Book Review: Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

My brother, a software?* engineer, and sister-in-law bought me this book for my birthday, correctly guessing it would interest me. I was excited to receive it and then (all together now!) it sat on the shelf for several years. I decided to read it for Women's History Month. Summary below: 

The history of the internet is more than just alpha nerds, brogrammers, and male garage-to-riches billionaires. Female visionaries have always been at the vanguard of technology and innovation.

In fact, women turn up at the very beginning of every important wave in technology. They may have been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize, but they have always been part of the story.

In a world where tech companies are still male-dominated and women are often dissuaded from STEM careers, Broad Band shines a much-needed light on the bright minds history forgot, from pioneering database poets, data wranglers, and hypertext dreamers to glass ceiling-shattering dot com-era entrepreneurs.

Get to know Ada Lovelace, who wove the first computer program in 1842, and Grace Hopper, the tenacious mathematician who democratized computing after World War II. Meet Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, the one-woman Google who kept the earliest version of the Internet online, and Stacy Horn, the New York cyberpunk who ran one of the world's earliest social networks out of her New York City apartment in the 1980s.

Join the ranks of the pioneers who defied social convention to become leaders of the tech revolution. This electrifying corrective to tech history introduces us all to our long-overlooked tech mothers and grandmothers—showing us that if there's a "boy's club" that dominates Silicon Valley today, it's an anachronism.

The title is a pun - broadband and broad (early/mid-twentieth century slang for woman) band. A band of women gave us broadband. Sort of. They made the internet possible anyway. Claire L. Evans takes us through a brisk tour of of women's contributions to computer science and the World Wide Web/Internet (yes, those are two different things. No, I can't really explain it to you). She starts with Ada Lovelace and female computers (if you've seen Hidden Figures then you get it), going on to Grace Hopper and other awesome ladies programming and debugging computers etc. Then she goes on through the decades to talk about other awesome tech women, none of whom I had heard about. An English woman came up with working hypertext like a decade before Tim Berners-Lee did, but used a different format of internet. It's all such fascinating stuff. The internet makes perfect sense to me: stuff links to other stuff. But early tech and internet connections? Holy shit. How did they do that?!?!?

Evans covers all of this in an engaging way, neither too scientific or casual/chatty. As a journalist, Evans (who interviewed just about all of these women personally) is great at telling the stories, yet she doesn't tell us enough. I am dying to know more about these women, but there are hardly any pictures or a suggested reading list (I guess that's not necessary but always appreciated). Stuff I didn't need to know about (Grace Hopper's drinking problem) was shared while other stuff I did want to know (some of these women must have been queer, right?) was not. There are endnotes, but no little numbers in the body of the text to indicate which citation or quotation goes to which endnote (I guess we're supposed to count quoted sentences in each chapter?), which I personally think is irresponsible in a nonfiction book. 

Anyway, I really enjoyed this book and want to learn more about the awesome women who gave us the internet/WWW, allowing me share my stupid little book reviews that no one reads anyway. Thanks for everything, ladies. 

Score: 4 out of 5 stars
Read in: March 8-15
From: gift
Status: keep

Cover notes: I love the use of the motherboard (so punny) to make a lady figure, but I think the b00b parts are unnecessarily crass.

Trigger warnings for this book: sexism, institutional sexism, transphobia in the chapter about the 1980s social network, drug and alcohol use mentions, claustrophobic depictions of spelunking in caves

*my engineer brother does something on computers with coding that affects internet/app-seeming things. That is the best I can tell you. Software engineering sums it up as best as I understand it. It's all very tech-y.

September books

 I actually read more than 2 or 3 books in September! Love that journey for me.

