Vulgar History Podcast
Giving Credit to History’s Disregarded Women
June 4, 2025
Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and today I’m so delighted to bring you an interview with author Allison Tyra, who you may know from her podcast, Infinite Women, or also from her website Infinite Women, which is an ever-expanding encyclopedia of women. We talk about this in the episode as well, we talk about her book mostly, but also her project Infinite Women, which is a website that’s bringing together biographical information about thousands of women from history. It’s an ongoing project, and she’s still going on it; it’s got over 6,000 different entries, and you can look up on the website for a specific person to read about them, or you can look up a specific type of person. If you just log on any day, it shows “Here’s what happened in history on this day,” and it’s women from all of history, all the way back to the oldest of old ancient cultures, up to people who are doing stuff these days.
She wrote a book, which is called Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work. This book is available now as a book, also as an audiobook. I know this because in one of our earlier conversations, she was saying that she was hard at work recording the audiobook, it’s like 18 hours long, so she was giving me some advice for if I end up recording my audiobook, how long you can go before your voice completely breaks off.
Anyway, I want to just let everybody know that the women’s history podcasting community is so supportive and so kind. When I started doing this podcast in 2019, part of the reason why it took off and became successful is because of the support of people like Allison Tyra, Katy from the Queens podcast. It’s just such a nice, positive community; there’s no competition, it’s just people, women helping each other out because in the podcast space, there’s a lot of bros, and we are happy to see each other succeed. And I’m so happy that Allison has this book out, and I was so happy to talk to her, so please enjoy this conversation between myself and Allison Tyra, author of Uncredited.
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Ann: I’m joined by Allison Tyra from the Infinite Women podcast and the new book. Wait, I don’t even have the book in front of me. Tell everybody the name of your book, please, Allison.
Allison: But I don’t have it in front of me either. [Ann chuckles] It’s called Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Ann: I love that you knew that right off. Like, the title, subtitle, yes.
Allison: I pulled it up. [laughs]
Ann: That’s relieving for me because I, too, have a book coming out, and I’m always like, will I remember the title? Will I remember the subtitle?
Allison: Well, it’s the subtitle.
Ann: The subtitle, exactly. And I assume that you’ve gone through different titles and subtitles, so which one stuck?
Allison: Well, originally, it was going to be To Her Credit, but then a few months after I signed the contract—which keep in mind was two years ago, because that’s how long it took to get it out on the shelves—another book came out with the same title and a similar theme. So, it wasn’t an in-depth analysis; it was, I think, maybe two dozen stories, like you would find in my book, except my book has over 600 stories. So, it was still very different in format, but because it was on the same general topic and it would have come out within recent times when this book came out, they wanted us to change the title.
I think my editor was more cranky about it than I was. I was like, look, I’m just glad that it’s not… So, my first offer from a publisher that I had sent it to was a military history one that also does a bit of women’s history. Their managing editor, I assume, is a middle-aged to older white man whose main interest is military history, and he really wanted to change the title from, like I said, at the time it was To Her Credit, he wanted to change it to Women’s Hidden Achievements. And literally every woman I said that title to got the same like, “Eughhh!” look on their face. And I was like, “Would you pick up that book?” And they said no.
Ann: No, no. That sounds like a text… You know what? That would have been a good textbook to encounter in 1991. [Allison laughs] But I feel like if I was researching for my podcast, I’d be like, “Oh, there’s something about this person in Women’s Hidden Achievements, a textbook from 1989.” And then I’d be like, “Oh. Okay, I got some facts, but like, whatever.” But yeah, I’ve learned it’s important to have a title that is distinct; you don’t want people to confuse it with another book, especially if it’s the same topic. But I want to take a step back, just for people who may not be familiar with the Infinite Women project, because the book kind of grew out of that. So, can you explain like your website and everything you’re doing?
Allison: Sure. So, you mentioned the podcast, which you are actually on. If anybody wants to keep an eye out for the Princess Charlotte episode, it’s an hour and 42 minutes long. [laughs]
Ann: And that’s shorter than what we recorded.
Allison: Very much so, yes. So, in addition to the weekly podcast, which I’ve been doing since 2023, you know, there’s well over 100 episodes, and I’ve already got them scheduled into late February, so please do go check them out. I will talk about anything except cisgender dudes, pretty much is my only caveat. So, I talk to a lot of really interesting people about whatever they’re obsessed with. Case and point: Ann and Princess Charlotte.
But the original project and the main function of it, I would say, is the biographical database. So, at the time that we’re recording, it’s at just over 6,700 biographies, and I’m always adding to it. And it is not limited by geography, by time period, by field. So, as far as I know, it’s the only resource out there of this size that has such a broad range of women. Usually, you see, like, “Irish women” or, you know, “Women in Science” or whatever. This is the only one I’ve found that is more comprehensive. And the thing is, despite that huge range of women, I kept seeing the same stories over and over and over again.
One that I like to mention is being kept out of med school isn’t just something that was happening in the 1870s to the Edinburgh Seven; it’s also happening as recently as 2018, because a lot of the examples in this book are even into the 2020s. But in 2018, it came out that at least 10 medical schools in Japan were deliberately downgrading female applicants’ test scores to justify rejecting them, and at the time, less than 22% of doctors in Japan were women. So, that’s a thing that you’ll read about. You know, artists and businesswomen and inventors and activists and athletes and see how these patterns are playing out, not just in a given situation, because I think that’s what happens when we tell these stories in isolation, which is very important. Like, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the scholars, like you, who will go incredibly in-depth on a particular woman’s stories and, you know, who may be digging through all of those dusty boxes full of old documents that haven’t gotten digitized yet, because my work would not be possible without that in-depth work. But when we tell those stories in isolation, I think it’s much easier for people to think, “Oh well, that sucks for them.”
Ann: That happened one time to this one person, and that was too bad.
Allison: Exactly. Like, when you’re looking that closely at one tree, you don’t get what I’m bringing, which is, like, drone footage of the whole forest.
Ann: I have your website up and was just… It’s so well designed, listeners, you should go. So, it’s Infinite-Women.com. So, you’ve got like “This day in history,” like things that are happening today that you’ve got, sort of like, ‘Pick a random woman’ button to just like, here’s somebody’s interesting story. You can also browse, you can also just type the name of someone you’re looking for. Like, it’s such a good resource.
How do you get the biographies of all the people? And then how do you… So, I guess you’re just putting them in there. My question is, how do you get the biographies and then once you have them, you’re codifying like, this is the date, so you know, that can link to that stuff and things like that?
Allison: So, the widget that is the, you know, “Today in women’s history,” you just plug all those in as separate entries. And so, I actually have a separate document that I keep track of because I love a spreadsheet, and it’s literally just, anytime I come across a date, I pop it in there. And then when I have the time, which is never, but I think I had at least four or five events for every day, and I was like, “Okay, that’s good for now. Maybe I’ll come back and do more later.”
But there’s also a function that I want to add called “World of Women.” So, it’s not live yet, but I have another spreadsheet with all of these places that women lived, or did work, or are buried, that, you know, I want to, maybe it’s just going to be like a giant Google Map essentially… But yeah, I just think that there’s something about those little connections to history, whether it’s you were standing someplace that this person was doing something or just something about the dates, like knowing that today something happened. I think that helps people connect to history.
Ann: I don’t know if all historians have the same experience I do, but my birthday, April 5th, keeps coming up in so many stories I read. I was just like, “Oh, this was the day that this person got one on the train to here. This is the day that this person was arrested.” I’m just like April 5th, it’s like a cosmic, magical date. But I feel like if that’s your birthday, if whatever anyone’s birthday is, I think if you read as much as I do, you keep coming up on any date. But I’m just like, April 5th, April 5th. So, I feel like, yeah, I like tracking the significance of dates and all the different things that might have happened.
