Girls, Girls, Girls – Margarita Hack

You're listening to Girls, Girls, Girls, the podcast rewriting history one episode at a time. I'm Bea Duncan. Hello, and welcome to Girls, Girls Girls. I'm Bea Duncan and I'm here on Women's Radio Station. And I hope you're all having a completely fantastic Monday so far. Just a quick reminder, if you are listening to this on Catch up, you can listen to Girls Girls Gals every single Monday at 12:30pm So a nice little lunchtime accompaniment and you can do so on Women's Radio Station. Now, nobody guessed from my clues last week about who I was covering, so I can now reveal that today we will be talking about the fantastic Margarita hack who was a renowned astrophysicist and social activist. But before we get into that, as always, it's time for the celhebration. So this is the segment where I show my gratitude to someone or something that has inspired me in the past few weeks. So, a few weeks ago, Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize for Physics, thanks to her work on chirped pulse amplification. And this is amazing in itself. Obviously, Nobel Prizes, few and far between, but it is especially fitting to have two amazing scientists on the show. But what is incredible is that she was the third woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in physics. So Marie Curie in 1903 was the first, and then Maria Goepert Meyer about 60 years later. So there have only ever been three women to win the Nobel Prize in physics. And to add insult to injury, ridiculously, Donna's Wikipedia page was rejected earlier this year in May, because she apparently wasn't famous enough. So a person who then went on to win a Nobel Prize was apparently not worthy of recognition only five months before, which, I mean, I think something's at play there. I mean, I have spoken before on this podcast about sort of Wikipedia biases and the fact that the majority of writers of entries and entries themselves are done by or about white men. And so it does make sense that Donna Strickland would not have had an entry or have been allowed in, but it is still incredibly frustrating. So, on a slightly more positive note, huge congratulations and celebration to Donna Strickland, and hopefully we will treat female scientists in a bit of a bit higher esteem going forwards. So, right now, as you're listening to this episode, I will actually be in Florence. I am recording this in advance because I'm probably going to be sitting in an Italian square somewhere drinking an Aperol spritz and eating pasta. Or at least I hope I will be. And so in the meantime, it means that you get to listen to me talking all about a fantastic Florentine woman, specifically the so called lady of the Stars, Margaretha Hack. She was an atheist, vegetarian, feminist who contributed to the fields of stellar spectroscopy and radio astronomy, which, apart from the science bits, is just exactly what I aspire to be as well. So we'll see. So Margarita was born on the 12th of June, 1922 in Florence. And she was born at the corner of Via Centro Stile, which literally translates to the street of 100 Stars, which is very apt indeed because of what she went on to do later on. Her father was a bookkeeper and her mother was a miniaturist at the Uffizi Gallery, which is one of the kind of biggest, most famous galleries in Florence. And hopefully I will be going to see some of the stuff in there while I'm in Florence. And she attended the Lescio Classic, Galileo Galilei in Florence. And she graduated in physics from the University of Florence in 1945. She actually ended up getting a final score of 101 out of 110, which is very good, as I'm sure you can imagine. And she had actually initially wanted to study English literature, but she changed her mind after just one class, which is very relatable. So she went to one and just thought, this is not for me, and changed possibly to the most opposite subject, physics. And it was probably the best decision she could have ever made. Her thesis was in astrophysics on Cepheid variable stars, which are a type of star that sort of pulsate regularly by getting brighter and then dimmer in a certain regular pattern. And Hack thought that this was almost a language, the stars talking to us in a certain way. That's how she viewed it. And that was her specialist subject and why she eventually became known as the lady of the Stars. Now she was known throughout Italy, as well as being incredible at science, as being quite controversial in the fact that she was very anti religious. Her parents were Protestant and Catholic respectively. But she often was known to criticize the Catholic Church because of its hierarchy. And when in 1992 the Roman Catholic Church officially admitted that they had been wrong to condemn Galileo, she was quoted as saying it was better late than never. Margarita also caused quite a lot of controversy in 2005 when she was talking about the blood of San Gennaro, which is a little vial of dried up blood, and it's held in the Naples Cathedral. And basically every year there is a ceremony where it liquefies into liquid blood. And she said the entire thing was a hoax. And she said that the substance is most likely going to be hydrated iron oxide, which has a lot of the same characteristics as blood, but it liquefies when shaken. She said there is nothing mystical about this. You can make the so called blood in your kitchen at home. As you can imagine, that kind of annoyed the Vatican and even more so when she joined in with the pro choice movement in Italy. And she was hugely involved with left wing politics as well. Quite recently, she was a huge supporter of Nietzsche Vandola, who is the governor of Southern Puglia, and he was one of Italy's few openly gay politicians. She was a huge supporter of him. And so she was basically finding any way that she could to annoy the Church and the people of Italy quite a lot as well. She was part of the Million Woman Movement, which was a movement kind of demanding the resignation of Berlusconi. And as well as