Happy Friday,

Two obituaries of two amazing women this week, from very different fields.

We start with Clare Hollingworth.  As well as working tirelessly and calculatingly to help refugees in the 1930s, she broke the news of the start of the Second World War, nearly died several times, lived to be 105 and – based on the below interview and pullquote – was landing zings to the very end of her life.

“My mother thought journalism frightfully low, like a trade,” she says, sipping champagne and working her way through a celebratory tin of caviar. “She didn’t believe anything journalists wrote and thought they were only fit for the tradesmen’s entrance.”

What did her mother want for her daughter?

“No idea, just sort of walk about and show off my non-attractive body.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/8811229/Clare-Hollingworth-interview-I-must-admit-I-enjoy-being-in-a-war.-I-dont-know-why.-Im-not-brave.html

Secondly, Vera Rubin, who proved the existence of dark matter. She loved her subject and did so much to advance it, all while “protest[ing] every all-male meeting, every all-male department, every all-male platform”. She did not take any guff whatsoever:

Her master’s thesis was, her Cornell supervisor said, worthy of being presented to the American Astronomical Society. But she was about to give birth, so, he suggested, he would present it—but in his name. She refused. Her parents drove up from Washington and took their 22-year-old daughter, nursing her newborn, on a gruelling snowy trip from upstate New York to Philadelphia. She addressed the roomful of strangers for ten minutes about galaxy rotation […]—and left […] Fed up, she looked for a problem “that people would be interested in, but not so interested in that anyone would bother me before I was done.”

http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21713814-american-astronomer-who-established-existence-dark-matter-was-88-obituary-vera-rubin

Have a great weekend!

Alex.