Allison: Well, I can send you a list later of all the things that happened on April 5th in women’s history. Maybe not all of them, but a lot of them.
Ann: I was low-key hoping you would offer that, [Allison laughs] and if you have some missing, I can fill you in.
Allison: Please do.
Ann: So, the entries. You’re pulling these from Library of Congress records? Where are you getting them?
Allison: Yes. So, some things are available for different reasons. So, the Library of Congress and the National Park Service had a bunch, I don’t know because the Trump administration has had so many diversity things taken down. But thank god for the Wayback Machine, which is an incredible archive. If anyone’s not familiar, you can plug in a link, and it’ll show you what has been there in the past to basically take snapshots. I’ve had to use that because some of these pages have been taken down.
But with the US government, there is a law that says any work product essentially of a federal government employee is automatically public domain. So, anything that, like, a National Park Service staff member writes for the National Park Service website, that’s public domain. And unless I’ve seriously misunderstood copyright law, I can share anything from the Library of Congress, the National Park Service, the National Archives. So, that’s great.
There’s also some sites like The Conversation, which is another great resource. It’s essentially like mainstream journalism, but it’s written by academics but it’s written for a mainstream audience. So, they’ll take a current events issue and give you all of this context that they know because they have a PhD in the topic. So, I absolutely love that. They make their stuff freely republishable under Creative Commons licenses. And so, a lot of them are like, as long as you’re not doing this for a commercial purpose, then you can share it. Others, I have explicitly asked for permission. So, like, the National Women’s History Museum is fabulous, I love their bios. And you know, they gave me permission several years ago to share theirs. So, there are a couple, like if it’s not attributed, then I wrote it, but almost all of them, like the vast majority, are from other sources because I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. I would rather spend the same amount of time importing 20 bios that someone else has written and then writing, like, one or two myself.
Ann: I was just going to say, because you’ve got, what did you say? Like, 6,700?
Allison: 6,700 as of when we’re recording this, so when it comes out, it’s definitely going to be more than that.
Ann: Right, right. So, as you described, you’re finding these sources, putting them all in one place so that people like me who are researching somebody for their podcast, I can just kind of like… Well, and this is something you talk about in your book, which is the Wikipedia problem. We have a chapter called “Wikipedia’s Gender Bias,” and I have encountered this so many times. Just when I come across the name of a woman or somebody suggests it, like, my first go-to is often Wikipedia, just to be like, is there a story here? Like, is there, you know, I’m always excited when there’s a heading that’s just like “Scandal and murder trial,” I’m like, “Oh, this is going to be a good story because I see that subheading,” [laughs] or like “Mysterious disappearance,” I’m like, okay, that’s good. But so many people are just the smallest little thumbnail paragraph. I mean, your resource is such a good— I’m going to pivot, I’m going to pivot. This is where I’m going to look first now. So, thank you.
Allison: Well, and it’s also, I think, very helpful that if I come across other links, so if I have a Smithsonian Magazine article that I find about that person, like I do always try to link to Wikipedia pages and I think it’s very telling how many pages I have that there is not a Wikipedia link for, because I will always have checked if there are any other resources I can tell you about. But, you know, The Conversation, like I mentioned, even if the bio isn’t from there, I might have a link to an article that someone’s written. So, I do try to share other resources for more information if I have them.
Ann: Yeah. What I find helpful, I mean, you have this on your site as you were just describing, but also sometimes the Wikipedia has got the shortest possible thing, but at the bottom it’s like, “Here’s the resources.” It’s like, great. Let me try to find that resource. Does the university library have that? Like, is it on Internet Archive? Like, can I find this obscure French language document from 1952 or not?
It’s interesting because I do find… I work at the public library, but I also am a big library user, and there’s an old-ish yet still useful multivolume resource that I use. It’s called either the dictionary or the Encyclopedia of Women in World History. And so, my go-to is often— Because these are really good essays in there, they’re written by scholars on a specific thing, and they have a point of view, and they give their references at the bottom. But when I’m like, okay, if there’s an essay there, that’s always my first stop. But then I’m like, “[groans] They’re not in there. Okay.” So, then it’s like, “Are they on Wikipedia? [groans again] They’re not.” I’m like, “Oh, but it’s a cool story, I need to find it!” So, just having them all in one place, like what you’re doing, is so useful for people, and everybody should know about it. So, that’s why I wanted to make sure that everybody understands that before we even talk about your book.
But you were saying how, looking at all these stories as you’re putting together this website, but also for your podcast, you’re noticing these themes. And so, could you describe how the book— Actually, describe how you decided to arrange the book by the themes that it’s arranged by?
Allison: Sure. So, my first step was I started just making notes. So, every time I would kind of come across one of these stories, make a note, make a note, make a note. And when you have like 600 notes, you should probably write a book. But yeah, so I first was actually looking at a much broader topic, just generally about women’s work, I hadn’t really focused in on what I was going to do yet, and that huge topic was just going to be way too much for one book. And so, I was like, “Okay, what can I pull out of that?” So, rather than looking at things that were, like, interfering with women doing the work, I was like, “Okay, let’s focus on women have done the work, but for whatever reason, they’re not getting the credit they deserve.”
So, broadly speaking, there are several categories; we start with documentation and gatekeeping. And I described documentation as, like, a multi-tiered sieve where, each level, we are losing women’s stories until all you’re left with is that little trickle. And so, the holes, if you will, are often around privilege, right? So, who is literate? Who considers themselves worth talking about? Who does someone else consider worth talking about? Whether that’s a journalist or maybe somebody who would be mentioned in other people’s letters? And then, who has the time and energy and money to buy the supplies, right? Who has the privilege to document their life? And then, even if that documentation existed at some point, what is considered worth saving and who makes those decisions, right? Is it a relative who decides to just check your stuff in the trash?
Ann: There’s so many examples of diaries where somebody dies and then their family just burns the diaries. I’m so mad every time I come across that, I’m just like, “Argh! I would have loved to read the diaries!” But yeah, I think people are just like, “This isn’t worthwhile.”
Allison: Well, the diary of Anne Lister is actually a great example. So, she died in, I want to say around 1840. But around 50 years later, her, I’m going to say great-nephew, that’s probably an imprecise description of their relationship, but let’s call him a great-nephew, he and his buddy around 1890 discover these diaries that have been hidden in the walls of the family home and it’s in code, but there’s a key and they’re able to decode it. And they read all of this stuff about how she’s running around seducing all of her neighbours’ wives and stuff. And the buddy, according to his own account, is like, ”Yeah, I told him to burn them,” but he didn’t. And I believe there’s a theory that the great-nephew himself was also a queer man and so that may have had something to do with it.
So, they hide it back in the wall, and then another 50 years goes by, so it’s now, like, 1932, I want to say, and the great-nephew has died the year before, presumably other relatives have come into the house. They re-rediscover it, and the buddy is still kicking around. He’s like, “Oh, I know the code!” And this is also when he’s like, “I mean, I told him to burn them. I told him they’d be awful for the family reputation.” So, it hasn’t been destroyed, and it does end up in an archive, but nobody’s writing about it, right? Nobody wants to tie their reputation as an academic to this 1800s lesbian.
Ann: Lesbian sex diary in code, yes.
