Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
Speaker 1: We start this, I'm Holly Fry. For some reason, my
Speaker 1: brain was like, why didn't she say birthday after you
Speaker 1: said happy? It's nobody's birthday. No, just the way you
Speaker 1: let in with happy, I'm like birthday. I'm also just like,
Speaker 1: how do we normally kick off our Friday minisodes. It's
Speaker 1: been a strange a strange week, strange week in our
Speaker 1: lives as of when we're recording this, and we don't
Speaker 1: know what the week will have been like when this
Speaker 1: comes out. But we talked about olamp de Gouge. Yes,
Speaker 1: I did the thing where I was like, I should
Speaker 1: thank people who have have suggested this topic, and there
Speaker 1: were so so so many. Uh, it's she's somebody that
Speaker 1: has been on my list for a really long time,
Speaker 1: and then they're kept being things that made me go
Speaker 1: I just can't. I can't talk about somebody getting guillotined
Speaker 1: right now. Um. And then when I started working on
Speaker 1: this and there was an attack on the Capitol, I
Speaker 1: was like, it's too late. I can't get away from
Speaker 1: the guillotine into deep. Yeah, yeah, I did not have
Speaker 1: time to switch switch tracks on this one. I did
Speaker 1: not know that there was all the stuff I said
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the episode about how, um like,
Speaker 1: she's most famous for the Declaration of the Rights of Women,
Speaker 1: but that wasn't actually what led to her execution, and
Speaker 1: that also was like just one tiny thing of her
Speaker 1: other work, Like I did not know anything about any
Speaker 1: of the rest of that, right. Uh, it's interesting, you know,
Speaker 1: her Declaration of the Rights of Women made me think,
Speaker 1: of course about the Declaration of Sentiments. Oh yeah, but
Speaker 1: just to keep because they're similarly modeled after an original document,
Speaker 1: switching out language pretty carefully. But it's interesting to note
Speaker 1: that hers you know, predates that one by almost sixty years.
Speaker 1: Seneca Women's Convention was eighteen forty eight. I think that
Speaker 1: sounds right, So I have to naturally wonder if they
Speaker 1: were at least in part inspired by that. Yeah. It
Speaker 1: it also came out just a year before Mary Wolston
Speaker 1: Craft's Vindication on the Rights of Women. Um so like
Speaker 1: there was there was a lat going on that was
Speaker 1: she was just part of the early parts of I
Speaker 1: found the lack of depth and clarity about her biography
Speaker 1: a little frustrating. That happens a lot of the time
Speaker 1: when we're talking about people from the long ago past. Um,
Speaker 1: Like when we're talking about somebody from the eleventh century
Speaker 1: and we're like, we don't know anything about their biography
Speaker 1: at all, that's not particularly surprising. But for somebody as
Speaker 1: relatively recent as Olmpta Goog it was a little frustrating. Um.
Speaker 1: There is a website that is Olampa Googe dot eu
Speaker 1: that has English translations of a ton of her stuff.
Speaker 1: So in terms of reading English translations of her written work,
Speaker 1: there is a lot more available in English on that
Speaker 1: score than there is, like in depth analysis of her biography. Right,
Speaker 1: maybe some answering of some of the questions about things
Speaker 1: about her life, right. I I also in reading this over.
Speaker 1: I looked this over this morning before we started recording,
Speaker 1: and I was reminded of a thing I'm trying to
Speaker 1: think of the best way to talk about this, that
Speaker 1: I overheard in a hotel bar in l A back
Speaker 1: when traveling happened, which is this whole thing about her
Speaker 1: writing and whether or not she was the daughter of
Speaker 1: the Marquis de Pompignan. I was sitting in this bar,
Speaker 1: and I was overhearing these people next to me, and
Speaker 1: this young woman who seemed lovely was having all kinds
Speaker 1: of conversations. But I noticed like she met with several
Speaker 1: different people while we were there, so I don't like.
