{"id":1578,"date":"2003-11-25T09:59:33","date_gmt":"2003-11-25T17:59:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2003\/11\/25\/1578.html"},"modified":"2003-11-25T09:59:33","modified_gmt":"2003-11-25T17:59:33","slug":"women-in-space-women-detecting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/11\/25\/women-in-space-women-detecting\/","title":{"rendered":"Women in space, women detecting"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I have no idea who pointed me to this: a New York Times<\/cite> book review of Almost Heaven: The Story of Women in Space,<\/cite> by Bettyann Holtzmann Kevlesy. The review, by Natalie Angier, is titled \"Building the Spatial Village<\/a>,\" 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.<\/p>\n

Which reminds me obliquely of something I meant to post a month ago: did y'all know about Kate Warne<\/a>, the first female detective to be hired by the Pinkerton Agency?<\/p>\n

When I mentioned this to co-workers, they said \"the what agency?\" Allan Pinkerton<\/a> 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<\/a> 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<\/a>; I'm no big fan of theirs.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>'s The Lady Pinkerton Gets Her Man<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have no idea who pointed me to this: a New York Times book review of Almost Heaven: The Story…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1578\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}