Immediately after Remember Me?, I read She's Come Undone, which was a mistake. It's just so horribly sad and depressing in a way that is in no way hinted at in the rather quirky summary. Wally Lamb is a good writer, and I cared about Dolores and wanted her to be happy, but yikes. Dolores is aptly named; the author points this out quite obviously in a patting-himself-on-the-back-for-being-so-clever way, and puts her through all sorts of sad situations. There is sort of a happy ending, at least, and Dolores finds the love she so craves. I did find the 1950s-70s upbringing interesting. Massive, massive trigger warnings for rape of a child, grooming by a predator, domestic violence, mental illness and institutionalization, fatphobia, nonconsensual sexual situations, semi-manipulated abortion, death, sex, homophobia, predatory lesbian trope, AIDS, stalking, religious abuse, alcohol and drug mentions/usage, binge eating and eating disorders, stillbirth, racism from an elderly character, infidelity. There's probably more but that's all I can think of. I left it behind in Mexico with a note telling my family not to read it (there's no way my Christian parents can handle that kind of story). Cover notes: I actually picked this up due to the interesting cover and title. It's actually the title of a 1970s song. 3 stars (4 stars for writing + 2 stars for story). 

Immediately after flying back from Mexico, I flew to New York to visit my sister and her family (I have a nephew now and he's the cutest baby in the world). We mostly hung out and went to restaurants and

bookstores. I bought Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman from Westsiders Rare & Used Books (such a fun bookstore). This feminist utopia is a reread for me, and I love it. Read my previous review here, and my mini essay comparing it to The Left Hand of Darkness here. It's so interesting how she points out that a lot of what we consider gender or how women naturally are is a result of the patriarchy and its gender roles (this was written in 1915!). However, I noticed this time how eugenics-y the book is: the Herland women are all white, despite being in a hidden part of South America or something, and they've deliberately bred themselves to be strong and tall and good at stuff and resist disease and smart, etc. I didn't really realize it until I read a quote from CPG that said that white men and women need to come together to improve the lower races, or something. All the great 19th and 20th century white feminists were all racist as hell, unfortunately. Anyway, I do like this book, but be aware of the racism and eugenics-y ways of thinking. It's critical of capitalism, the patriarchy, and Christianity (but rightfully so, imo). Loved the misandry though. 4 stars, keeping. 

Another reread this month was James Finn Garner's Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. These are fun PC satires of classic fairy tales, and it's funny to read how the tales were transformed. For instance, Red Robin Hood and the wolf chop up the woodcutter for being so sexist and speciest as to think RRH needed his help with the wolf. Per usual, one isn't sure whether Garner is poking fun at capitalism etc. or PC culture itself. I reread this one because I'm giving the series away. Trigger warnings for fairytale-typical violence, I guess? 3.5 stars, giving away. 

My last read for September was The Chickens Are Restless, a The Far Side comics compilation. I love Gary Larson's The Far Side so much. I got this from the thrift store, and I'm pretty sure I'd already seen all of these (although there were some comics I didn't remember seeing before). These are classics for a reason. I wonder, if I were to walk past all the faculty office doors at my school, how many would have a TFS comic taped to it. Probably a lot, in the sciences. 4 stars, keeping.

July-September 2017 books

I didn’t read very much at all these last 3 months. I was just super busy and worked throughout the summer.

The first book I started in June was The Moor, a Sherlock Holmes book by Laurie R. King where he and his wife, Mary Russell, solve a mystery in the moor. I know, right? I totally thought this was going to be derivative fanfiction and that Mary was going to be a Mary Sue (pun unintended). This book was actually really good, very well written, and it did not trample on the Sherlock Holmes legacy. Mary is this badass Jewish feminist scholar and she wears trousers and keeps her last name in the 1920s! She takes over the Watson role, helping Sherlock and being the narrator of the novel. The only thing I didn’t like was that the ending was pretty abrupt. I actually want to read the rest of the series. 4/5

After that was Highland Fling, a historical romance novel by Amanda Scott that had more history than romance. The romance was pretty uneven and typical (headstrong redhead and this older rich dude who resists his attraction to her then is like ‘I’m going to tame you’, gag me with a spoon), but the historical stuff was interesting. England’s dickishness in taking over other countries is well known, but I hadn’t heard much about how it was for Scotland. Anyway this was ok and whiled away the time. 3.5/5