Speaker 1: One seemed to be like a friend that stopped by
Speaker 1: for drinks, one was like a quick business thing, and
Speaker 1: then one might have been a date. But at one
Speaker 1: point in time she mentioned that she was the illegitimate
Speaker 1: I hate that weird daughter of a famous person. And
Speaker 1: it was a famous person that I have interviewed, and
Speaker 1: I had this moment where I was like, I have
Speaker 1: enough connection back to that person. I could probably check this,
Speaker 1: but I don't know if she's just using this to
Speaker 1: get access to something like. It was just this really
Speaker 1: weird moment where you think about those things. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: the fact that there are a lot of people in
Speaker 1: the world who are not legally connected to their father's
Speaker 1: what that means. How that plays in the modern era
Speaker 1: compared to how it was playing here was not that different.
Speaker 1: It just all gave me pause. Um, I I rewatched
Speaker 1: the most recent Little Women on Christmas Eve, along with
Speaker 1: the one that starred wind Owner writer. I just had
Speaker 1: a whole marathon where I watched two different versions of
Speaker 1: Little Women in a Row. But that scene in the
Speaker 1: one that came out, I think in it starts off
Speaker 1: with this scene where Joe March goes to a publisher
Speaker 1: and is like, my friend wrote this and would like
Speaker 1: you to look at it. UM, and that framework of
Speaker 1: the memoir of Madam Belmont where it's like there's this
Speaker 1: unnamed um editor who's like, I'm publishing this correspondence of
Speaker 1: my friends were like, reminded me of that UM. So anyway,
Speaker 1: I uh, I like Olympics. I find her just got
Speaker 1: some contradictions that are really interesting to me. Uh in
Speaker 1: terms of being like, yeah, women are women are pretty deceitful,
Speaker 1: but like we were forced into that position, and then
Speaker 1: also being like yeah, the revolution but also the monarchy, right,
Speaker 1: That is all very fascinating, And I think it's another point.
Speaker 1: I always like to point these out because I think
Speaker 1: they're important that very very poignantly exemplifies that like, no
Speaker 1: one is not complicated. Well, we also didn't really get
Speaker 1: into like analyzing whether her abolitionist play was sensitive in
Speaker 1: its treatment of race or not, or the fact that
Speaker 1: she made comparisons between marriage and slavery. Like we have
Speaker 1: talked on the show before and other episodes about the
Speaker 1: feminist movement kind of appropriating the language and imagery of
Speaker 1: slavery to talk about women's rights and how like that
Speaker 1: really diminished the impact of the horrors of slavery in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways. We didn't really talk about that
Speaker 1: in terms of Olympic at all, but that also was
Speaker 1: like a part of her work and a part of
Speaker 1: the world that she was in. So I'm glad I
Speaker 1: finally finally got her off to the top of the
Speaker 1: list after probably eight years of people asking. This week,
Speaker 1: one of the things that we talked about was John
Speaker 1: Dalton and his anomalous vision, which most people would call
Speaker 1: color blindness, but it's shifting to the terminology of color
Speaker 1: vision deficiency for accuracy's sake. I love this whole thing,
Speaker 1: as you obviously could tell um. The whole time I
Speaker 1: was researching it, I was giggling at myself because my
Speaker 1: beloved and I are both kind of artsy folks. We
Speaker 1: get along tremendously well. The biggest arguments we have ever
Speaker 1: had in our marriage have been about colors. Yeah, I like,
Speaker 1: I mean, just infuriated discussions of color. There is one
Speaker 1: pair of pants that, like, thank goodness, it has gone
Speaker 1: from our lives that I always said was slate blue
Speaker 1: and he always said was black that had just faded.
Speaker 1: And we would argue bicker over this stupid pair of
Speaker 1: pants and what color it was for a ridiculous amount
Speaker 1: of time. Two artsy people arguing about color is no
Speaker 1: fun for anybody because they both have incredible conviction in
Speaker 1: their beliefs. It's very funny people have such strong connections
Speaker 1: to color. I mean I I thought about this with
Speaker 1: John Dalton, and it's a question we can never know
Speaker 1: because he never really said I were I like, I
Speaker 1: did he have a favorite color? I don't know. As
Speaker 1: a scientist, he seems to have been, you know, like
Speaker 1: he'll talk about which ones are pleasant. But so many
Speaker 1: of us get so attached to a color and it
Speaker 1: makes me chuckle. I know, your favorite color is blue. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've been playing a lot of animal Crossing and every
Speaker 1: time I buy stuff, you know, in the Able Sister store,
Speaker 1: it's like the blue one. My entire animal Crossing wardrobe
Speaker 1: was just blue blue blue blue blue blue blue. Uh.