this, she was also involved in movements lobbying for more rights for euthanasia and also lobbying for anti nuclear reactors in Italy, which again was very. She was basically going against the grain in every single way that she could think of. And I mean, it still worked out for her. But yeah, it's quite funny. She did really try and annoy a lot of people. In 1944, she married Aldo de Rosa. And to please her mother in law, who was a very devout Catholic, she had a very religious ceremony. And she was quoted as saying that this would be the first and the last time that she would ever go into a church. And as a wedding dress, this is absolutely great. She just took an overcoat and wore it inside out. And that was her way of dressing up for the ceremony. So as you can tell, she didn't really want to have a big fancy ceremony. She was only doing it to please her mother in law. And that's why she kind of made this small protest by turning an overcoat inside out and wearing that on the day. Her and her husband never had any children, but they owned eight cats. Eight cats and a dog as well together. And I personally think that that's exactly how I would wish my life to turn out. Eight cats. Absolutely amazing. What a household that must have been. So Margarita graduated in 1945, and by the early 50s she was working as an astronomer at Florence's observatory. And eventually she moved on and she worked at the Brera Astronomical Observatory, which is just outside Milan. She worked there for about 10 years. And after that, between the years of 1964 and 1998, she started teaching at the University of Triste and she, she lived there and she spent pretty much the rest of her life there as well. She was very well known and celebrated for being able to describe scientific procedures and theories in a way that the general public could understand. And so as well as doing all of this incredible research and kind of doing her theses on the stars, she would often write books and go on TV shows. She became rather of a TV personality and she would go around explaining this stuff in simple terms. I guess she could have been seen as being like a Brian Cox type of person, doing these kind of shows and just really bringing it to the people. She was very, very passionate about that, as you can imagine, being quite a liberal, left leaning person. She was very into sharing knowledge and making sure that it was accessible to every single person. And in fact, she wrote over 200 papers explaining different kinds of scientific concepts and spreading her. And most of the time it was about the different kinds of radiation emitted by the stars. As I mentioned before, she considered this radiation to be a type of language, which I think is a really, really sweet way of looking at it. She felt very connected, I think, to outer space and to the stars. And as somebody who didn't believe in God, was very, very much an atheist, this was sort of a faith for her. And she very much considered that stars had something to say and we just had to try and work out what exactly that was. And that's what she tried to do. Margarita made history in 1964 as she became the director of the observatory in Triste. And she was the first woman ever to hold this position. And under her leadership, as you can imagine, it became one of the top researchers, research centers in all of Italy. So that was an incredible trailblazing achievement for her, being the first woman ever to be a director of this observatory. And she did very, very well at it. So I hope you're looking forward to hearing a little bit more about Margarita. But for now we're gonna go for a very quick little break. But don't forget, if you go to womensradiostation.com you can find out all the information about this show and all of the others. And I hope to see you after this very quick break. WRS women's radio station, Voice of Women Worldwide, Sarah's Universal Soul Show. What does your soul or spirituality mean to you? Welcome to future Classical Woman Awards with me, Stefania Passamonte on Women's Radio Station. Welcome back, I'm Russ Cain. You're listening to in conversation with On Women's Radio Station. I'm Angie. And I'm Patsy. And we're open. To see what other programs we have on Women's Radio station, head to our website, womensradiostation.com I'm Isabelle Manavi, an executive coach. Do you want to change a negative into a positive? We can do this by encouraging you to rewire your brain using simple visualization techniques. In 20 years of practice, I've seen this transform lives. For more information, look on Women's Radio website. Call me on 079-844-22171. I'm listening. Mirae B Ltd. We are a virtual PA consultancy. We provide remote administrative services. Our offering is diverse. We manage your calendar, we update your client database. We take care of your property in France and in London we also offer bookkeeping and translation services. Would you like to know more? Please call 077-8684-8998 for further information. Mirae B Limited making the life of the business owner successful. Let Women's Radio advertise your brand or business. It's so affordable and effective. Reaching out to all women. Call us on 020-743-77-0666 now. Are you struggling with money? Turn to us. 