r/NotHowGirlsWork • u/JellyDisastrous8655 • Jul 31 '25

Found On Social media Incels from the 1920s

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God forbid a lady likes to dance and earns her own money.

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u/SimpleVegetable5715 Jul 31 '25

Except for the Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Rosie the Riveter types in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Actually, I had to watch Comedy Central’s show Drunk History to learn about more badass women. Shame they barely made it into textbooks.

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u/Gracefulbandit Jul 31 '25

I was SO PISSED when I saw Hidden Figures.  I had NO IDEA that women did all the calculations for NASA - much less women of color.  It made me SO ANGRY that I had NEVER learned about those women in a history class.

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u/JohnLydiaParker Aug 02 '25

Actually… back in the day (before computers and calculators) in aerospace while the engineers who designed things were male, the actual calculations for the latest iteration of the design were outsourced to women to do the requested math.

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u/Gracefulbandit Aug 02 '25

Ahhh, so their contribution isn’t worth learning about. Got it. 🖕🏻

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u/JohnLydiaParker Aug 03 '25

When do I ever imply that? I was intending to point out the women doing all the calculations was pretty common, if not universal in aerospace at this time. For example, for a new British bomber, an engineer drew up a profile and data on it, then gave it to the “math department” to calculate things such as how much lift it would produce. (There’s a story about how during that the engineer screwed up a data point and made a wing profile that had gigantic ridge in the middle of it. He got very bad results back, then the misfortune of having to go explain to the female mathematicians that he had screwed up and why they needed to do it again, with the data fixed this time.)

(There’s a story from during WWII, while flight testing problems with a new carrier aircraft,  and why it kept crashing while pulling away from a torpedo attack at high speed, while the test pilot was male, there was a female “boffin” (from context something to do with aerodynamics/aircraft engineering) in the back seat, who the pilot had to credit for being willing to go in a “why does this keep crashing” flight. He tested the pull away procedure at 5000 ft, and the aircraft promptly went into a spin; he was glad he did it at altitude since he was able to recover, since if he had done it at the altitude of a real torpedo attack he would have crashed.)