Elizabeth Blackburn’s adolescence was similar to that of other girls growing up in the 1960s. She followed current trends in fashion, listened to the Beatles, and had siblings whom she argued with but also admired. Additionally, she was also a model student who consistently achieved high marks in academics. Being the fifth of seven children, her siblings considered her the most self-motivated of the bunch; worrying less about pleasing others and more about independent success.
Although Blackburn’s family background is primarily English, she was born in Hobart, Tasmania, three years after the conclusion of World War II. Her father’s family travelled to Austrailia from Northern England in 1882. Her great-grandfather, Reverend Thomas Blackburn, was an Anglican minister who became obsessed with entomology after reading the Charles Darwin’s 1859 publication, Origin of the Species. After cataloguing many species in Hawaii, Thomas Blackburn moved to Australia to further his studies. Elizabeth’s father, Harold Blackburn, inherited his father’s scientific disposition and earned a medical degree from the University of Adelaide.
Similarly, Blackburn’s maternal side of the family shared an obsession with science and didn’t shy away from traveling. Blackburn’s maternal great-grandfather, Robert Logan Jack, was a geologist who surveyed minerals throughout China until 1904 when the Boxer Rebellion threatened both his and his son’s safety. His son, Blackburn’s grandfather, later wrote about his travels and perpetuated his father’s legacy, becoming a geologist himself. Though not through geology, Blackburn’s mother, Marcia Constance, pursued a scientific career earning a medical degree from the University of Melbourne during World War II...
... middle of paper ...
...te such a discovery without conducting any experimental work of their own. Unfortunately, the perception of women in science hadn’t progressed as far as science in that time. Consequently, Blackburn was forced to confront the problem she half-heartedly acknowledged. Her solution was, what she dubbed, protective coloration. Common social behaviors and female confidence had to be set aside and replaced with more calculated actions and responses in order for her majority male colleagues to accept her without feeling threatened or seeking romantic companionship. Of course, by adopting this method she was still able to
Works Cited
Brady, Catherine. Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007. Print.
"Elizabeth H. Blackburn - Biographical." Elizabeth H. Blackburn - Biographical. Nobel Media AB, 2014. Web.
1. Where did Barbara Anderson’s fieldwork take place and what was the goal of her research?
It has been noted that Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s father on several occasions expressed that he wished Elizabeth had been a boy. Even when she excelled in life and completed tasks in attempts to please him, he constantly reminded her it was a shame she was born a girl. His constant reminder expressed to Elizabeth that her father believed that only males could be successful, which merely fueled her ambition to succeed and prove the contrary along with ensuring that other women follow...
Linda M. Scott’s chapter from her book ¬Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism, Reading the Popular Image as well as Kathryn Kish Sklar’s article Hull House in the 1890’s: A community of Women Reformers cover the main theme of the New Woman as Club Woman and Social Reformer. Found in both articles is the way in which the New Women emerged in society. Scott’s chapter examines how the publicity and social construction of the Gibson Girl played an influential role on the daily lives of the women who viewed her, while Sklar’s article explores how Hull House played as a tool to socially and economically integrate women into society.
Rossiter, Margaret W. (1982). Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press
On the morning of September 4, 1957, Elizabeth was getting ready to go to her first day of school at Little Rock Central High School. She didn?t have a phone at her house, so she didn?t know that the other 8 students were going to meet at Daisy Bates? house and to go school together as a group. She got off the bus and walked down Park street in Little Rock, Arkansas and into a screaming mob with military police around her and she began her quest to attend Central High School in Little Rock. She thought the police were there to protect her, but they were ...
Despite the gathering winter she felt relieved to see that her sixteen- year old daughter, now her only child after the early death of her son James, was acting normal again. For the past fortnight the younger Elizabeth had been carrying herself in a strange manner. While walking along normally she would sometimes cry out. Last week she had shrieked at extremely inappropriate time in Sunday dinner and that day in church she had been overcome with irreverent laughter. She was always quick to offer a reasonable excuse to spare the swift punishment usually dispensed to children at the time, but the extravagance and immodes...
There are two women from the near and distant past that have become strong female role models in recent years: Queen Elizabeth I and Virginia Woolf. These women were not without problems while growing up, though. Elizabeth’s mother was beheaded after being charged with treason when she was only three; she grew up viewing women as indispensable after her father had six wives; her family kept dying (mother, step mother, father, half brother, sister), and she was locked away by her sister Queen Mary in the Tower of London for a number of years. Virginia Woolf on the other hand battled with depression and mental disease her whole life, was denied a typical education because she was female, had many mental breakdowns after death of mother, and was institutionalized after father’s death. Both Elizabeth Tudor and Virginia Stephen-Woolf shared many of the same family problems in their lives, but their life paths and careers were drastically different from one another.
This article provided a brief biography of Clara Barton, to include, her experiences on the battlefield as a nurse during the Civil War and a brief outline of her accomplishments after the war.
