Good afternoon team,

I hope you are well today. I hope it's been a good week and that you are looking forward to the weekend. And if it has not been a good week – if you feel, for example, like you have been toiling away for little reward – I have a super Fem Fri for you about women who probably also felt like they were toiling away with little reward quite a lot of the time. And one who actually just did what she felt like, which was, one gets the impression, its own reward. Something for us all here today. Let's go.

Starting with the main event, Katalin Karikó, who is pretty much entirely the reason why we have mRNA vaccines. Many many thanks to the friend and subscriber who sent me this amazing story; I knew that there was a story but not how intense it was. This is a lovely picture of a woman who loves her work:

Another scientist might have felt orphaned. Karikó could have pitied herself. But she takes far too much pride in her work. With a placid smile, she recounts how someone once introduced her to a group: “Oh, Kati works for me,” he told them. “I said, ‘Oh, Frank. I don’t work for you. Do you think when I come in on Saturday and Sunday, I’m coming for you?” The weekends she spent, the late nights she worked—she did that for her research.

https://www.glamour.com/story/katalin-kariko-biontech-women-of-year-2021

And, I mean, of course it's Julian of Norwich next, spending twenty years in a cell thinking about the meaning of her visions. A voluntary cell, but also not one she could get out of. This is a really good article about the philosophy of her thought, so if that's something you are into then click through, but this quotation tells you a lot about how important it was for her to speak out about what she had seen:

Just because I am a woman, must I therefore believe that I must not tell you about the goodness of God, when I saw at the same time both his goodness and his wish that it should be known?

https://www.theculturium.com/julian-of-norwich-revelations-of-divine-love/

I'm going to be honest with you, I'm not actually wild for Emily Dickinson or her poetry, I'm including this because it's quite funny to see a woman just absolutely checking out of stuff she is expected to do, and very funny that her family's term for this was 'elfing it'. ELFING IT. One to think about as the yoke of festive responsibilities descends. Anyway, most of her poetry was also discovered posthumously, so this definitely fits the rubric:

Emily Dickinson​ loved to flee. Long before […] her withdrawal from society became almost absolute, she devised elaborate ways of avoiding people, a habit her family referred to as ‘elfing it’. When she was sent to deliver a letter, she would ring the doorbell and leg it; she greeted family guests with what she called ‘sorry grace’ and played the piano grudgingly – and only if visitors remained in an adjoining room. She avoided chores like the plague – ‘God keep me from what they call households’ – and left the burden of domestic toil to her mother and sister: ‘I do love to run fast,’ she said, ‘and hide away from them.’ She arrived late to church to escape small talk.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n11/joanne-o-leary/bitchy-little-spinster

Love,

Alex.