Allison: So, it’s not until, again, another 50 years goes by, so it’s 1988, I want to say, that an academic actually publishes, like actually makes public, “Hey, this diary is queer as hell and it’s from, you know, almost 150 years ago,” well, probably more than 150 years ago, because they spanned like so much of her life. And then, it wasn’t until, I want to say 2017, that we got the book, Gentleman Jack, and then 2019 that we got the series.
So, if you look at each of those steps, that’s a pretty good encapsulation of, she was incredibly privileged, right? Like, the fact that she felt safe enough, even in code, to have all this written out, that is a sign that she was incredibly… She was wealthy, she was well-connected, she had the privilege to do this in the first place. And then a relative chose not to destroy it, and then it did make it into an archive. It’s relatively safe there, but nobody’s talking about it, it’s not being indexed, looked at by academics. Obviously, this is well before digitization. And then, okay, finally, the academics talk about it. And then eventually, eventually, it comes to public attention.
Ann: I do want to just mention, we’re talking about your book, but my book, available now for pre-order at RebelOfTheRegency.com, does use Anne Lister as a source. I do quote from her diaries because she did write twice about Caroline of Brunswick. And thank you to all those generations of people that made me able to have two quotes in my book from her.
Allison: [laughs] And so, after Documentation and Gatekeepers, because gatekeepers are the ones making these decisions at every step, right? Then you have credit outright being stolen and contributions being ignored. So, these are two, I wanted to take those apart because credit being outright stolen is really overt, but there’s also a lot of, like, more subtle but still incredibly harmful things. So, treating a woman as though she’s just the assistant to particularly her husband.
They actually did this to Marie Curie. People might say like, “Oh, why is like the only woman scientist that a lot of people can probably name,” at least Westerners, “Why would she be in your book?” I mean, she’s the first woman to win a Nobel. Because she almost wasn’t. The 1903 Nobel Committee was only going to recognize Pierre, her husband, and another prominent male scientist heard about this, and he goes to Pierre and he warns him. And Pierre and a third prominent male scientist, they go to the Nobel Committee, and they fight for her. They say like, “No, you have to give this to her as well. She is at least as deserving as Pierre.” And so, the Nobel Committee gives in, but it took three prominent men fighting for her, caring enough to go to bat for her. And so, I love that example, because it is one of several male ally stories in the book, because I did want to shout out the good men. I told my husband I want to write a book about the good men, and he said, “So, a pamphlet?”
Ann: [laughs] I would agree. Yeah.
Allison: Yeah. They are definitely the minority, but I do want to give credit where credit is due. And also point out that, you know, a lot of times there is only so much women have the power to do. It’s one reason that I get really annoyed at books that basically tell you how you’re letting yourself down and how you could succeed in the workplace if only you do these things, and it really puts the responsibility… It’s framed as empowerment, but when it comes down to it, there’s only so much power that women have in a lot of these situations. And so, if Marie had gone by herself and tried to fight for herself, I highly doubt she would have been successful through no fault of her own. The simple fact is that male allyship is incredibly important in a lot of these stories. Even if it’s not the key pivot point that, we wouldn’t have this story if it wasn’t for these men, it’s still important. And I think girls need to understand that as well.
Ann: I think what’s also really… what I keep coming across in my research, but also this is in your book too, is the concept of—and this is where I think a book like this is so valuable—is that women often won’t think that something is even an option for them because you don’t know that a woman did this before. And the reason you don’t know a woman did this before is because of what you were saying, it’s like, there wasn’t a record kept of it, or nobody explained that, like, oh, actually she did all the work, but the man’s name was published in it. So, I think it’s just so important to where we do know about women who did stuff to kind of elevate those and raise those so people can see like, “Oh, I’m not the first one to do this. Like, there’s somebody who could be my role model. There’s somebody who did this a hundred years ago or five years ago or something.” And I think that sort of record is so valuable.
Allison: When we say representation matters, it’s not just, you know, a catchphrase, like, you can’t be what you can’t see. It’s important to understand that women have been written out of these things. Like women in Hollywood, women in computer science, they were there from the very beginning. Like computer science, the first programmer before computers even existed was Ada Lovelace. The people who made the first computer work, the ENIAC programmers, were women. You know, women literally founded this discipline. And the fact that we now see a minority of women in this field is man-made, quite literally.
Ann: Yeah. And that’s so interesting too. Computers is such a good example of this. It’s just kind of like, it was considered… Well, I’m just thinking about like the movie Hidden Figures. Like, a computer was a person, and it was sort of considered… It wasn’t necessarily a gendered thing until it became a gendered thing. Like, where I work at the public library here in Saskatoon, I’ve heard tell, there was a woman who retired shortly after I started working, but one of her first jobs was working in the computer room, like, where it was a room full of these machines and she was who was hired to do it because it was like, yeah, let’s get this young woman to do it. Because it was sort of equated to being equivalent to other female-coded jobs, like secretarial work or something. And now the IT department is entirely men because that’s who tends to enter and be successful at that career.
Allison: There’s also a really interesting pattern that I’ve noticed. I don’t think I mentioned it in the book, but one of the things that you find is that women often get put into tedious roles. And so, things like the Harvard College Observatory astronomers, who were women, I mean, there were men doing other jobs, but the women actually analyzing the photographs. A lot of times it’s because this is boring, it is minutia, it is detail-oriented. And there’s this argument that, like, “Oh, women are just better at tedious work,” which is incredibly insulting. But also, anyone who does science knows that a lot of times, the tedious work is where the discoveries happen. So, someone like Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who’s in the book, they are making those discoveries because they’re doing the tedious work.
You can make the same argument about this book, in fact, because I love my website, I’m very proud of it, but it is very tedious. It is very repetitive adding all of these biographies to the site. It’s very time-consuming, and it’s also why I saw these patterns. It’s why I have this book written is because— It’s why I wrote this book, because I was able to see those patterns from doing the tedious parts. And so, it’s actually really funny that this sexism is what is leading to these discoveries.
Ann: You also talk in your book about something that has come up a few times, actually pretty recently on my podcast, and it makes me so angry, which is when somebody’s grave has their husband’s name, Mrs. Husband’s name.
Allison: Mrs. Nameless, yeah.
Ann: Yeah. Yeah, it just makes me when someone is remembered as not who they were, but it’s like, “Here lies Mrs. (Husband’s name), Mother of (son’s name).” And it’s just like, oh, so that’s like, the whole identity of this person.
Allison: Yeah, and I’m guessing not even mother of daughter’s names.
Ann: No, I’m sure not. Yeah.
Allison: My favourite example of Mrs. Nameless is there was a woman who collected, I want to say, botanical samples. So, these were kept in the Smithsonian archives. And when they were entered, they were listed as Mrs. Husband’s name. And at some point, when they were upgrading their digital system, any honourifics, so Mr. and Mrs. were removed. And so, suddenly, Mrs. Husband’s name became just Husband’s name. And so, all of these samples were now credited to him, except he’d been dead for years.
Ann: It’s a thing that it just feels like the final, you know, when I finish— Because my podcast, I always do like life to death of a person. And when there’s what I consider, like, a good memorial or even just a gravestone, I’m just like, “Yes, amazing. Love it.” But so often it’s just like, Augh! Hate it. Either there’s no grave or it’s just like Mrs. Husband’s name. And I’m just like, [groans] no, that’s not… It makes me mad.
But you also talk in your book about male pseudonyms. Can you talk about that?
Allison: Sure. So, one of the interesting things is I do connect that, again, to how things are still happening, like, in recent years. And so, there are stories about, obviously, like the standard one. So, like, Andre Norton was actually Mary Alice Norton, and to get published in a sci-fi space, she’s going by a male pseudonym, but that also reinforces the reason that she needed the pseudonym, right? Like, she is reinforcing that perception of sci-fi is a male space. And I don’t mean to criticize her for that, because so often it’s just we’re doing what we need to do to get our work out there. But you can see how it is self-perpetuating patterns.
