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Sarah Biffin was the first English Mouth and Foot Painting artist and had no arms and underdeveloped legs. She was commissioned to paint miniature portraits of the royal family. When her sponsor died, Queen Victoria gave her a Civil List pension.

"ai is making it so everyone can make art" Everyone can make art dipshit it came free with your fucking humanity

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Anna Katharine Green is such a good detective novelist that the Pennsylvania State Senate debated over if it was possible for a woman to write her first book. Born 1846 in Brooklyn, NY she then went on to be known for writing out legally accurate detective novels, popularize detective books before Arthur Doyle wrote Sherlock, and shaping the detective fiction genre. At one point in time Yale Law School used her books to represent to its students why they shouldn’t rely on circumstantial evidence.

She can claim many first in the detective fiction genre that she is dubbed the mother of the detective novel. Anna was the first to write older women as sleuths and girl detectives along with plot devices like coroner’s inquest, news paper clippings as clues, and expert witnesses.

She had some controversial views on feminism but overall I think she did more good than harm from what I read about her.

A few years ago I read 13 of her books in a year, the following two still live in my head:

The Woman in the Alcove

The story revolves around an enigmatic murder during a glamorous ball in New York City, drawing the protagonist, Rita Van Arsdale, into a web of intrigue involving her fiancé, Anson Durand, and a beautiful socialite, Mrs. Fairbrother, who is found dead. As the mystery unravels, themes of love, betrayal, and the complexities of human relationships emerge, with Rita determined to clear Anson's name amidst swirling suspicions.

Lost Man’s Lane

Honestly, it reads like an episode of Murder she wrote au that takes place in the 1800s.

Ever since my fortunate—or shall I say unfortunate?—connection with that famous case of murder in Gramercy Park, I have had it intimated to me by many of my friends—and by some who were not my friends—that no woman who had met with such success as myself in detective work would ever be satisfied with a single display of her powers, and that sooner or later I would find myself again at work upon some other case of striking peculiarities

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Also when men would acknowledge their partners society wouldn’t. This is seen in Lillian Gilbreth, born 1878, a woman with two PhDs (psychology and engineering). She was an industrial engineer who made huge contributions to industrial engineering, the science of making processes more efficient.

She started a successful industrial engineering consulting company with her husband. He didn’t have a formal education but was very charismatic and smart. While working together he always accredited her and saw her as a valuable business partner. Unfortunately he died in 1924, leaving her a single mother of 11. To make matters worse no one wanted to work with her company without her husband, even though she was extremely capable.

The only way she got her way back into the industry was to sell the layout of an efficient kitchen even though she could barely cook. She also opened a small industrial engineering school from her house.

While she would get awards and accolades in her field later on, she experienced many instances of people minimizing her skills and accomplishments. One time a reporter falsely quoted her as saying she didn’t care about her PhDs and preferred motherhood. This made her extremely upset.

When her husband was alive people put her in the box of a wife who helped her husband, so when he died people thought the brains behind the business was gone. Without her husband’s early death, her story would have been hidden by her husband’s legacy.

If she sounds familiar, two of her children wrote two books about their family and their Mother’s accomplishments. The first book is called Cheaper by the Dozen which Disney made a multiple movie with the same name. Disney changed all the people and events from the books, so they failed at bringing the story of an amazing woman in stem to their audience.

okay but if you ever see a male creative who had a string of great work and then everything else he did was dogshit, go to the "personal life" part of his wikipedia and look at his relationships. you'll either find a major tragedy he didn't recover from (completely understandable) or, more likely, there was a woman in his life doing uncredited shit editing his stuff or contributing generally and she's not there anymore.

I told a friend about this phenomenon in literature and he called me weeks later like, I remembered what you said about women doing uncredited work when tim burton came up. he made a string of bangers then everything else just was nowhere near as good. the timeline matches perfectly to when he was with this german visual artist (lena gieseke). he's done some good work in collaboration, but if things were dug into I suspect we would find she did a lot more than people realise.

so yeah whenever you look around like wow women didn't work in history, or, women aren't auteurs, or, there just aren't as many great female writers - societal reasons for that aside, half the time they absolutely did.

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I think the tale of Rumpelstiltskin is still relevant to modern society especially on how we and big companies see artists. I wish we had some more retellings for it.

The King forces a woman into a room full of straw and threatens to kill her unless she spins all the straw into gold by sunrise. He doesn’t talk to her about how quick she can work, what supplies she needs, or treats her with any kindness. It is similar to how even now people don’t fully understand how things are made and make unreasonable demands for artists and other makers.

This is often emphasized by social media posts making things look easier and faster to make online. AI recently made this worse by often generating photos of artwork that is almost impossible to make for that medium. Recently I heard about AI generated patterns on Etsy that are either impossible or extremely hard to make. This is similar to the woman’s father in the story, who starts the rumors of his daughter being able to spin straw into gold.

Also the woman succeeding in spinning the straw into gold wasn’t met with any real compensation or appreciation outside of the Kings greed. Instead the King takes her work and demands more for her. This is similar to how people demand more from content creators and online artists without regard to the person’s schedule or health.

Also another thing to note is that the King doesn’t ask the woman what she wants for compensation or negotiates. Instead the woman is “rewarded” by being able to marry the King who recently threatened to kill her multiple times. This can also be compared to how some companies and people try to pay artists with things that they don’t want, exposure, or anything but money.

Rumpelstiltskin also takes advantage of the woman and helps her at the same time. Honestly if he didn’t try to trade work for a baby, he would have been the hero of the story. Also he didn’t need to let the Queen keep the baby if, she remembered the name of the person who saved her life three times. He could have been like the witch from Rapunzel and just took the baby. 

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From 1885 to 1908, Belgium killed, raped, maimed, mutilated and kidnapped countless Congolese people. This was done in the name of profit, often kidnapped vulnerable people in communities and ransoming them for resources.

The King of Belgium plotted and profited the most of the atrocities. He used his influence to suppress many of the testimonies against him, many of them were publicly released 80 years after his death. If you are interested in learning more King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hoshschild is a good book on this topic.

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Hemingway’s Florida Keys house turned into a museum and house to 50+ cats.

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Why are there no uppercase numbers?

The answer is that they exist but we don’t use uppercase and lower case the same way for numbers as letters. Both lowercase and uppercase numbers look very similar so it’s hard to notice. In the 19th century people decided that uppercase letters were easier to read and decided to mostly use them. Fonts that use lowercase numbers are Georgia, Candara, Constanta, and corbel.

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San Francisco had a black plague problem from 1900-1904. Like during the European black plague, fleas on rats was the main vector of the plague. So the city focused on killing as many rats as possible. One of the suggestions on how to control the rat population was to let hundreds of ferrets loose around the city. This would have made ferrets a common part of the city’s wildlife and made the city more whimsical.

While the ferrets are not included in the wiki article they are mentioned in the book The Barbary Plague: the Black Death in Victorian San Francisco by Marilyn Chase.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900–1904_San_Francisco_plague

The problem with American Cities is we lack whimsy