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Full stop. She used to work as a chemist. Forget this. The chocolate company Mars. Take that, Tim Peak. You may have heard of Alexander Fleming, the guy who discovered penicillin because he couldn't be bothered to wash his dishes before going on holiday. But you might have not heard of Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau, the chemical engineer who invented a way to mass produce penicillin. Before her, at any one time, only 10 people in the world could be treated with penicillin. It's Hutchison Rousseau who was responsible for saving literally millions of lives with her invention. But she's always been overshadowed by a man. You're listening to Girls, Girls, Girls, the podcast rewriting history one episode at a time. Hi, I'm Bea Duncan. Hello and welcome back. You are still listening to Girls, Girls, Girls. And you're here with me, Bea Duncan on Women's Radio station. And today we are talking about Margarita Hack. If you haven't been listening yet, if you missed the first half, don't worry, you can still catch up, but if not, we're at kind of the peak of her career, so don't worry, you haven't missed out. We have just been talking about how she made history in 1964 as Margarita became the first ever female director of the observatory in Tristei. And she did really, really amazing things there. She was the director for quite a few years, and as you can imagine, she was an incredibly intelligent, smart woman. And so she made some really great waves. But when she finally retired from the observatory in 1987, the new director of the observatory, Stefano Borghani, said that she was one of the first astronomers to have the intuition that the future of astronomical observation lay in using space satellites. So from his perspective, she was one of the first people, a kind of trailblazer, to think about space satellites. I mean, obviously now when we think about space and space exploration, satellites are a huge part of that. And. And we have satellites above us at all times. And so the fact that he credits her with that and her being the first person to even think about it, that is pretty incredible in itself. Now, Margarita did get some formal recognition, even if not many people necessarily know who she is. I mean, she's not really on kind of syllabuses, at least not in my schooling, but she did get formal recognition. So in 1998 she was awarded the medal of the Italian Order of Merit for Culture and Art. Now, while that is all very well and good, and I'm sure she'd be very, very proud of that, in my opinion, even cooler is the fact she has a literal asteroid named after her. So the asteroid 8558 Hack was named after her. And. Oh, that's so cool. Imagine being able to have an asteroid named after you floating about in the sky. That is really, really. And I think that she probably might have been even more honoured by that. But the medal's cool as well. But, you know the asteroid. That's mega. And the year before she died, on 28 May 2012, she was awarded the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. All of these awards are so long, they hit such a mouthful. I don't know how she would have gone around telling people what she got, because she must have abbreviated it or something, because that's ridiculous. But again, she got a very cool award. And, I mean, it's nice to get formal recognition, even if you're not necessarily getting the kind of social recognition necessarily that you would like. But that's the whole point of this podcast. We're trying to get women's names into people's minds, make them household names, because I really think she deserves it. So Margaret died on 29 June 2013, and she was in the Adriatic Sea town of Triste. So that was where she was lecturing at the university and where she was the director of the observatory. And she was 91, which is a very impressive age to get to. And her husband passed away just a year later, and they're both buried in the cemetery, Santa Anna di Tristei. So that's very sweet. Even though she didn't actually believe in an afterlife, but I'm sure it's still nice that they are laid to rest together. She said once in an interview, I have no fear of death. When there is death, I won't be there. Which is true. I mean, I guess if you don't believe in an afterlife, you don't fear death. Because she kind of just thought, when I'm dead, I'm not going to realize I'm dead, so what's the point in worrying about it? Which is a very refreshing take and a nice way to think about it, in my opinion. And she made an impact on a lot of people's lives, and a lot of people were incredibly sad when she. When she passed away. So Fabrizio Marrazo, who was a spokesman for an LGBT advocacy group called Gay center, said, with Margarita Hack's passing, we lose an authoritative voice in favor of civil rights and equality. And obviously that was to do with all of her social activist work to do with LGBTQ rights, abortion, euthanasia. She really was fighting for every single person who didn't have as much of a voice as her. And even Italy's Foreign Minister, Emma Bonino said that Hack was an extraordinary figure and that with her, vanishes not only a great scientist, but a free spirit, deeply intellectually honest. So she made a huge impact in Italy and People were extremely sad when she died. And I think it says a lot that so many people were aware of the impact that she was making, not just in science, but also in, as I said, social activist movements and all of that. She was, yeah, she was. She did a lot for Italy. She really did. In her will, she left her personal library to the city of Tristei. So this contained over 24,000 books, which, I mean, I, I'm sure she read them all, but I cannot imagine how somebody can have a personal library that large. It's absolutely ridiculous. I've got a really, really good friend who loves reading. It's basically all she does. And I think being in a library with 24,000 books would be like her dream come true. And I don't think even she could get through that many books, to be honest. I have full faith in her, but not that much faith. So I think that's a really sweet thing that Margarita did. She kind of, I guess, passed on the knowledge and the resources that had helped her get to where she was. She wanted to pass that on. And that is again, very much in her kind of almost socialist spirit. She wanted to provide education and knowledge to anyone and everyone who wanted it. So that was the story of Margaretha Hack. She was just mind blowing to research. I mean, she made incredible strides in astronomy, in science, which, I mean, even I could tell that, and I'm not really a scientist, but the stuff that she was researching was cool. I mean, I've mentioned it before, but I love the idea of stars having a language. And I think she obviously