More recently, there was a story where an author was talking about, she sent out her query to however many agents, let’s say 20 agents, under her name, and then she got basically no response. So, she sent it out to the same number of agents under a male name, and I think she phrases it as, like, “He was 60% more competent at writing the same book as I was,” just changing the name. Or there was a, I want to say she was a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt, who was significantly more successful— So, she did one round of grant applications under her name and again, got basically no support. And then she convinced the university in their system to change it to just her initials, and she was much more successful. But then the system, like, reset itself or something. And suddenly, without her knowledge, it was her full name again, and again, miraculously, she was unsuccessful again. And so, she phrases it as like, you know, “This experiment has a limited sample size, but it’s not one that I care to repeat.”
Ann: Well, and then now we’re seeing stuff like with AI and hiring practices and stuff, like, the systems look at, well, here’s historically who are the successful candidates, and it’s duplicating that. And again, it’s looking at things like, well, not just gendered names, but also is it like is it a name that reflects that they’re maybe from a different background, that they’re probably not a white person? So, it’s like the way that people’s… Like, sometimes they are aware of this bias they have, and sometimes you’re not aware of the bias that you have. And then these systems are just kind of adopting that being like, “Well, this is what people do, so we’ll do this, too.”
That’s a problem that I see really not much different now than it has been in terms of just female names and how pseudonyms are more effective, like even in workplaces where there’s things like people are answering an email and it just depends, like, which name do you sign off with can affect how the person who responding to the email— You know, if you have a group organizational email, like whatever name you say, and then if it’s a name where it’s kind of like, is this a man or a woman’s name like Erin. It’s interesting to see how people respond. And by interesting, I mean depressing and just, like, kill me.
Allison: Yeah, and I did write this two years ago, so AI was not even as much of an issue then as it is now. But the issues are still happening, right? It’s still the same issues. And so, fundamentally, I would say it comes down to “Trash in, trash out,” is a term you’ll hear in data science. And it’s basically if you’re not using an accurate or a good, whatever that means, data set, then your results are going to be messed up. In AI, that means that because it’s learning on existing data.
So, a company like Amazon, it can upload, you know, all of these resumes of people who did get hired. But if the people who got hired were what I call “chawms,” so cisgender, heterosexual, abled, white men, that is what the system is learning Amazon wants, because if we’re being honest, it is. If you were being honest about your biases, that’s who you’ve been hiring. And it replicates those biases, but it gives people this veneer of lack of accountability, right? Because they can blame the AI. There’s not a human person actively making that decision. And so, you hear stories about, you know, it downgraded resumes that mention the word “woman.” So like, you know, women’s rowing team, right? Or women-only universities, because it’ll look at its data set and say, “Oh, we don’t hire people from that college.”
Ann: And this is where, like, your book goes through all different time periods. You’re talking about more recent people. You’re talking about, like, people from ancient times. And that’s where you were saying, like, you’ve got this overhead view. You’re just like, oh, this is the same theme. Like, this happened in 1820, and this happened to someone very similarly in 1640, and also in 1992. Like, you’re really… So, arranging it by themes rather than by chronological order.
This is where I would say this is a book, I think you say this in your introduction, probably most people are going to sit down and read it front to back. That’s like, too much facts. I think it’s like a nice I think would be a good book to have, like, on your bedside stand to say, “Oh, let’s just read like a bit and think about it.” Something like that.
Allison: I wouldn’t read it before bed. You will not sleep well.
Ann: You’ll be mad. You’re right. Put it in your bathroom. Although you might end up lingering in your bathroom. I don’t know. Maybe you want to.
Allison: Well, it is going to shit you. So, that works.
Ann: But I do think it’s a book, like, there’s so much information in each chapter that in order to really absorb it all, you need to kind of put it down, come back to it. But then you say in your introduction, I think, that your dream is that somebody will read this and be interested and then pursue to read more about one of these people, which I think that’s what it’s really good for as well. Like, it’s sort of introducing so many people in context that if someone finds a special interest in one of these people, you know, put the book down, put in your bookmark, and then just go find a biography of that person.
Allison: Yeah, I think I phrase it as like, “Feel free to stop reading this, but please come back.” [laughs]
Ann: Yeah. So, when you were first putting this book together, whichever title it was under at that time, like, there’s so many people in this book, how did you decide how many people it was going to be?
Allison: I just kept adding until my editor made me stop. So, that was, I think, maybe eight months before publication. She said, “Okay, it’s a static medium. You need to stop.” [laughs]
Ann: “It’s not a website, Allison.”
Allison: But since then, I have kept taking notes. So, I’ve got like 10 pages just since then, less than a year later, I’ve got 10 pages or so of notes that I could add. So, maybe they’ll let me do, like, a 10th anniversary expanded edition or something.
Ann: Bonus chapters. Yes, yes!
Allison: Well, but it’ll still all be the same themes. Like, that’s the thing with women’s history, and in fact, the name of the project, Infinite Women, comes from the fact that I kept seeing listicles where it’s, you know, “Five women artists you’ve never heard of “or it might be a book that has, like that one that I mentioned that’s called To Her Credit, they stole my title. How dare they? But, you know, that has, I think, two dozen. And those are great as a starting point, but I think it does sort of reinforce this idea of, you know, you’ll see “the only woman in the room” stories, And I think that framing it as “Here’s a handful… Maybe it’s a big handful, but it’s still just a handful,” creates this idea that that’s all there is.
Ann: Yeah, there only ever was five women artists, and here they are. I find that when… I’m very fortunate now that just from listener suggestions and other things, like, I have a really long list of people to profile on my podcast, eventually. But sometimes when I was like, “Oh, just what are some ideas?” And you look up like, “Women from history,” and it’s like the same people every time. And it’s always like Joan of Arc, Queen Victoria, like Cleopatra. I’m like, “Yeah, I’m aware. Thank you, the Internet.” Like, it’s just regurgitating the same names. And I would feel like it’s probably the same thing for “Here’s these five women artists.” All the articles would be like, it’s the same five, because when you don’t dig deeper, those are the names that just keep coming up, so it just keeps perpetuating itself.
Allison: Well, it’s also how we tell those stories. So, you mentioned, you know, Cleopatra and this image of her as, like, a seductress rather than, you know, a brilliant ruler who, you know, was incredibly well-educated, spoke all these languages. Instead, we just tell her story as a seductress because that’s the version of events that the Romans were telling, and that’s whose documentation survived. There’s so many stories like that. I know when I was a kid, I had one of those books about like “Women who Ruled” that’s made for, you know, like 10-year-olds. And it was a good book, like, I liked it. And as an adult, I’m like, wait, Indira Gandhi was a nepo baby and a dictator. Right? They’re not telling you the full story because they want to focus on, like, “Oh! Here’s the first woman to be prime minister of India,” and they want you to be inspired by that, but not telling you the full story.
Like, I have an episode where we talked about the diary of Anne Frank, which is also in the book, about the censorship that’s happened. And each layer of censorship that’s removed, the more complete picture we get of a real teenage girl, as opposed to this idealized version that her presumably grieving father wanted put out into the world. He didn’t want the world to know that she talked about, like, sex and masturbation and touching breasts, and she talked about prostitution, like, not from personal experience, but just, you know, this was a thing that she was aware of. He didn’t want them to know that she fought with her mom. You know, she’s a teenage girl, of course she fought with her mom. But the person I was talking to, who was Dutch, was saying that reading the sanitized version has a teenage girl herself, like you don’t really connect with it because it doesn’t… It’s not authentic. Not just it doesn’t feel authentic, it isn’t.
