Women in space, women detecting
I have no idea who pointed me to this: a New York Times book review of Almost Heaven: The Story of Women in Space, by Bettyann Holtzmann Kevlesy. The review, by Natalie Angier, is titled "Building the Spatial Village," and I'm not sure how much longer it'll be publicly accessible. The review provides a nice little précis of women's history in space; would make me want to read the book if I didn't have so much else waiting to be read.
Which reminds me obliquely of something I meant to post a month ago: did y'all know about Kate Warne, the first female detective to be hired by the Pinkerton Agency?
When I mentioned this to co-workers, they said "the what agency?" Allan Pinkerton was the best-known American detective of the second half of the 19th century; his Pinkerton National Detective Agency was similarly well-known, and Dashiell Hammett worked for them in the early 1900s before he became a writer. The Pinkerton agency, by the way, was also renowned for its strikebreaking work, such as its role in the Pennsylvania Railroad strike of 1877; I'm no big fan of theirs.
But Pinkerton was definitely forward-looking when it came to employing women. Kate Warne apparently just walked into his office one day in 1856 and convinced him to hire her (that page is about a fictional character based on her, but talks about the real history); she did such a good job as a detective that Pinkerton hired several more women, thirty years before American police departments started hiring women.
You might think this would be fertile ground for fiction, and you'd be right; another character inspired by Warne is Dayle Dobson, protagonist of Jerrie Hurd's The Lady Pinkerton Gets Her Man.
