Behind the Scenes Minis: Olympe and Dalton

Tracy and Holly chat about Olympe de Gouges and the less-than-robust information about her life's details. When talking about John Dalton and color vision, discussion of emotional attachment to color and accessibility issues related to color vision deficiency.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of I Heart Radio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
We start this, I'm Holly Fry. For some reason, my
brain was like, why didn't she say birthday after you

(00:22):
said happy? It's nobody's birthday. No, just the way you
let in with happy, I'm like birthday. I'm also just like,
how do we normally kick off our Friday minisodes. It's
been a strange a strange week, strange week in our
lives as of when we're recording this, and we don't
know what the week will have been like when this
comes out. But we talked about olamp de Gouge. Yes,

(00:46):
I did the thing where I was like, I should
thank people who have have suggested this topic, and there
were so so so many. Uh, it's she's somebody that
has been on my list for a really long time,
and then they're kept being things that made me go
I just can't. I can't talk about somebody getting guillotined

(01:06):
right now. Um. And then when I started working on
this and there was an attack on the Capitol, I
was like, it's too late. I can't get away from
the guillotine into deep. Yeah, yeah, I did not have
time to switch switch tracks on this one. I did
not know that there was all the stuff I said

(01:27):
at the beginning of the episode about how, um like,
she's most famous for the Declaration of the Rights of Women,
but that wasn't actually what led to her execution, and
that also was like just one tiny thing of her
other work, Like I did not know anything about any
of the rest of that, right. Uh, it's interesting, you know,
her Declaration of the Rights of Women made me think,

(01:48):
of course about the Declaration of Sentiments. Oh yeah, but
just to keep because they're similarly modeled after an original document,
switching out language pretty carefully. But it's interesting to note
that hers you know, predates that one by almost sixty years.
Seneca Women's Convention was eighteen forty eight. I think that

(02:10):
sounds right, So I have to naturally wonder if they
were at least in part inspired by that. Yeah. It
it also came out just a year before Mary Wolston
Craft's Vindication on the Rights of Women. Um so like
there was there was a lat going on that was
she was just part of the early parts of I

(02:32):
found the lack of depth and clarity about her biography
a little frustrating. That happens a lot of the time
when we're talking about people from the long ago past. Um,
Like when we're talking about somebody from the eleventh century
and we're like, we don't know anything about their biography

(02:52):
at all, that's not particularly surprising. But for somebody as
relatively recent as Olmpta Goog it was a little frustrating. Um.
There is a website that is Olampa Googe dot eu
that has English translations of a ton of her stuff.
So in terms of reading English translations of her written work,

(03:15):
there is a lot more available in English on that
score than there is, like in depth analysis of her biography. Right,
maybe some answering of some of the questions about things
about her life, right. I I also in reading this over.

(03:36):
I looked this over this morning before we started recording,
and I was reminded of a thing I'm trying to
think of the best way to talk about this, that
I overheard in a hotel bar in l A back
when traveling happened, which is this whole thing about her
writing and whether or not she was the daughter of

(03:57):
the Marquis de Pompignan. I was sitting in this bar,
and I was overhearing these people next to me, and
this young woman who seemed lovely was having all kinds
of conversations. But I noticed like she met with several
different people while we were there, so I don't like.
One seemed to be like a friend that stopped by
for drinks, one was like a quick business thing, and

(04:17):
then one might have been a date. But at one
point in time she mentioned that she was the illegitimate
I hate that weird daughter of a famous person. And
it was a famous person that I have interviewed, and
I had this moment where I was like, I have
enough connection back to that person. I could probably check this,
but I don't know if she's just using this to

(04:38):
get access to something like. It was just this really
weird moment where you think about those things. Yeah, and
the fact that there are a lot of people in
the world who are not legally connected to their father's
what that means. How that plays in the modern era

(04:58):
compared to how it was playing here was not that different.
It just all gave me pause. Um, I I rewatched
the most recent Little Women on Christmas Eve, along with
the one that starred wind Owner writer. I just had
a whole marathon where I watched two different versions of

(05:19):
Little Women in a Row. But that scene in the
one that came out, I think in it starts off
with this scene where Joe March goes to a publisher
and is like, my friend wrote this and would like
you to look at it. UM, and that framework of
the memoir of Madam Belmont where it's like there's this

(05:39):
unnamed um editor who's like, I'm publishing this correspondence of
my friends were like, reminded me of that UM. So anyway,
I uh, I like Olympics. I find her just got
some contradictions that are really interesting to me. Uh in

(06:00):
terms of being like, yeah, women are women are pretty deceitful,
but like we were forced into that position, and then
also being like yeah, the revolution but also the monarchy, right,
That is all very fascinating, And I think it's another point.
I always like to point these out because I think
they're important that very very poignantly exemplifies that like, no

(06:26):
one is not complicated. Well, we also didn't really get
into like analyzing whether her abolitionist play was sensitive in
its treatment of race or not, or the fact that
she made comparisons between marriage and slavery. Like we have

