Poetry Suite from ‘Mathematics for Ladies’ by Jessy Randall
“Men got the credit, but I continue to spin.”
Poetry by Jessy Randall
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From the Poet:
These poems are part of a series titled “Mathematics for Ladies”, a derogatory term for descriptive mathematics in the Soviet Union ca. 1920. Poems from the series have appeared in, or are forthcoming from Analog, Asimov's, Scientific American, and the Women's Review of Books.
For more information, including a list of the women included (80 so far), click here.
If you have recommendations of additional historical women in STEM fields, please send them my way! You can reach me at: jessyrandall@yahoo.com.
Lise Meitner (1878-1968)
They barred me from the science labs
at the University of Berlin
for fear I’d set my hair on fire.
By ‘they’ I mean men, the men in charge.
By ‘for fear’ I mean they feared me.
That line about my hair! I had to laugh.
I laughed some more when the papers
mixed up ‘cosmic’ with ‘cosmetic’.
I was in the fucking newspaper, you see.
I was the motherfucking mother of nuclear power
and I laughed all the way away
from the Manhattan Project, in which
I refused to participate.
In that project, the men who worried
about my hair created enough fire
to burn 200,000 bodies down to nothing.
Maria Goeppert Mayer (1906-1972)
Everyone at school says girls are dumb,
but all the girls and just one boy
passed the university exam.
It must be my stupidity
that makes this hard to understand.
Another dumb thing about me: I married.
I didn’t know the rule at Johns Hopkins:
professors’ wives could not be professors.
We could be office assistants.
The protons and neutrons keep spinning, though –
despite what anyone tells those pairs they
can and cannot do. Like dancers in a ballroom
they move in concentric circles, spinning,
some clockwise, some counter, they move.
I was the first to make this metaphor.
Men got the credit, but I continue to spin.
Rachel Bodley (1831-1888)
I was quite boring.
I did science.
I was meticulous.
I don’t have any
funny stories about it.
Stop requiring women
to be charming and delightful!
Just let us do our work.
Thank you.
Margaret Morse Nice (1883-1974)
We should look at what they do,
not what they are.
I’m talking about birds.
I’m only talking about birds.
If you listen to the songs they sing,
you’ll learn their language.
You’ll get their frequency.
They sing two thousand times a day.
I know what’s wrong with men.
They don’t sit still. They don’t
write anything down. They think
they know instead of knowing.
Charlotte Auerbach (1899-1994)
Yes, it hurt.
It burned.
The gas, mustard,
you’ve learned
what it did to soldiers.
We used it to turn
mice into monsters.
Science does not yearn
or murder. Our work
earned no award.
It moved forward,
unheard.
Anna Wessels Williams (1863-1954)
They took my name off the treatment.
Park-Williams-8 is too much to say.
In medicine, speed is everything.
We’re racing diseases, and we
usually lose. If it’s faster to say
Park-8, go ahead and say it.
I know what I did against diphtheria.
I know Park wasn’t there.
He knows it too.
Let the men have the recognition
and the fame. They need it more.
They seem to die without it.
They seem to fade.
I have other things to rush toward.
My sister’s life. The twentieth century.
A rabies vaccine that works
no matter whose name is on it.
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Jessy Randall's poems, comics, and other things have appeared in Poetry, McSweeney's, and The Best American Experimental Writing. Her most recent book is How to Tell If You Are Human: Diagram Poems (Pleiades, 2018). She is a librarian at Colorado College, where she occasionally co-teaches a half-credit class called The History and Future of the Book.
Learn more at her website, here.