I decided to start reading books from my ever-growing to-read list, and checked out All the Single Ladies: unmarried women and the rise of an independent nation by Rebecca Traister from my library. This book did not disappoint: it talked about the views and roles of single women (mostly in the US) and the changes they’ve made in this country and culture. It was so good and affirming to read about all the kickass ladies out there who didn’t get married and had good, fulfilling lives, as well as women who today are dealing with various aspects of being single. I liked that Traister followed up with the women she interviewed for the book so that we could see where they were a few years later at the time of publication. The author is currently married with kids but was single well into her late twenties, so she gets it. I may buy this book for my own library. 4/5

The last book of this trimester is Morality for Beautiful Girls, the third book of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. He is British, and I am usually very suspicious of books set in countries the author is not from, and of books with characters of color when the author is white, but Wikipedia says he was born in Zimbabwe and worked in Botswana as an adult, so it appears he knows his stuff. The books (I’ve read another book in this series many years ago) sound like he’s done his research, and have colloquisms and the like. Mma Precious Ramotswe runs a detective agency with her assistant Mma Grace Makutsi and is called upon to solve all sorts of mysteries. In just this book MFBG, the duo must (together and/or separately) determine if a government man’s brother is being poisoned by his wife, figure out where a feral child found in the bush came from, run the detective agency and Mma Ramotswe’s fiance’s auto repair shop simultaneously, try to figure out why the fiance, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, is acting the way he is, and detect if any of the contestants of a local beauty and morality contest are, in fact, immoral. This is a lot of plots going on, but McCall Smith handles them all well. The characters are very well written, interesting and likeable. I want to read the rest of the series but since there are like 17, I’ll stick to getting them from the library. 4.4/5

Unsung Hero[in]es: In the Bible, What Did Women Do?

The Seventh-day Adventist Church, among many other Christian denominations, has been going through the issue of whether or not women should be ordained as pastors. There are already women pastors, my aunt among them, but millennia of patriarchal misogyny and male gender bias are hard to shake off. The senior pastor at my church, LLUC, has done a sermon series about some of the women leaders of the Bible in order to see what they and their roles may have to teach us about the topic of women's ordination. I wanted to write down the messages in order to remember them.

1. Deborah: Here Comes the Judge! (sermon video) – Don't limit the way God chooses to work. Don't think that God can or should only work in one specific way.
2. Huldah: Prophet to the King (video) – I think this one is something like, Listen to what God is saying regardless of who He's saying it through. God chooses to speak through whomever He wants. God's message is vital regardless of whoever is saying it, even if it's someone you wouldn't expect.
3. Miriam: In the Leadership Circle (video) – "Unsung heroes can have feet of clay." God can speak or work through flawed people. Just because a person is flawed, doesn't mean that God can't work through them or choose them to be leaders. Moses also made mistakes and was flawed, but people don't point to him and say that men shouldn't be leaders because of him. (I almost fistpumped in church when he said this. I definitely made that "sips tea" face)
4. Esther: Living with the If (video) – This sermon was given by a woman. The story of Esther should be sung and remembered because it shows us how to trust in God despite uncertainty and place our lives in His hands. We need to stand up for what's right despite our fear.
5. Priscilla and Junia: The Apostles' Colleagues – Today's church should look like the early church, with both women and men in its leadership and playing important roles.
6. Next week is Mary: A Woman's Place. Not sure yet which Mary it is.

I have loved this sermon series, not only because of the crumbs of representation for women that there is in the Bible and the way this shines a light on women leaders (even fewer crumbs for them), but because this is one of the ways my quiet, prefers-not-to-ruffle-feathers pastor shows support for women's ordination: by preaching from the Bible, the same place opponents of women's ordination turn to. This is simultaneously an ordinary sermon series on Bible characters and a Scriptures-supported feminist endorsement of women's ordination. I see you and I thank you.