(06:47):
talked on the show before and other episodes about the
feminist movement kind of appropriating the language and imagery of
slavery to talk about women's rights and how like that
really diminished the impact of the horrors of slavery in
a lot of ways. We didn't really talk about that
in terms of Olympic at all, but that also was
like a part of her work and a part of

(07:10):
the world that she was in. So I'm glad I
finally finally got her off to the top of the
list after probably eight years of people asking. This week,
one of the things that we talked about was John
Dalton and his anomalous vision, which most people would call
color blindness, but it's shifting to the terminology of color

(07:31):
vision deficiency for accuracy's sake. I love this whole thing,
as you obviously could tell um. The whole time I
was researching it, I was giggling at myself because my
beloved and I are both kind of artsy folks. We
get along tremendously well. The biggest arguments we have ever

(07:53):
had in our marriage have been about colors. Yeah, I like,
I mean, just infuriated discussions of color. There is one
pair of pants that, like, thank goodness, it has gone
from our lives that I always said was slate blue
and he always said was black that had just faded.
And we would argue bicker over this stupid pair of

(08:14):
pants and what color it was for a ridiculous amount
of time. Two artsy people arguing about color is no
fun for anybody because they both have incredible conviction in
their beliefs. It's very funny people have such strong connections
to color. I mean I I thought about this with
John Dalton, and it's a question we can never know

(08:36):
because he never really said I were I like, I
did he have a favorite color? I don't know. As
a scientist, he seems to have been, you know, like
he'll talk about which ones are pleasant. But so many
of us get so attached to a color and it
makes me chuckle. I know, your favorite color is blue. Yeah.
I've been playing a lot of animal Crossing and every

(08:58):
time I buy stuff, you know, in the Able Sister store,
it's like the blue one. My entire animal Crossing wardrobe
was just blue blue blue blue blue blue blue. Uh.
And sometimes we'll be like, I'm gonna get the pink
one because my entire wardrobe is blue. UM. I wanted

(09:19):
to know that, Like, there there are a lot of
accessibility issues that are related to color vision, Like there
are websites that are anywhere between ugly and just unusable
depending on how they use color. UM. I have a
friend who he's he's always used the word color blind,
but he has color vision deficiency and is also a

(09:41):
game designer, and we'll talk about how games are sometimes
just not playable at all because they have used colors
to signify different things, Like you just you can't tell
if that card belongs to one group or another because
the colors that were used on it cannot be distinguished

(10:02):
by people with particular color vision deficiencies. It relates to
a lot of stuff besides oh yeah, you know, like
what color you decided to pay your house or whatever?
Right we I think we talked about it in our
episode on UM the invention of traffic lights. There's I

(10:23):
don't remember if it came up any episode or if
it was in a listener mail where there's a kind
of famous one that's inverted where the red, green, and
yellow are flipped opposite of a normal traffic light, and
so for people that maybe have color vision deficiency and
have learned that spatially in order when they're driving, that
completely screws them up. That's uh, don't do that, municipality,

(10:49):
whenever flipped your traffic lights. I think most municipalities know that. Um. Yeah.
It gets to be interesting when I think about, like
I said, in our family, we did not know that
my dad clearly was not seeing color the same way
as the rest of us. And I think we had
a discussion at one point where I was asking him
questions like this about just like basic stuff that we

(11:09):
encounter every day that you're even taught as a child,
like look for this color, it means danger or whatever,
and he was like to him, stop signs. He always
learned by shape and never really thought about what color
they were, which I think is a pretty common thing.
But I do wonder them for children that maybe are
not aware that this is a thing that happens. Is

(11:33):
there just complete puzzlement when they're in classes and they're
being taught things by color as meaning when they're like,
I don't know, it looks exactly like the other thing
next to it, Like I I wonder how many kids
get really confused in those moments. Yeah, so, if any
of our listeners have color vision deficiencies, shoot us an email,
because I want to hear all about it. It's one

(11:54):
of the things that I love about John Dalton's writing
is that he's pretty creatively descriptive about how things look
in a way that people that would not have color
vision deficiency would understand. Like when he says, like, you
know what you point to and say his bottle green
looks exactly the same to me as red. Um and
I can't. I can't tell those two part. It's like, Oh,

(12:14):
that's like a really good, easy visual cue. I think
for people that that have quote unquote normal vision to
understand what's going on a little bit better. It's such
a fascinating thing because so many things happen in your
brain to process the world around you. That even so,
I always have that almost like paranoid concern that we're
all seeing everything slightly differently, even though you can take

(12:37):
tests on online to see if you have any color
vision anomalies or not. Um, Yeah, well, we ever really
know if we're seeing things exactly the same way. I
don't know, So thank you for spending time with us
this week. We hope that you have a wonderful, wonderful weekend.
As always, you can always subscribe to the show in
the heart Radio app, at Apple podcast or wherever it

(12:59):
is you listen. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
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