Ann: Well, that’s an interesting thing, too, getting back to Anne Lister and stuff, like these are people who were writing a diary for themselves. So, eventually, to publish it, it’s like… Yeah, this was never meant for public consumption, so I can understand that it’s like, “Well, let’s just kind of finagle this a bit.” But then, as historians, you want to read the original diary, you want to get those, like, weird tangents and things like that.
Allison: Yeah, on our conversation on Infinite Women about Princess Charlotte, you were telling me how amazing it is that we have all of these letters that she wrote to her bestie that the bestie was supposed to destroy and didn’t, and thank god she didn’t! But, you know, we talked about how you really get such a sense of her personality because it was something that was meant to be private.
Ann: Yeah, it’s interesting how… So, you know, this gets back to what you’re saying before about your book, it’s just kind of, like, whose diaries are deemed as important enough to put in an archive, or to digitize, or things like that? And then just in terms of the only thing that I’m capable of talking about, Caroline of Brunswick, when she knew she was dying, the doctors were like, “Well, you’re dying so if you want to destroy your papers, you should do that now,” and then she did. And I’m just like, I would murder 25 people to be able to read Caroline of Brunswick’s papers.
Allison: Like, a specific 25 people or just 25 random strangers?
Ann: No, I think 25 is a number I just want… I didn’t want to say, “I would kill…” Nnhh, I would kill 25 specific people, but whose names I won’t reveal.
Allison: I think we would all kill 25 specific people if we could get away with it, but that’s a separate conversation.
Ann: Absolutely, so that’s not really a sacrifice for me. But anyway, what I mean to say is just like it devastates me the same way that Mary Shelley lost her papers in a hotel in France or whatever. It’s just like, I would love to read these actual diaries. So, it’s just, like, the ones that we still have, I’m grateful for, and I just mourn the ones that were destroyed or edited by family members, and you could never read what they secretly said.
Allison: Yeah. It’s also the biases that the editors have. So, if I’m recalling correctly, Emily Dickinson’s work, like, her trunk full of poetry that was not published during her lifetime, was left in the control of, I believe there was a fight between her brother’s wife, who she also had a sapphic relationship with, and then her brother’s mistress. So, they’re fighting over the papers, the mistress wins, and the edits she makes are just, I would say, atrocious. I’m not a poetry aficionado, but one of the things that she did was make it a lot less queer because Emily was writing, essentially love poetry to her sister-in-law. But we also get the work of Sappho. When you see the translations and the spins that they put on these things, like, deliberately changing the genders and stuff, it’s just so blatant, but then there’s also… There’s so many stories when it comes to censorship. But it’s not just queer women, right?
My biggest bugbear on this front is actually Sojourner Truth and what we call the “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, because Truth was from New York, she was born enslaved in New York. There is no indication that she spoke with this, like, Southern slave patois, right? Her first language was Dutch. So, we have two versions— And again, this is how important documentation is. We are so lucky that we have the original version, which I believe was published in a newspaper, like, the same week she gave the speech. Oh sorry, for anyone who’s not familiar, Sojourner Truth was an abolitionist and a women’s rights activist, and the premise of this speech was essentially talking about how, like, “You say that women are so delicate and need to be taken care of and dah-dah-dah, you know, am I not a woman?” That’s essentially the gist of the speech. So, we have the version that, my understanding is, she was friends with the editor of this newspaper, so she presumably signed off on it, it was published the same week that she gave the speech. Then there’s the Frances Dana Barker Gage version. And you know, any white woman with that many names is not going to be an ally.
Ann: [laughs] Yeah.
Allison: I feel confident in saying that. 12 years after the fact, Frances Dana Barker Gage publishes her, I want to say translation, and she’s changed both the content of the speech, like, putting words in her mouth, saying things that are not in the original version, but also putting this, like I said, Southern slave patois, and that’s where we get the phrase, “Ain’t I a woman?” She almost certainly never said that phrase, and yet the Frances Dana Barker Gage version is that she created, for her own reasons… I’m not saying she was malicious. She was probably doing this because, to her white lady ears, that is what a formerly enslaved person sounds like, and maybe she thought that this version would be more accessible to white people who were on the fence. I don’t know what was in her head, bless her heart. [chuckles] But because we have both sets, you can see the changes that you make; you can compare them side by side, (online, there’s a website, google it). [laughs] But if we didn’t have that original version, we might have just accepted that this is actually what Sojourner Truth said, and it’s so blatantly not.
Ann: And that sort of thing, it’s so… Again, it comes up, the themes that are in your book, I was just like, “Mm-hm! Mm-hm!” It’s just, like, things that I’ve sort of half aware, noticing just in the various stories that I’m reading, and so much of it… Just to go back to what we know about Cleopatra is because that’s what the Romans wrote about it. Like, every time I kind of come across a story that I feel like I know, and then it turns out it’s either the Romans, and everyone just kind of believed that for, like, up until now. Or sometimes it’s the Victorians and how they presented something.
Oh, I’ll just tell everybody this tidbit, which is that when Queen Victoria became Queen, England was not super into monarchy at the time because it had been a series of messy kings, and Caroline of Brunswick had been around. So, Victoria was like, “I want to just make everything be, like, everyone should respect the monarchy. I’m going to be such a trad wife queen.” But people were like, “Do we want to have like a woman queen?” This is kind of like, “Eugh! Women in charge.” And she’s like, “Well, there was one woman in charge who did pretty well, and that was Elizabeth I.” So, she brought in this era of, like, memorializing the Tudors and making them such a big deal, which they weren’t until that point. And you see that still today! Like Six, the musical, or whatever, or it was just as we’re recording this, it was the anniversary of Anne Boleyn’s execution, and I saw a picture of how many people brought bouquets to her. The Tudors are so well known above and beyond almost anything else from English history, and it’s because… I was like, “Well, I guess they just always were more popular. “It’s like, no, it’s because Victoria was like, “Here’s a successful queen. Wasn’t she great? She was so great. And I will also be great,” and that’s kind of where that came from.
The other time period where I see a lot of common perceptions of historical figures come from is America in the 1950s, glamorizing specific things from the past and pretending… America in the 1950s was a specific time, it was like post-World War II, like, the economy is doing pretty good, suburbs are being invented, and this is a time where it’s like they wanted to connect themselves back to the Victorian age and be like traditional family structure. It’s like, but the Victorians weren’t even like that. So, it’s just like people from time periods reimagining other time periods. And now we’re in 2025, and people believe that misinterpretation.
So, when I peel back those layers to be like, [gasps] Like, it was just explained to me, listeners will hear this in a bit, I have an episode coming out— I think it’s for sure coming out after this, where we’re talking a bit about the American Revolution era and the Founding Fathers. And I learned in that episode that the whole premise of the Founding Fathers of America, you know, George Washington, et cetera, they’re these infallible, perfect, saintly, like, brought directly from God, everything they said was so incredible, like WW Founding Fathers Do? And it’s like, that was kind of popularized in the 1950s also. It’s not like that was not the perception of the founding fathers from 1776 through until now. It’s like, no, in the ‘50s, because there was this American nationalist movement, and like, that all connects. So, I’m like, man! And people now are like, “Let’s make it like it was in the past!” And it’s like, that’s literally one decade. Like, you just want to bring back this one decade where there’s some really good propaganda and the baby boomers all went to school.
