Yesterday I finally got to see SIX, the musical about the women who are known primarily because they were married to Henry VIII. SIX is about HERstory, the things we don’t usually hear about, because history was written primarily by men — and having been educated in the UK and the US, the history I learned was told through the lens of white men.
I saw it at the beautiful Bushnell Theatre in Hartford.
SIX was 1:20 of pure delight. While it might not give one a deep perspective on history, it had important themes of history vs herstory, power dynamics, a woman being blamed for the predatory behavior of the men around her, how patriarchal societies pit women against each other.
It’s also about how in the past, women were remembered for their relationship with a man, rather than their own accomplishments.
One of my “gateway drugs” to history was reading Jean Plaidy novels when I was a kid. For those who haven’t encountered her, Plaidy was the pen name of a prolific yet secretive English author named Eleanor Hibbert. I inhaled her Tudor novels, reading and rereading them multiple times. she also wrote under the names Victoria Holt and Philippa Carr.
It’s appropriate that I saw SIX with my cousin, Sara, who was also a prolific Plaidy reader. Afterward I remarked to her how ahead of her time Plaidy was, by writing historical fiction from the woman’s point of view, rather than focusing on Henry’s story.
Driving home, I heard a replay of a NPR Throughline podcast about the creation of Monopoly. We were raised on mythic“rags to riches” story of how a salesman named Charles Darrow lost his job in the Great Depression, and in an attempt to support is family invented what would become one of the best selling board games of all time. But that is a myth I was sold as a kid and believed as a kid, just like the “America is a meritocracy” one.
The true story of Monopoly begins a few decades before Darrow rolled the dice, with a Washington, D.C., woman named Lizzie Magie. In 1904, Magie patented something called the Landlord's Game, which was, in some great irony, an argument against the concentration of wealth. Her game spread around the country, including to the Quakers of Atlantic City, N.J., who added all their city's street names (Atlantic Avenue, Kentucky Avenue, Park Place). Darrow got his hands on the game through a Quaker friend — and then sold it to Parker Bros. as his own.
The company, like much of America, went with the tale of this down-on-his-luck Depression-era salesman. Pilon says, "I think there's something about us psychologically that just makes us really wired to loving the Darrow story."
Once again, the woman with the idea was written out of history.
And that reminded me also of another discussion I’d heard about the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, for which James Watson and Francis Crick won a Nobel Prize. Watson and Crick were aided in their research by an image of DNA (image 51) which was obtained thanks to an x-ray crystallography techniques developed by Rosalind Franklin, a research chemist - an image that was delivered to them without her knowledge or consent.
According to Franklin’s niece, Watson’s sexism was likely was a factor:
Her niece recounts a time when Watson attended a talk that Franklin gave. Watson admitted that he really wasn't listening because all he could think was that she would be rather attractive — if she changed her hair or dressed differently.
Shorter Watson - maybe she should have smiled more.
Franklin could have done all of that and it wouldn’t have mattered, given that Watson is a racist, sexist jerk in favor of eugenics. His toxic views are still being cited by white nationalists like Stefan Molyneux as “proof” that white people are superior.
Okay, this has come a long way from where I started, talking about SIX. But in a way, it hasn’t, because hundreds of years later we’re still fighting many of the same battles. All of these stories remind us why it’s important to have diversity in our institutions. They remind us to think about whose stories we HAVEN’T heard, because of the lack of diversity in our power structures.