It’s a “Man’s World” — or is it?
In her recent nonfiction book, “The Matilda Effect: How 25 Women Were Erased From History,” author L.E. Carmichael recognizes the achievements women made in STEM, sports, arts and politics across different time periods and regions of the world.
“We’ve got women from ancient Egypt all the way up to the 20th century,” Carmichael said in an interview, “just to really get that sort of diversity of representation and show that this is a thing that happens everywhere to women in all fields and is still happening.”
Women profiled in the book include Chattanooga’s very own Jackie Mitchell, a baseball pitcher who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, along with Rosalind Franklin, a chemist who took the first photograph of DNA, and Hatshepsut, an Egyptian queen who oversaw the construction of the Temple of Deir el-Bahri.
The book gets its title from Matilda Joslyn Gage, “an American suffragette and equal rights activist, who was herself erased from history,” according to Carmichael.