That’s where so much of this stuff was perpetuated, and then people get—sorry, this is my bugaboo, I guess—and then people get mad, where you’re like, “Why are you making history woke? Or like, why are you saying that the Founding Fathers were perfect people?” It’s like, because people never thought that until this one 10-year period, like, we’re actually correcting the record. We’re not changing it. And I feel like that’s what your book is doing too. Like, you’re going back and correcting what people might have thought about these women or about these situations rather than… I don’t know if that helps people not get their back up about it as much, where it’s like, “No, I’m not changing. We’re restoring what actually was true in the first place.”
Allison: So, one of the projects that I want to do is about how discomfort is basically the root of most of our problems as humans, and our refusal to deal with things that make us uncomfortable, and our refusal to examine our own discomfort. But I think how that applies here is people want to believe they know history, they want to believe that their knowledge is reliable. A lot of times, you know, they may have founded part of their identity on this. So, the fact that if you’re a white guy and pretty much all the history you’ve been taught is white guys did everything and sometimes women or people of colour were there, then that really strongly reinforces your sense of, like, white male entitlement. So, anyone who comes along and challenges that, not just in the sense of, if this thing that you believe is true is wrong, then what else do you think you know may be wrong? That’s a very uncomfortable feeling. If you were in the chawm, the chawminant party, that is very uncomfortable, and we don’t like having our beliefs challenged.
Obviously, that applies to religion and everything, but I think it also applies to our worldview more broadly, and our understanding of history, particularly something that we were told as children, right? So, you’ve carried this with you, like I said, maybe it helped shape your identity and your perception of yourself and the world around you. That’s part of your worldview. And some people react very negatively when you tell them something that changes that. And if you are a woman or a person of colour, seeing that representation is very empowering, but there is a certain type of chawm who feels disempowered. It’s the, if you think there should only be men in the room, even one woman seems like too many.
There’s a study that I cite in the book from Dale Spender here in Australia, and it’s in the section about “You Talk Too Much.” She did an analysis of university classroom conversations where she would record the conversation and then basically ask everyone, “Who do you think talked more, the boys or the girls?” And the men felt that the women were speaking an equal amount of time at, I believe it was 15%. So, a 15 to 85% ratio was what they perceived as balanced. They perceived the women as dominating the conversation at 30 to 70. So, the women were still speaking less than a third of the time, but again, if your perception of balanced is basically no women or very little women—which sounds like I’m talking about people of short stature [chuckles]—or very few women, then equality feels like an attack. It feels like you were being disempowered.
Ann: Well, and that’s what you see too lately with things like the main characters in a Star Wars or a Marvel film or something, where they’re just like, “Where’s all the men?” It’s like, okay, if you look at the cast announcement that they just came out of like, whatever this new like Avengers 1,000 people are in it movie, that thing that they did with the chairs… I forget what the proportions are. But it’s like, okay, they announced there’s this new Avengers movie coming, and there was a five-hour live stream and every, like, 20 minutes slowly over this five hours, they would pan over and show one more director’s chair with the name of an actor on it. And people are apparently just watching this for all five hours, and slowly they’re revealing who the cast is going to be of this new Avengers movie, and it’s something like 35 or 40 people.
I’m going to extrapolate, I’m going to make up a number, but I’m not going to be very far off; it’s something like six women are in this movie and the rest are men, and the women who are in it are I think mostly white, but it’s that sort of number where people are like, “How dare you have one movie with a woman main character?” It’s like, if you look at a list of every movie that came out of Hollywood in the last month, it’s like, yes, there was one movie with a woman main character, and there was also 750 movies with a male main character. So, like, when you start… Yeah.
Allison: I’m just going to say the Geena Davis Institute is absolutely phenomenal. I cite them multiple times, but they actually do studies about, you know, the top-grossing films of a given year and, sort of, diversity breakdowns. They’ll give you breakdowns of how much women talk in children’s movies. So, you can see stories where, like, particularly egregious are ones like, you know, The Little Mermaid or Sleeping Beauty, where the main character is asleep or mute for basically the whole film. But even modern-day films, you can see these breakdowns that actually give you those numbers for how few women and people of colour, and other diversity metrics, how little diversity we have in films.
There was one where I think I mentioned the fit, you know, the 15% is seen as equal in the classroom discussion conversation. There was a study that they put out where they found that only, I think, 17% of people in crowd scenes, including workplace crowds, only 17% were women. And there’s a quote from Geena Davis about basically, are we training people? Because obviously movies and television shape how we perceive the world. Are we training people to think that 17% women is the norm?
Ann: I just want to clarify, some fact-checking for myself, the new upcoming film and Avengers: Doomsday and that five-hour live stream. So, they announced 26 actors, five of whom are women, three of whom are white. So, but that also reminds me of… And I think this is, it’s interesting how the themes of this podcast that emerged, like last week’s episode, this week’s episode, next week’s episode, we’re talking about some similar themes, but I’ll say it again in case someone didn’t hear last week, which is again, going back to my thing about the 1950s is a lot— Or, let’s just say, like, Hollywood films of the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s, there was a lot of historical movies made, especially about the American West or, like, there was the Cleopatra movie with Elizabeth Taylor. There’s a lot of historic movies, or about, like, Victorian England. And those movies have almost exclusively only white actors in them.
And then, a lot of people watch those, and that shaped their perception of what the Wild West was like, or what Victorian London was like, or what ancient Egypt was like. So then, when a new project comes in and they have like one Black actor, it’s like, “Oh my god, they’re going woke. Like, why are they changing this? You’re ruining history.” It’s like, no, like the movies had white people in them because they’re produced in Hollywood during a time—not that it’s that much better now—but of like extreme racism in terms of like, who could be in what movies? It’s like, yeah, these movies about the American West invented, basically, the mythology of the West with just like all these white people. If Indigenous people show up at all, it’s as the villains or the victim; if there’s Black people, it’s mostly there in an enslaved type role.
So, when you try and correct that record, then people get mad, like you were saying, like you’re challenging the worldview. But it’s like, “No, your worldview is based on movies made in America in the 1950s, a very famously racist time.” So, it’s like, you’re not looking at pictures from back then. You’re looking at a movie from a hundred years removed from those events. And it’s… Yeah, people just get so… chawm-type people get really mad about this.
I just have one other example. I want to tell you, because I don’t know if you’ve come across it. I did a two-part episode about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, and one of the resources I was looking at mentioned when the revelations came out about what Sally Hemings’ relationship to Thomas Jefferson was, which is that she was the mother of several of his children, she was his long-time partner, not really.
Allison: It’s always tricky because, like all of the terms we would ascribe to that, don’t really apply to a situation where she had no ability to consent. Sorry, I’m going to cough again. But yeah, no, every time I see them, I see her referred to as like his mistress or something, and it’s like, she was quite literally his sex slave. I mean, she was an enslaved person that he owned and that he raped. I mean, I’m sorry, but there is no scenario that I could— There’s no argument I can see for saying that she had the ability to consent. There is no argument to say that this was not a coercive relationship.
Ann: Yeah. And then they unearth this like room attached to his room, and it’s like, “This is where she slept,” and it’s like the smallest closet with room for, like, half a bed. But, so when these first, like there had been rumours about this and that Thomas Jefferson had these mixed-race descendants through Sally Hemings. And there was, that was kind of always a rumour, and then when it was basically codified by doing some DNA tests on some people, looking at some letters, like, actually believing these descendants, there was a lot of people who were so mad about it.
