Behind the Scenes Minis: Joan Curran and Murasaki Shikibu

On today's casual Friday talk, Tracy and Holly talk about the surprising level of recognition Joan Curran got from male contemporaries, war debris, and the skeevier aspects of the "Tale of Genji."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, I'm Molly Frying,
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Uh, and welcome one skin to
casual Friday with the stuff you missed in History Class.
So this week we talked about Joan Curran, who is

(00:25):
a scientist that has just not gotten her due in
the public sphere. In my opinion, I don't know how
I stumbled across her. This is I do not remember.
I literally have uh, multiple lists that I keep in
various states of disarray. I have one on my phone
that are potential episodes. But then I also have like

(00:47):
kind of my adaptation of like a bullet journal style
notebook that I keep with me and keep all my
stuff in and literally scrawled on one of the pages
like two months ago is the name Joan Curran. And
I don't remember how I got to it. But then
I went back to it recently and I was like, wait,
why didn't I jump right on this, uh? And I
don't know why, maybe because I've been talking about a

(01:09):
lot of science lately, but I it was one of
those things where the refreshing and beautiful part of it
to me is how over and over the men who
were her colleagues and friends, we're always very quick to
correct people who did not recognize that she was a
heavy hitting, brilliant scientist in her own right, which is awesome. Yeah,

(01:31):
that's not something that you always here. Like there was
one instance I'm going to get some of the details
wrong because I don't have the notes right in front
of me, but where one of her friends recounted when
he was like first meeting their family and they were
at some like academia event and she was sitting at
this table with other physicists and it was I believe
when her her husband, Samuel was was head of the

(01:54):
University of strath Clydes um science department, and someone said
some thing about, you know, what a good sport she
was to sit there and listen to them, and like
two of the men at the table were like, um,
she's smarter than the rest of us put together. So
like that is a really lovely thing that her colleagues
were never she seemed to not uh suffer that situation

(02:18):
that happens with a lot of women scientists where it's like,
that's cute that you did research. The men are talking
that never seemed to happen, particularly considering that she was
working in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties when it
was a lot less common for a woman to have
a seat at the table in terms of the level
of research she was doing, and clearly, like the Royal
Air Force and British leadership recognized that this was a

(02:40):
smart person who needed to be utilized for her intellect
to make contributions to the war effort, which was kind
of to me the best takeaway from that whole thing.
You know, talking about war is very difficult in general.
As I get older, it gets harder and harder to
read some of these accounts, because, uh, the more you
learned about the world, the more you recognize, like the

(03:02):
depth of impact of even sometimes seemingly small gestures or
small moments. But we like I never really learned the
degree of devastation of Hamburg during the raids during Operation
gomorra Um. I remember getting a very very brief version

(03:23):
of it, like in high school, of like, these were
very big bombing raids, there were civilians killed, but I
literally had not ever until I dug into her story
and that particular result of her work like how horrifying
it was, and everyone who lived through it and later
spoke about it talked about being really like a hell

(03:44):
on Earth. And what's really interesting in that as well
is even the men who were involved in that raid
on the Allied side talking about how at the time
they were like cheering because they thought it had gone
so well, and when they realized what had really happened
and how completely destroyed Hamburg was, like, they all felt

(04:05):
a weird sort of um conflict and guilt about it
that I think a lot of them were dealing with
for the rest of their lives. Yeah. Yeah, and it's
I said in the show, but I feel like the
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki yet a lot more attention,
at least here in the US um than all of

(04:26):
the other destruction leading up to that point, when it
like that wasn't something that was unique to the end
of the war. No, and it and you know, it's
it's just one of those things that makes you think
about the things that humans will do to one another
in the names of strange strange efforts. Yeah. On a
on a potentially lighter note, As you were researching this,

(04:49):
did you find anything about like the clean up effort
of all of this material that was dropped around, because
it just seems like a lot um you know what.
I didn't, But it is a good question. I mean
I kind of suspect that what happened in a lot
of cases, although I don't know for the D Day prep,

(05:11):
where they were using it really more as a a
sort of wartime theater effort, this would not have been
the case, but when they were using it during bombing raids,
I suspect that there was so much destruction in general
that kind of that material got lumped into the general
clean up without really separating out what that was versus

(05:31):
you know, collapsed buildings versus you know, the loss of
human life. It all kind of got lumped together as
one big problem to rebuild from. It would be my guest,
But I don't know, And that's a good question. Other
than knowing that a cow ate some I really don't
have a lot of info about what the cap was
on all that aluminum. There are still some places that

(05:52):
have those strips of aluminum that have been recovered as
like museum pieces, right. I saw some of those when
I was rousing around the internet. It was one of
those things that I was just curious about. And there
are also things that are surely much more damaging than
window that is left behind during wartime. I mean, we
have unexploded ordinance that we need to talk about on

(06:14):
Unearthed pretty free, but I was just curious. It is fascinating.
It was painted black because they didn't want the reflective
nature of aluminum to give away anything either. So in
some cases I suspect people didn't recognize that it was
aluminum stripping versus part of a damaged building or other
bomb damage because it didn't look like a shiny metal thing.