All About That Bass

I've been wanting to do this exegesis of “All About The Bass” ever since it first came out, which was ages ago, but this blog has basically been Procrastination Central since its inception so whatever. I love this song, but I have issues with it. 

Yeah it’s pretty clear

I ain’t no size two

But I can shake it shake it

Like I’m supposed to do 

I’m glad your not being a size two doesn't keep you from shaking it, because it shouldn't (full disclosure: I danced to this song like a mad fool at my cousin’s wedding). But you’re “supposed to”? Why, because you’re a larger lady? Because you’re a lady in general? Who told you you’re supposed to shake it? Why can’t you just shake it because you want to?

I’m not going to criticize the grammar (double negatives, etc.) used throughout the song because it is standard in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). What I have an issue with is that the singer, Meghan Trainor, is as white and blond as they come and is using AAVE in the first place. I was disappointed when I saw the music video and learned she is white. Cognitive dissonance, linguistic cultural appropriation. AAVE has entered the mainstream (aka white) cultural consciousness, though, so am I being oversensitive? Is it now ok for white people to use it in songs? I'm feeling the answer to both of those questions is no. I don’t know very much about Meghan Trainor so I don't know if her background is inner-city or urban and if she grew up speaking AAVE. Her music video is a preppy pastel retro wonderland, so I rather doubt it. I wish I could remember the source of this quote: "It is profitable to be black or gay as long as you're neither." 

‘Cause I got that boom boom that all the boys chase

All the right junk in all the right places

 Well. I kind of hate that use of boom boom, as well as the stale platitude that males lust after women’s bodies. Putting the accuracy of that mentality aside, it shouldn't be just blindly accepted as a fact of life. We should expect better from men and boys.

Also, what about people who have all the wrong junk in all the right places, or all the right junk in all the wrong places, or all the wrong junk in all the wrong places (me)? What constitutes right and wrong, in terms of junk and its placement? Just kidding, I know. Women are supposed to look like Jessica Rabbit or Beyonce. 

I see the magazines working that Photoshop

We know that shit ain't real

Come on now make it stop

If you've got beauty beauty

Just raise ‘em up

‘Cause every inch of you is perfect

From the bottom to the top 

YAASSSSSS. This makes the song for me. 

Yeah my mama she told me don’t worry about your size 

Aww, that’s nice. My mama has told me to exercise more and not eat so much in order to lose weight since I was a teenager. 

She said boys like a little more booty to hold at night 

But at least she never made males’ opinions or desires the yardstick for what my body should look like. My health is the reason she tells me what she does. That’s vastly more important than making males desire me. I’m glad she never taught me anything so damaging.

Also, are there really (white) mothers out there sincerely using ‘booty’? That’s horrifying. 

You know I won’t be no stick figure silicone Barbie doll

So if that’s what you’re into then go ahead and move along 

YES PREACH IT.

Then in the chorus she goes into how she’s “all about that bass, no treble”, which I think is supposed to signify bigness vs. skinnyness? idk. This is not clearly explained and inaccurate musically because the song’s score includes a treble clef. It kind of has to. 

Hey I’m bringing booty back

Go ahead and tell them skinny bitches that 

Girl, please. Ain’t no white girl bringing booty back (oh no I’m doing it too. I’M PART OF THE PROBLEM). If anyone brought booty back it was Beyonce or JLo way back in the nineties, not some white girl who has only just become famous because of this song.

Also it’s not very nice to address all thin women as skinny bitches. They can’t all possibly be bitches. This brings up an interesting point, though: when you have a group of people who have historically been oppressed or seen as less than, they are naturally going to feel and express resentment towards the oppressors/dominant group/group who they are constantly being compared to unfavorably. When the oppressed group rejects the acceptable mold and breaks free from trying to conform or be conformed to it, the pendulum will swing in the opposite direction (i.e., the resentment and bitterness against skinny bitches or whites or whoever). This is not as bad as the original bias or racism and is a result of the injustice.  It is very easy to want to be like “f*ck skinny bitches” like Nicki Minaj, but the skinny girls aren't the issue. It’s that the diversity of body sizes isn't accepted with all types of bodies being seen as equally beautiful, and that instead only one type is held up as acceptable (the thin supermodel body type). Remember, however, that one of the steps of grieving is anger. 