This one woman, I just remember the quote from her where she was like… It’s not just that people feel close or connected to the history; people have, like, parasocial relationships to historical figures. And she had grown up reading Thomas Jefferson’s letters, and she felt so personally connected to him, like he was very inspiring to her in various ways. And she’s like, “This can’t be true because the man I know from these letters would never have done this.” So, she refused to believe that he had been involved with Sally Hemings because she felt like she knew him so well. And it’s just kind of like, “Well, here’s the facts. Here’s the DNA test. Here’s the family stories. Here’s Monticello changing, adding these new exhibits, like making it be like, ‘Hey, here’s what happened.’” And she’s just like, “No, because the man I know would never do that.” Like, people feel ownership over these stories. People have the… Yeah, just that the parasocial relationship to how a person presented themselves.
You can find inspiration in some of what Thomas Jefferson did, I guess, I don’t know, I don’t care. He probably did something interesting; he kept these lists, I don’t know. People like… You can find inspiration in his life, but also see him as a person, a deeply flawed, shitty person, but you could still be like, “Well, you know what? He wrote good sentences. I admire him as a writer.” I don’t know.
Allison: But I think that’s the problem is we don’t allow for nuance and context and interestingly, I had another conversation where we were talking about, it might’ve been in the context of comedy, but if you are anything other than a chawm, the further you get from chawmness, the less context you are allowed to have, the less nuance you are allowed to have because your diversity is taking up space. So, when you watch a standup comedian, a lot of times they will address whatever it is about them that deviates them from chawmness. And part of that is lived experience, and you know, I love hearing about different experiences and stuff. But I was actually talking with Katie Gee Salisbury, who wrote a book called Not Your China Doll.
Ann: The Anna May Wong book! Yes, yes, yes. She was on my podcast. Love that book. Love her.
Allison: One of the things that we were talking about, it made me think about when you were talking about racist Hollywood and, you know, you didn’t even mention, like, all the yellowface and the blackface and that’s, and how the Hays Code wouldn’t allow interracial marriages.
Ann: I did say I was, I carefully worded. I was like, “It was mostly white actors,” which is not to say it was all white characters.
Here’s the thing. We could talk for 25 more hours, as I murder a person each hour, but people need to [both laugh] read the book.
Allison: Well, we’ve gotten a bit far from Uncredited.
Ann: We have, we have. But it’s all good. And this is the thing. Your book is available as a book. You also have an audiobook that you read yourself. What is it? 18 hours long?
Allison: 18 and a half.
Ann: 18 and a half hours long, and your poor voice. Congratulations on accomplishing that.
I wanted to ask you one more question about your book, which is it ends with a playlist. Tell me about how you chose those songs.
Allison: It’s just songs that I like, that make me feel that they give me the girl power vibes, and you know, the sort of, “We’re not going to take this anymore.” Yeah. I hope that it helps other people get through what is admittedly often not a fun book. The Midwesterner in me, anytime someone says, “Oh, I just got your book,” wants to reply with, “Oh, I hope you enjoy it!” But the person who wrote the book in me is like, “Oh no, no, no, no. That’s not the vibe.” And more often like, “Oh, I hope it makes you mad.” My favourite review so far is my mom, who is a 68-year-old, white, Midwestern lady, and she said, “You know, this really pissed me off!” And that is, that is not her vibe normally. [laughs]
But the other way to look at it is that it is honestly the most empowering thing I think I’ve ever experienced to really appreciate, because I think we do all internalize that message of like, “Oh, if women are as good as men, how come I haven’t heard of more women?” Like, the implication being, “Well, obviously they’re not because I haven’t heard of them.” And I do think that we internalize that because that’s what we’re shown constantly is this absence. And really seeing, so like I mentioned, that drone footage of the forest, right? Not just one or two women’s stories, but here’s over 600 stories, here’s how it happened today, so don’t let anybody tell you this is all in the past, is actually really empowering to see how hard the patriarchy and the people who uphold it, they have to work to keep us out because they know if we get in, we will outperform them. If we get into the schools, if we get the job, if we get the promotion that we’ve earned, we will often outperform the men, and they can’t have that. And so, they try to convince us, because if you can convince a woman that she’s not capable, she’ll do the job for you, right? She will do the work of keeping herself down, and that is what our whole society tells us over and over and over again, implicitly or explicitly.
I really hope that people who read my book, both men, women, nonbinary, other, whatever your gender, I hope that people who read my book will realize how much they have been lied to about women’s potential and women’s abilities. Hopefully that will help unravel some of their biases because there are stories in the book about not just the male allies, but male bosses in contemporary settings who once things like “he-peating” where a woman says something and it’s ignored, and then a guy basically says the exact same thing and it’s like, “Ah, you’re brilliant!” Once you point this out to a male boss, some of them are misogynists, obviously, like you know, they’ll just keep, they won’t believe you, or they’ll just keep letting it happen. But there are multiple stories in the book about once things like, you know, men interrupting women all the time, once that their eyes are open to that because they are blinded by their privilege, right? If it doesn’t affect them, they’re probably not going to notice it.
I was actually just in the San Francisco airport, and they’ve got an aviation museum there and there was a display with, I think it was Virgin America paraphernalia, and one of them was a flight attendant, I believe, uniform, like, the actual uniform from 2012 and it included knee high stiletto boots. And I mentioned this to a male employee there. He had not noticed, like, it had not occurred to him that not only is this for people who are on their feet for hours at a time, it’s also probably a safety code violation, if we’re being honest. But it genuinely just hadn’t occurred to him until I pointed it out that forcing a flight attendant to wear stiletto boots in 20-frickin’-12 was stupid, on many levels.
Ann: Especially, like, just my recent understanding of flight attendants as first responders after there was that thing where the airplane landed upside down. And then I learned…
Allison: Yeah. They’re first priority is your safety.
Ann: Yeah. So, like, why the fuck are we putting them in these shoes when it’s like, “Well, she would have saved your life, or she would have helped the people evacuate the airplane. But unfortunately, she tripped and fell because she’s wearing these fucking stiletto boots.”
Allison: Yeah. So, I do genuinely hope that, you know, people who don’t identify as women will also read this book and if they have experienced male privilege, that hopefully, it will change their biases and hopefully it will open their eyes so that they can be better allies because I do love the good men. I’m married to one. My dedication in the book is “For Jared, He knows what he did.” And it’s an in-joke with me and my husband, Jared, because what he did was, you know, support me, and listen to me rant about this, and feed me, and read the book multiple times. So, I do want to shout out the men who help women get the credit they deserve, but also do the work in the first place.
The last section of the book is about the cost of disregarding women. One of the people I talk about is an FDA employee, Frances Oldham Kelsey, who, while European countries were okaying a drug called thalidomide for use in morning sickness, so for pregnant women, all these countries were approving it. And she said, “Hang on, there was this one study that found that birth defects may be connected to this, and I want more research done.” And she talks about how her bosses backed her up, and not too long after, she was credited with preventing tens of thousands of birth defects in children because yeah, it turned out that she was exactly right to be concerned about that, and all of these kids in countries where it had been approved were being born with these birth defects.
So, you can see how having supportive bosses trust her saved a lot of kids from being born with those conditions. There are lots of stories where the men didn’t listen to the women; the men in power chose to disregard women, and people died, or say, investment companies lost a bunch of money because they didn’t trust a woman entrepreneur. It really drives home that it’s not just about the women themselves, and it’s not just about the girls who are not seeing themselves represented; people die when you don’t listen to women.