In her autobiography, “The Life of an Ordinary Woman, Anne Ellis describes just that; the life of an ordinary woman. Ellis reveals much about her early—ordinary if you will—life during the nineteenth-century. She describes what daily life was like, living a pioneer-like lifestyle. Her memoir is ‘Ordinary’ as it is full of many occurrences that the average woman experiences. Such as taking care of her children, cleaning, cooking the—world’s greatest—meals. It also contains many themes such as dysfunctional families, insensitive men, and negligent parents that are seen in modern life. The life of Anne Ellis is relatable. Her life is relatable to modern day life, however, very different.
The youngest of five children, Clarissa Harlowe Barton was born on December 25, 1821 to a middle class family in North Oxford, Massachusetts. In this rocky New England countryside, Clara, as she quickly became known, learned the value of hard work and hard principles through her labors on the family farm. From the beginning, Clara's family had an immeasurable influence on her. Her older siblings, who were all quite intelligent, helped educate Clara and could scarcely keep up with answering her never-ending barrage of questions. Her active mind readily absorbed new lessons and novel stories about famous ancestors. Something of a tomboy, she portrayed exceptional equestrian skills and could play sports with surprising aptitude, compliments of her brothers and male cousins.
Maurice Wilkins: This scientist is seen as somewhat sexist, because he does not believe in the potential of Rosalind’s scientific abilities. At the same time, he seemed to be dedicated to work, but Rosalind seems to do a majority of the work.
In the text "The Sexing of the body" Sterling argues that scientist should not only worry about the physical feature to determine someone's sexuality but also on the characteristics. Sterling writes," But behaviors are generally social activities, expressed in interaction with distinctly separate beings. Thus, as we move from genitalia on the outside to the invisible psyche..."(Sterling, 29). When a scientist steps out of that box of determining gender based on the physical feature it can change the perspective of how gender is viewed in society. In the same way, The Text "Baboons with Briefcases vs Langurs with Lipstick" by Susan Sperling shows how scientist should overlook physical features and DNA to determining what is gender. Sperling writes, "Other things shape behavior besides genes and Shape it in important ways for the organisms in question..."(Sperling, 250). Our behavior can say a lot about the gender we are but Sperling demonstrates that even the behavior aspect of determining gender should be furthered studied. Both of these Authors show how scientist try to construct and validify the our sexuality is already with us and it not constructed by society. When viewing how scientist makes their studies there is some type of biased and gender stereotypes connected to these
Born on December 25, 1921, Clara grew up in a family of four children, all at least 11 years older than her (Pryor, 3). Clara’s childhood was more of one that had several babysitters than siblings, each taking part of her education. Clara excelled at the academic part of life, but was very timid among strangers. School was not a particularly happy point in her life, being unable to fit in with her rambunctious classmates after having such a quiet childhood. The idea of being a burden to the family was in Clara’s head and felt that the way to win the affection of her family was to do extremely well in her classes to find the love that she felt was needed to be earned. She was extremely proud of the positive attention that her achievement of an academic scholarship (Pryor, 12). This praise for her accomplishment in the field of academics enriched her “taste for masculine accomplishments”. Her mother however, began to take notice of this and began to teach her to “be more feminine” by cooking dinners and building fires (Pryor, 15). The 1830’s was a time when the women of the United States really began to take a stand for the rights that they deserved (Duiker, 552). Growing up in the mist of this most likely helped Barton become the woman she turned out to be.
Social pressure to raise pleasant, good mannered children who become grounded and productive adults has been a driving influence for many generations. If our children do not fit into this mold then we’re considered failures are parents. Emily’s mother is tormented by the phone call which sets off a wave of maternal guilt. Emily’s mother was young and abandoned by her husband while Emily was still an infant so she had to rely on only herself and the advice of others while she raised her daughter. After Emily was born her mother, “with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, (I) did like the books said. Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with swollenness, I waited till the clock decreed.” (Olsen 174). Then when Emily was two she went against her own instincts about sending Emily to a nursery school while she worked which she considered merely “parking places for children.” (Olsen 174). Emily’s mother was also persuaded against her motherly instincts to send her off to a hospital when she did not get well from the measles and her mother had a new baby to tend to. Her mother even felt guilt for her second child, Susan, being everything society deemed worthy of attention. Emily was “thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blond replica of Shirley Temple.” (Olsen, 177) she was also neither “glib or quick in a world where glibness and quickness were easily confused with ability to learn.” (Olsen 177), which her sister Susan had in
Telomeres power the successful reproduction and division of cells, and are found in the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) of genes found in chromosomes. When she was tested, it was discovered that her telomeres were shorter than other non-cloned sheep her age. However, scientists say that this mistake could be useful for treatment of cancer. By giving cancer cells in the body short telomeres and putting them back into the body, other cancer cells would be infected, and would die qui...