RHYS BOWEN: Last week my daughter Clare and I celebrated the release of our latest Molly Murphy novel, VANISHED IN THE CROWD. It's Molly 22 (can you believe it?). Since Clare was the primary researcher and instigator of this story, I thought she should talk a little about the driving force behind the story. Clare?
CLARE BROYLES: I went to high school in the 1980’s. It was a time of hope for women’s lib – the era of big shoulders and girl bosses. We were taught that a woman could do anything that a man could do. But at the same time, my history and literature classes were steeped in only what men had done. In the textbooks of the eighties, men (especially white men) were the explorers, the architects, the poets and heralds of Western civilization. They held the patents, owned the companies, and authored the novels. But more recent scholarship has shown that our textbooks were all wrong.
The dominance of men as innovators and leaders was largely due to the erasing of women’s names from their achievements. The woman who brought the French style of cinematography to early films was described only as a secretary. The woman engineer who completed the Brooklyn bridge, hid her accomplishment so as to not embarrass her bedridden husband (and lose his salary!). Our textbooks lionized Watson and Crick but we never learned about Rosalind Franklin who took the photograph of DNA that enabled their research. For many years scientific discoveries by women had to be in a paper authored by a man in order to be published. So it was natural, but completely untrue, that my high school self thought that men were the designers of the modern world.
This phenomena has a name, “The Matilda effect,” named after suffragist Matilda Gage by the researcher Margaret Rossiter. Her efforts in the 1990’s to restore women’s names to their achievements was labeled activist scholarship, but her volumes on the contributions of women through history have demonstrated how often women were overlooked or erased. These women include the discoverer of nuclear fission, the woman who discovered the composition of the stars, microbiologists, authors, computers, mathematicians, and even the creator of the game Monopoly!
This is the dilemma of the fictional Willa Parker in the latest Molly Murphy mystery: Vanished in the Crowd. She is a passionate virologist who can only find work in her husband’s lab and publish her research under his name. Her commitment to her work is meant to be put aside when she has a child and her family given precedence. When she gets on a train for New York and then vanishes, it is by force or by choice? That is the question that Molly Murphy has to answer. She wants to find Willa before her husband does to find out if Willa wants to be rescued, or if she is better off remaining hidden.
Readers of historical fiction might ask, is this anachronistic? Were there really women scientists in 1909 working on the cutting edge of finding a cure for the polio virus? And the answer is yes. There were passionate women scientists persevering against all odds. The reason we as modern readers are surprised is the Matilda effect itself.
It can be hard to rewrite the internal scripts created by the world in which we grew up. Fiction has always been helpful in imagining the world in a different way. In my high school years, science fiction and fantasy allowed me to imagine worlds of powerful women, but current historical fiction portraying women and their accomplishments allows me to rewrite that history in my psyche. Molly Murphy, the character, is growing and changing as she finds herself in the company of suffragists and powerful women. She is starting to believe more in the cause and question the dictates of the society she was born into, just as I have.
What about you? What assumptions from your formative years have you had to rewrite in your mind and your psyche? How have novels helped you learn a new point of view?