Ann: Thank you so much for talking with me about your book and also about your website. First of all, everybody go get the book. Order this book from your local bookstore or all the places you can get it. Force your library to order a copy of it. The eBook and the audiobook are also available. And also, I just wanted to let everybody know, your website is so great, Infinite-Women.com, so you can go in there, look up your faves. 6,700 people there and growing. But if there’s someone who’s not there, you have a form right at the bottom of the website where you can suggest somebody.
Allison: I will say the total list, because I love a spreadsheet, as previously mentioned, the total list is something like 225,000 people. So, I am working on it, but I’m always happy to add to that list because I have issues with boundaries, apparently, when it comes to these projects. I was complaining to my husband, and he’s like, “You literally called it Infinite Women.” [Ann laughs] We have a very “You did this to yourself policy in our house.” [laughs] Like, when he’s, you know, really sore because he just did an ultramarathon. Like, you did this to yourself.
Ann: Nobody made you, no exterior force. Yeah.
Allison: You chose this path. You knew what was going to happen, and now you are paying the consequences. Sometimes I tell him like, “Look, I am just trying to check yourself before you wreck yourself, and I am failing.”
Ann: I wanted to mention, too, I’m looking at the cover of your book. So, I don’t know how much input you had on the cover design, but I love that it’s called Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work. And then it says “Allison Tyra” in the hugest font where you’re just like, I will be credited as the author of this book, and I respect that.
Allison: Thank you. I did not have any input on the, well, I’m sure I could have if I’d asked, but no, the cover illustration is by a designer named Nat Mack, who is brilliant and is currently at work on the cover design for The View From the Hill, which is my next book. It comes out in 2026, it’ll be on presale, I would guess November, I should probably know that. But yeah, it celebrates women who made their mark after 40.
Ann: I love that. I love that as a concept, and I love knowing I’m going to invite you back on to talk about that because that question… We’ll talk about that later. I’m sure you have this in your book. But just like, because for a lot of women, it’s like marriage and raising children. You’re not able to pursue these passions and your goals until you’re after 40 because a lot of women are raising children up to that point.
Allison: That’s one of the reasons. Another factor I found was some women are just working away for decades, and they just don’t get recognized, they don’t get credited and acknowledged, and widely known until they’re older. So, you know, you might have someone like Tina Turner who did have a career as a singer, but she was very much under the control of her husband, Ike, and it was very much “Ike and Tina.” It wasn’t until later in her life that she got away from him, and she came into her own. Or it might be women artists or scientists, where the rest of the world just hasn’t caught up with them yet. So, you know, a scientist like Patricia Bath, I believe, had to wait for laser technology to catch up with her ideas for what she wanted to do with laser eye surgery. And it wasn’t until later in her life that that happened.
So, I will happily come back and talk with you for however long you want about that. [Ann laughs] But it was interesting getting into the different reasons, but that one’s less analytical, it’s more a collection of stories. But there is a bit of that, okay, let’s look at this whole, you know, youth obsession, and this idea that you have to know what you want to do with your life at 18 is just dumb. Also, I think we put too much pressure on young people, going back to that whole question of, how much control are you actually in, right? Like, what I was saying about telling women, “Here’s what you can do to get ahead in the workplace,” and sort of indicating that if you don’t, it’s your fault. But I think that we put too much pressure on young people who feel like they have to have everything in their life sorted by age 25. Like, “Okay, I have to be married by this date. I have to have kids by this date. I have to have bought a house by this date.” And a lot of times it’s just not realistic, and it’s not necessarily what’s going to make you happy in the long run.
Ann: I just want to say, do you know where those timelines and numbers come from? America and the 1950s. [laughs]
Allison: Everything comes back to America in the 1950s.
Ann: It traces back to the one decade where that was possible for anybody.
Allison: Like, is this going to become a conspiracy podcast where you’ve got the board with all the string and, like, it’s just the 1950s at the centre and it’s allllll the string.
Ann: Well, and then I think the ultimate end of that would be, like, me time-travelling back, sort of like in Back to the Future with the room with the string, because it also takes place in the 1950s. I think that’s where this is all headed, but I’ll let you know how that goes.
Allison: Please stay away from your parents if you do time travel.
Ann: Yes. [laughs]
Allison: That’s what we learned from that trilogy.
Ann: Absolutely. Thank you so much for talking with me. It’s always a pleasure. Everybody should listen to, first of all, just listen to Infinite Women, the podcast, subscribe, like set up your automatic downloads, whatever, and then keep your ears peeled because on August 4th you can hear the episode, the extremely long episode that you’ve edited down, where I am on infinite women talking about my fave should have been Queen Princess Charlotte.
Allison: Well, and if you just can’t wait, I do already have an episode about the Hanoverians and their rise to power. So, if you want to hear about all the messy drama that came before Princess Charlotte, brace yourself. There’s also a Royals playlist. So, if you go on my website under the podcast item in the menu, there’s playlists and you can see all the Royal episodes. I also have transcripts for every episode, so feel free to check that out if you’re more of a reader than a listener.
Ann: This is fantastic! I just clicked on it and I’m like, oh, you know what? I’ve been doing some website work. I should do this. These playlists are great.
Allison: I just feel like you’re going to start doing… You should start doing, like, react videos. Like, you’re just listening to the podcast, like, “Hang on.”
Ann: [laughs] “BRB. I’m just going to recode my website.” Thank you so much for talking to me, Allison. And I hope that you continue having fantastic interactions with people about this book because I do think it’s going to make people mad in a good way.
Allison: That’s the plan. And so far, it seems to be working.
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So again, Allison’s book is Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work, and you can get more information about that from her website, which is Infinite-Women.com, which is also the website where you can get all the information about women from history, as well as playlists of her past podcast episodes. If you have a certain type of person you’d like to hear about, and I might add that to my website too, because I love the idea of podcast playlists.
Anyway, speaking of books, I have a book that is available now for pre-order. It’s called Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Uncrowned Queen of Britain, or maybe it’s Britain’s Uncrowned Queen, we go back and forth. You know, until the book is printed, it could still change. But just look up Rebel of the Regency by Ann Foster; you can order that at your local bookstore. If you’ve never pre-ordered, you can just go to your local bookstore’s website and look up my book, Rebel of the Regency by Ann Foster and click on ‘Order.’ And then the website will do it for you. You can just go in in person and be like, “I demand that you order this book.” It comes out next February. So, there’s plenty of time for you to do that. You can also order it from any of the major online book websites. You can have more information about ordering my book at RebelOfTheRegency.com. There’s also a link there for if you do pre-order the book, you can share a picture of the receipt with me, and then you can get some delightful treats. Like, you can get a paper doll of Caroline of Brunswick designed by Siobhan Gallagher; you can get a free membership to my Substack or a free membership to my Patreon. Anyway, RebelOfTheRegency.com. Get used to me talking about it because I’m going to be promoting that every week until next February. What else is there to say?
So yeah. I mean if you want to keep up with more information from me and what I’m up to, you can subscribe to my newsletter, which is, like, every month I send out, just kind of the highlights of what’s up; I talk about the most recent podcast episodes I’ve done, I’ll give you the latest book news, information about events. Like, for instance, I’m going to be having an in-person Vulgar History meetup in July in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. If you’re going to be around that area and you want to know the information, you can RSVP at VulgarHistory.com/Meetup. Otherwise, I mean, I did these new end credits that say a lot of the stuff that I used to usually say so I’m like, I feel like there’s more to say, but I think it’s all going to be covered in the credits. So, until next time, keep your pants on and your tits out.
Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster, that’s me! Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon for as low as $1 a month at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod and get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com.
References:
Get a copy of Allison’s book (affiliate link)
Learn more about Allison’s Infinite Women project
Listen to Allison’s Infinite Women podcast
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