Speaker 1: And sometimes we'll be like, I'm gonna get the pink
Speaker 1: one because my entire wardrobe is blue. UM. I wanted
Speaker 1: to know that, Like, there there are a lot of
Speaker 1: accessibility issues that are related to color vision, Like there
Speaker 1: are websites that are anywhere between ugly and just unusable
Speaker 1: depending on how they use color. UM. I have a
Speaker 1: friend who he's he's always used the word color blind,
Speaker 1: but he has color vision deficiency and is also a
Speaker 1: game designer, and we'll talk about how games are sometimes
Speaker 1: just not playable at all because they have used colors
Speaker 1: to signify different things, Like you just you can't tell
Speaker 1: if that card belongs to one group or another because
Speaker 1: the colors that were used on it cannot be distinguished
Speaker 1: by people with particular color vision deficiencies. It relates to
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff besides oh yeah, you know, like
Speaker 1: what color you decided to pay your house or whatever?
Speaker 1: Right we I think we talked about it in our
Speaker 1: episode on UM the invention of traffic lights. There's I
Speaker 1: don't remember if it came up any episode or if
Speaker 1: it was in a listener mail where there's a kind
Speaker 1: of famous one that's inverted where the red, green, and
Speaker 1: yellow are flipped opposite of a normal traffic light, and
Speaker 1: so for people that maybe have color vision deficiency and
Speaker 1: have learned that spatially in order when they're driving, that
Speaker 1: completely screws them up. That's uh, don't do that, municipality,
Speaker 1: whenever flipped your traffic lights. I think most municipalities know that. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It gets to be interesting when I think about, like
Speaker 1: I said, in our family, we did not know that
Speaker 1: my dad clearly was not seeing color the same way
Speaker 1: as the rest of us. And I think we had
Speaker 1: a discussion at one point where I was asking him
Speaker 1: questions like this about just like basic stuff that we
Speaker 1: encounter every day that you're even taught as a child,
Speaker 1: like look for this color, it means danger or whatever,
Speaker 1: and he was like to him, stop signs. He always
Speaker 1: learned by shape and never really thought about what color
Speaker 1: they were, which I think is a pretty common thing.
Speaker 1: But I do wonder them for children that maybe are
Speaker 1: not aware that this is a thing that happens. Is
Speaker 1: there just complete puzzlement when they're in classes and they're
Speaker 1: being taught things by color as meaning when they're like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it looks exactly like the other thing
Speaker 1: next to it, Like I I wonder how many kids
Speaker 1: get really confused in those moments. Yeah, so, if any
Speaker 1: of our listeners have color vision deficiencies, shoot us an email,
Speaker 1: because I want to hear all about it. It's one
Speaker 1: of the things that I love about John Dalton's writing
Speaker 1: is that he's pretty creatively descriptive about how things look
Speaker 1: in a way that people that would not have color
Speaker 1: vision deficiency would understand. Like when he says, like, you
Speaker 1: know what you point to and say his bottle green
Speaker 1: looks exactly the same to me as red. Um and
Speaker 1: I can't. I can't tell those two part. It's like, Oh,
Speaker 1: that's like a really good, easy visual cue. I think
Speaker 1: for people that that have quote unquote normal vision to
Speaker 1: understand what's going on a little bit better. It's such
Speaker 1: a fascinating thing because so many things happen in your
Speaker 1: brain to process the world around you. That even so,
Speaker 1: I always have that almost like paranoid concern that we're
Speaker 1: all seeing everything slightly differently, even though you can take
Speaker 1: tests on online to see if you have any color
Speaker 1: vision anomalies or not. Um, Yeah, well, we ever really
Speaker 1: know if we're seeing things exactly the same way. I
Speaker 1: don't know, So thank you for spending time with us
Speaker 1: this week. We hope that you have a wonderful, wonderful weekend.
Speaker 1: As always, you can always subscribe to the show in
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