made a lot of incredible impressions. I think it's great as well that she was very committed to the idea of sharing that knowledge with people by putting it into terms in simpler terms that people could understand and being a television personality in that way. Because often science, especially kind of astronomy and stuff, can be seen as being quite elitist, out of touch. People don't really understand it, it seems so abstract. But if she can go there and she can start explaining it to other people, it's also quite brave in such a religious place. I mean, she will have seen what happened to Galileo and happened to a lot of the scientists back in the day. But she just wanted to make the world a better place, let everyone understand science, and then also improve the lives of those who needed civil rights help, essentially. I think if her time wasn't taken up enough with, you know, interpreting the language of the stars, she decided to make civil changes as well. So I don't know how she had enough hours in the day, to be honest. Now, I hope that you enjoyed that and you're going to be tuning in next week to hear who I'm going to talk about. As always, I give you a couple of clues in case you want to try and guess. I mean, people, they're meant to be hard, these clues, but not many people have been guessing. I think I had one with Claudette Colvin. I was very impressed with that. But please, please do get in contact. If you think you know who I'm going to be talking about next week or if you think you know but you're. If you're not quite sure, I could always do that person in another episode. So next week we're going to be talking about a fantastic woman. She was born in Dhavlali and she was educated between India and England. She was sort of operating in the 1800s. And she was also, I suppose, an advocate for social justice in a certain way, but a little bit more formally than Margarita Haack. She was a trailblazer. She had a lot of firsts. First woman to do X, first person to do this. You know, I'm not going to give away anything more because otherwise it'll be very obvious. But that's all you're going to get. Yeah, I think that's enough. So if you think you know who I'm talking about or, yeah, just don't, don't put this into Google because you'll probably be able to find it. But hopefully this sounds exciting and it'll pique your interest for next week so that you can come back and listen to that exciting story. So if you want to get in contact with me, you can do I'm gggpod on Twitter or you can email me at girlsgirlsgirlspodmail.com I've had quite a few people contacting me in the last week and they've been just chatting to me about the show and what they like. So if you want to just chat, you can do that. But also if you want to suggest somebody a topic or as well, a celebration, because as I mentioned a couple of episodes ago, I am opening up the celebration to you guys. So if you've got anyone in particular that you want to celebrate, even if it's just a friend or your mum, feel free to give me an email or tweet and I will be very, very happy to shout them. Also, don't forget that you can go to the presenters page on womensradiostation.com all of my episodes. And also episodes of all of the other incredible shows that are on the station. You can catch up with them, go exploring, find something new and also you can tweet them womensradiostn on Twitter. So lots and lots of ways to get in contact. It's up to you how you do it and I hope to hear from you very, very shortly. And if not, tune in next week. We'll be chatting about another incredible woman, but for now I'm signing off and I'll see you next time. WRS Women's Radio Station Voice of Women Worldwide this is Amy Liu, Voice of China at Women's Radio Station. Welcome to future Classical Women Awards with Min Stefania Passamonte on Women's Radio Station. After a long day, I like to sit in my bath with a glass of wine and listen to Women's Radio Kamrass Kate that you're listening to in conversation with on Women's Radio Station. To see what other programs we have on Women's Radio Station, head to our website womensradiostation.com are you looking to enhance your career? Are you looking to grow your business? Well then why not? Visit wearthecity.com wearthecity.com is a website for working women. It's full of inspirational stories of women that have been there, seen it and done it. We also feature events, women's networks and other articles that may help you to progress both in terms of your connections and business ideas. Visit wearethecity.com and take your business or career to the next level. Mirae B Ltd. We are a virtual PA consultancy. We provide remote administrative services. Our offering is diverse. We manage your calendar, we update your client database, we take care of your property in France and in London. We also offer bookkeeping and translation services. Would you like to know more? Please call 077-8684-8998 for further information. Mirab Limited making the life of the business owner successful Would you like to host your own radio show? Would you love to be doing what I'm doing right now and be a radio presenter on Women's RAD station? If you're passionate on your subject or topic, we'd like to hear from you, wherever you are in the world, about what's happening in your country, town or city. It's your station, your voice to women of the world. So contact us. Send an email to involvedwimsradiostation.com. I'm Isabelle Manavie, an executive coach. Do you want to change a negative into a positive? We can do this by coaching you to rewire your brain using simple visualization techniques. In 20 years of practice, I've seen this transform lives. For more information, look on Women's Radio website. Call me on 079-84422. I'm listening. Women's Radio Station is a not for profit, community interest company. Supporting women is our passion. We're currently welcoming donations to help towards our running costs to keep this important initiative alive. To donate, simply head to our website. Every little will help.