No I’m just playing I know you think you’re fat

But I’m here to tell you

Every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top 

This is what keeps this song from being skinnybashing, as poorly skilled in reading comprehension and culturally unaware Natalia Kills thought. While most women have body image issues due to this society and its messages, not all women think they’re too fat. There are women and girls who wish they weren't so thin, who wish they had curves instead of being shaped like a tongue depressor. But they too are perfect, just as bigger women and girls are.
 

Here’s the music video, which I mostly like (just like the song!). I do wish the whole thing were just that Polynesian/Pacific Islander fellow doing his thing, because, to quote a YouTube commentator, he is a “dancing god”. I like the palette/look, the diversity of the people (always a bit off to have white singers with backup dancers who are WOC, though) and that the thin girl in the worrisome plastic wrap corset loosens up and dances friendly-like with the others at the end. I want almost everything Meghan Trainor wears in this video.

I don’t think I have ever been as hungry for anything as Meghan Trainor is for fame. Look at her face. It’s like Rachel Berry from Glee but more. That woman would do anything. It scares me a bit.

Also here is my favorite cover (1940s jazz retro style). That girl’s voice! And she plays the upright bass. Visual and auditory puns, y’all.

Ballroom dancing and male-dominated society

I took several dance classes when I went to UCLA, partly because I have always wanted to learn and partly so that I would do some exercise during the week and not turn entirely into Jabba the Hut. The class was once a week, and I bought black and white loafers at my favorite cheap shoe place on Westwood Boulevard since tennis shoes were strictly forbidden and I knew I'd get blisters if I wore heels (and I'm tall enough as it is anyway). I took East Coast Swing the first semester (Winter '11), Ballroom basics the next 2 semesters (Spring and Fall '12), then Beginning Salsa (Winter '12), then Intermediate Salsa (Spring '12). The same instructor taught all the dance classes, a petite yet tough lady named Jackie. I loved it. I got to be pretty good, too (by which I mean you probably wouldn't die of secondhand embarrassment while watching).

I learned a lot from these classes: how to dance, obviously; how to follow; what to do in different circumstances. It was while dancing in one of the Ballroom dance classes that I realized how the culture of ballroom dancing directly parallels a male-dominated society like ours, especially the way it was in the past (which obviously makes sense considering the former arose from the latter). In ballroom dancing, the man leads. The man makes all the decisions, and the woman has to follow and go along with whatever he wants to do. If he wants to twirl her, she twirls. It's his decision. If she wants to twirl, she has to wait until it occurs to him. If she doesn't want to twirl, she's kinda out of luck unless she's willing to speak up ("hey, I'm getting kind of dizzy"). He moves her where he wants to go. He is supposed to have a firm hold on her. The firmer the hold, the better/stronger the lead.

The man always walks or moves forward, while the woman moves backwards. She can't see where she's going; the man decides where they're headed. I had a guy I was dancing with ask me once, "Isn't it weird to be always walking backwards?" "No," I replied, "I'm used to it." And that's how it is, in a male-dominated culture like ours. You are used to things always being a certain way, with men always being in charge and making the decisions. You get used to being the one who has no say, who does whatever the other has her do, who follows, who doesn't make decisions. You get used to being controlled, to always having the short end of the stick, to this world not being for you.

Girls would dance together if there weren't enough guys or if they just wanted to dance together (this happened more often than guys dancing together, which only happened a couple times as a joke), but one had to take the man's part (the Lead) and one had to take the woman's part. The rigidity of the gender roles stayed in the couple, despite their both being the same gender. Men could dance with two women, but I never saw two men dancing with one woman (I never took tango; that may be A Thing there; idk). I guess that as long as you have a Lead it doesn't matter how many he's leading.

