User:Victuallers/MaryGrew

The way to make the world anew, Is just to grow—as Mary Grew!

I think it was 2008, I had joined Wikipedia and I was creating articles about the villages of Wikipedia when a story caught my eye. The National Portrait Gallery were threatening to sue Derek Coertsee who was an American Wikipedian who had cleverly taken 3,000 images from their web site. I say cleverly as not only had he managed to find high-res images that were hidden from users but he had studied copyright and only taken paintings from long dead artists. The details have been long discussed but in my mind the moral case was clear so I checked that Derek had legal cover and set out to write articles that included the disputed images. I remember writing one for Did You Know where the hook was that this woman had appeared with three earls and she was the only one who was fully clothed. Besides Did You Know I was also keen on a tool that allowed you to create imagemaps where different parts of the image could be clicked on to get more detail.

The picture that really intrigued me a detailed picture of dozens of people sitting down at the World's first anti-slavery convention. The convention had been organised by British abolitionists who I quickly found out were mostly Quakers and bankers. Amazing to think that bankers were agents for moral improvement but the evidence was there. I decided to see how many people in the picture I could write articles about. This turned to be a great number as the painting was only of the people chosen to be in the picture. They were all at the time considered notable and they came from all over the world. Possibly the largest delegation from outside Britain were the Americans. They had travelled for weeks in different ships to arrive in London in 1840 for this convention. What was to prove important for me and for the women in the world was that the American delegation included women. The American women included Lucretia Mott, ???? and the unusually named Mary Grew. I'd never heard of any of these but as I wrote about the delegates I heard of a row that was large at the time but which was to influence me and history.

The organisers of the convention received complaints and they decided that the convention would not allow women to enter. Given that this was a convention about the equality of men it appeared ludicrous that it would exclude women. There were many raised voices and one of the loudest was Henry Grew. He was a clergyman with unusual views but one of them was that women should be seen and not heard. He was American but despite this he argued that only male delegates should be allowed. This was not an extreme view at the time until you realise that he had travelled thousands of miles with other delegates which included Mary Grew, his daughter, who was a delegate in her own right. Imagine the embarrassment of listening to your father argue that his own child should have a wasted transatlantic journey and that the people who proposed her as a delegate should be disenfranchised because they had chosen a women.

I continued to write articles about the people in the painting for the next nine years. Many of them have appeared in "Did You Know" including Henry Grew. I was able to report Mary's story there but I couldn't find enough to give her an article of her own. Lucretia Mott and ???? had gone away from the convention vowing that they would do something about women's rights. Unfortunately their time was involved in anti-slavery and a civil war had to be fought to establish the rights of man. However in 186? the two of them were invited by ??? to New York and they picked up the baton and the first women's convention took place at ????. I was reminded of this recently by Ian Pigott creating a list of women's conventions for the Women in Red project.

It wasn't just Mott and ??? who got the women's right's bug. I was interested in Wikipedia's ability to correct the systemic bias of history. I wrote articles about people and places in Africa, Estonia, Prague and Australia and increasingly women. I discovered Kate Marsden who went to Siberia to find a cure for leprosy and found herself accused of being a pushy lesbian. I discovered ???? who helped to found the African National Congress but her husband and history ignored her because she had no children. I was posting at the systemic bias project and there was some sympathy but no one appeared to be doing anything. I was writing articles each March for International Women's Day, but how one day or even one month is meant to address 51% of the population is obviously a fools errand. We had to do something and Wikimania in Mexico was asking for papers. The call to arms gave vent to a proposed talk on "How to Pick Up More Women". That got some attention. Importantly I re-met virtually user:Rosiestep who had been a fellow editor at Did You Know. The talk was re-titled so as not alarm the horses and the talk featured the need for measurements of the gender gap so that we could launch a project that would "move the pointer". A project to "grow" then number of notable women. Experts arrived and they and the emerging power of Wikidata created the first figure. It was estimated that 15.5% of the biographies were women. I never got to Mexico but I skyped in and we gave the talk and "Women in Red" was formed. The title was taken from a page owned by "T.Anthony" which listed articles required about women. If you haven't heard then you may not know that 15.5% is very nearly 17%. It may seem like a small change but there are 1.5 million biographies. Moreover women in red spawned other sister projects and we found out that every language has the same problem. Notably the Welsh Wicipedia?? has fixed theirs.

So you have found out that I'm interested in correcting systemic bias, image maps, Did You know and I was also interested in Wikisource. So I was intrigued to find that some of the Women in Red editors were creating a lot of new articles by using Wikisource. Specifically they had found a book called "Women on the Century" which had been published in 189??? and it included 1400 women and their photographs. I was intrigued enough to go along and look at these 1,400 women and there was a name I know .... Mary Grew. It appears that Mary recovered from the conference and incredibly from having a chauvinistic father. She was active in the women's movement all her life. I went back to Henry Grew's article and did what Mary had managed so many years before me. I created a separate life for Mary and it was described in her own article. The woman had always looked so severe and I understood that because I knew the man her father was. What I didn't realise was that she must have had a sense of fun too. When the American poet failed to turn for Mary's meeting her sent a poem by way of apology. The closing lines of which inspired me to write this.