(06:37):
That would be my guess. So the second thing that
we talked about this week was mir Saki Shikibu and
the Tale of Genji. My introduction to this, as was
the case with say Shown, was a class that I
took in college called Medieval Women Writers, which has actually
inspired a number of episodes of this show at this

(06:57):
point because other people that we read included Marjorie Kemp
the Book of the City of Ladies. We read in
that class. Like there was a lot of things that
over the past several years have eventually made their way
into episodes, but this was a class, unsurprisingly a class
about medieval women writers, which was an elective taught in
the literature department of a university that had more women

(07:19):
than men at It was taught by a woman and
had a majority people in the class, mostly women, And
boy did we think Genji was gross. The translation that
we read was one of was by Edward Scheidensticker in
the seventies, and we did not read the whole entire

(07:41):
book because that's just not reasonable in the course of
a college class where you have like ten different works
that you're gonna read, when's a thousand pages long. Um.
But we had this abridgment where all of the chapters
that we were reading were from the earlier parts of
the book. So all of the chapters that we were
reading were about Genji and his fair ers and just
the very schevy part of abducting a ten year old

(08:04):
and grooming her to be his wife. UM. And we
were all like, we don't like this guy. He seems
like a player. He's you know, breaking all these women's
hearts and causing all this emotional wreckage. Um. And our
professor was like, yeah, this was like this was the
addition of the book we had available to us. It's
unfortunate that it only includes material from the early chapters

(08:26):
of the book, because you only see like, uh, player Genji.
You don't see old sad Genji from later on, when
it's like all of his youthful pursuit of all of
these women has like caught up with him and he
is sad and wistful and wants to just become a
monk and leave the world. Um, And we were all

(08:47):
like we have we don't really care, though we still
think he's greats. I love that you have such an
academic introduction to that and the Pillow Book, because my
introduction of the Pillow Book is from the nine Peter
Greenaway film of the same name, which I don't know
if you've seen it, I don't think so. Um it

(09:09):
is say Shanagon is listed as one of the writers
along with Peter Greenaway, but it is not. Um. It
stars Vivian and Ean McGregor, and it's a really beautiful film.
If you love Peter Greenaway, which I do, he is
not for everyone. So I then after seeing it was like, wait,
this is it lists like a writer from hundreds of

(09:30):
years ago as one of the writers. So I looked
it up from there and that's how I got introduced
to that similarly, not entirely similarly, but the Tale of
Genji I got introduced to because I was working as
an acquisition specialist in a college library and we got
a CD ROM version of the Tale of Genji that
was a really beautifully designed thing that was intended to

(09:51):
like be a new way that you could take English
speaking students through that whole thing. But it became very
apparent to me, even with my limited knowledge of the
original text, that this particular piece of education seemed to
focus a lot more on explaining like the hierarchy and
the court culture part of it, and they really skipped

(10:11):
over a lot of like the sexual interludes and the
romantic part of it, because I don't know how you
would do that on a CD rum in the early
two thousand's without it being really really Yeah. But yeah,
So I came up both of these from a very
pop culture place, and then just because I was curious
and did my own reading, learned about them, but not

(10:31):
from a literature class. Yeah, it seems like, um, when
I was researching the one about the Pillow Book that
came out how those years ago, at this point I
kept finding YouTube videos from an anime, and I was like,
I'm going to check that out at some point, but
I never. I never did, so maybe I'll manage to
do that at some point. Anyway, I'm glad I finally

(10:55):
got to move for up to the top of the list,
because she's been on that list literally since day one,
and at various points people have been like, Hey, could
you do an episode on her? And every time I've
been like, Ah, is it too similar to the thing,
And then I was like, Oh, it's been so long,
it doesn't matter at this point. It might have been
weird if we had done them back to back, but
not not a big deal. There is a strange odd
satisfaction with finally getting a topic off your list that's

(11:18):
been there for years. Yep, Yep for sure. Okay, Taylor
Genjie check Yep. Thanks so much for listening to our
casual Friday everybody. Stuff You Missed in History Class is
a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For
more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I Heart

(11:39):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
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