The culture of ballroom dancing doesn't really prepare you for the real world, either (at least my classes didn't). The instructor always decreed that the men had to ask the women to dance (men lead and make all the decisions, doncha know). We girls had to stand there and wait for guys to come up to us and ask us to dance; we couldn't go up to and ask them. The most we could do was make eye contact with a guy we wanted to dance with and smile encouragingly. I'll bet that's what it was like to date in the olden times. Interestingly, when I went swing dancing with some friends at a local dance studio, I was ill-prepared for it because I just sat there and waited for guys to ask me to dance, which generally didn't happen. Hardly anyone asked me to dance because I was new and didn't know anyone, and on top of that and being really shy, I didn't ask anyone to dance because it felt wrong, like I was breaking the rules. My instructor had hammered it into my head that The Men Do The Asking. This did not apply in the real world (my friends asked guys all the time), and it left me sitting on the sidelines, feeling awkward and longing to dance but unable to due to antiquated rules I had internalized. In this way, the rules I learned in my dance classes actually hindered me in real life.

I realize there is an interesting point to be made about my instructor being a woman and teaching us the very traditional-role-y ballroom dances. Women often internalize and then turn around to teach the next generation the very same rules that cage them, that put them as lesser. When my teacher taught us the moves, she'd generally take the man's part and show us what to do with a volunteer girl from the class. (She would also sometimes have a guy who was a good dancer lead her in order to show us what the ladies were supposed to do.) The instructor was the leader of our class, and women who are leaders often have to take on male qualities because in the traditional mindset, leader=male.

Also, in classes where the guys outnumbered the girls, there would be a mad rush to ask girls to dance in order to avoid being left without a partner (the instructor made sure those who hadn't danced previously got to dance the next time). It was amusing and kind of amazing to see guys run or jump up to one and breathlessly say "hiwouldyouliketodance". One felt almost powerful, at that point (and there is so little power for women in ballroom dancing). This also didn't really help prepare me for the real world because in the real world, guys were not falling over themselves to ask me to dance (or on a date, I guess is the real-world parallel).

There is something that was positive about the dance classes' rigidly enforced gender roles and rules. The instructor was adamant about men doing the leading and asking, but she was equally adamant about the men being responsible for the women they were dancing with. It was the men's responsibility to make sure they didn't steer their partners into other dancers, or step on their toes, or make them dizzy by twirling them too much, or dropping them during lifts, or dipping them into other people, or crash into others or the wall, etc. If anything of that sort happened, it was automatically the man's fault. Many times I'd step on a guy's toes accidentally and apologize (the ingrained rules of my primary culture were stronger than this one's), only to have him say, "No, that's my fault; I wasn't leading you correctly."

Our male-dominated culture has men leading all the time, but outside of feminist circles you will rarely hear the blame placed on them. Wars and crime and economic crises and poverty and so forth occur under the watch of or are done by the group in charge (generally white heterosexual men, especially those who are rich) but they are almost always blamed on other people or seen as things that Just Happen ("don't get raped" instead of "don't rape"). Sometimes the bad things are blamed on others, on those not in the Group In Power (the U.S.'s economic state after George W. Bush being blamed on Obama, or the 'deterioration of our society' being blamed on feminism or secularization). We still have the male bias and domination without at least having the sense of responsibility, of acknowledging that it's their fault because it happened on their watch, when they were in charge, because they were in charge (and they're almost always in charge). If you're going to be in charge, at least own up to how much responsibility you have.

Not that I want Chivalry To Come Back, or anything. Just everyone be good to one another. And realize that what you've been taught, and the society we live in, is often messed up. But even in that (despite that?), you can find beauty and joy. I really did love dancing. I think I'll start up again.

Male Bias

men and women, boys
and girls, and husbands and wives
we always come last