Who is this woman?
On sources, virality, and nobody having any common sense
I was looking for some information on female inventors, and came upon this page from St Mary’s College in South Australia. It’s about women in STEM, and describes Maria Beasley, who invented collapsible rafts.
This was the photo they use for Beasley.
You’ll see the problem, when I tell you that Beasley was born in 1836 and died in 1913. Judging by the hairstyle and blouse, this picture looks to have been taken in the 1940s. The woman in the photo was NOT born in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The illustration of Beasley elsewhere online is this:
So who is the fetching brunette from the St Mary’s College webpage? I tried a reverse image search, and found more sites identifying her as Beasley.
Also some identifying her as another woman inventor, Margaret E. Knight. In fact the same photo appears in a lot of places as Knight: but it’s not her either!
Margaret E. Knight was the same generation as Beasley, dying in 1914. She invented a machine to produce flat bottomed paper bags. She was also photographed in the early 20th century:
Yet the 1940s doll is everywhere as Knight. In Youtube videos. In illustrations for teaching.
Embarrassingly, even MSNBC included the photo in a brief piece on Knight.
The picture was included (as Knight) in a Ranker list of historical hotties.
That nobody looked at the dates and thought, hold on, that can’t be right is stunning. But it makes sense for a world in which history is all a blur, everything from the time of Christ to the Coolidge administration is just some vague “olden times”. It’s a black and white photo, so it was “in the past”. Any distinction between 1840 and 1940 is flattened.
The mystery of this photo is also very much like a phenomenon in academia, where a scholar (call him scholar A) will have made a claim, many years ago. This claim gets cited, over and over again, through many books and research theses. Over the decades, the citations will be “cited by scholar B [or C, or D]” linking back to a book, each of which cites an earlier citation - none with the original source. The end of the trail leads back to scholar A. Who just stated something and everyone else ran with it.
Someone said this photo was Beasley. And thus the incorrect information spread, like a virus, across the internet. And now it’s obviously been used in classrooms all over the place.
The real woman, the one in the photo, has no identity online - beyond the fictitious role she now plays as “female inventor”. There are worse fates, I suppose, but her life - her real life - has been erased. In order to push girls into STEM, websites are pushing a fiction.
Where else I’ve been lately:
I had two reviews in the Wall Street Journal in recent days.
The fake Beasley sure is glamorous, though, much like pictures of my mom from the late 1940s and early 50s.
Combine the spread of AI with lots of motivated reasoning from every point on the political spectrum, and we’re going to end up with most of history being falsified.
Thanks for tracking this down. Hey, you know, one woman is as good as another, right? This is why I can't abide books without footnotes. I make it a mission to track things down if something seems off, and without footnotes, it is really difficult and sometimes impossible. I am glad I live in a town with a University library, which makes it much easier.