Absurdity
Pioneering Researcher Who First Documented The Existence Of Women Dies At 90
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
CAMBRIDGE, MA. The world of empirical science lost one of its most consequential figures this week with the passing of Dr. Eleanor Marsh, the researcher widely credited with establishing, through rigorous academic inquiry, that women are real and have been here the whole time.
She was 90.
Dr. Marsh's career began, as so many landmark careers do, with a simple observation that everyone around her had somehow failed to make. "She kept noticing them," said her longtime colleague Dr. Philip Hartwell of the University of Chicago. "In offices. In grocery stores. Operating machinery. She had the courage to write it down."
Her seminal 1963 paper, "Preliminary Evidence Suggesting The Sustained Presence Of Women Across Multiple Geographical Locations," was rejected by the Journal of Human Sciences four times. The fifth submission was accepted after she agreed to add the caveat "further study warranted" to the abstract, which she did, under protest.
"They wanted her to hedge," said Dr. Hartwell. "They said the sample size was too large and that made them nervous."
The paper was eventually published in a special issue alongside a rebuttal from a Harvard professor who argued that what Dr. Marsh had documented were "a type of man, possibly variant, requiring additional classification." That professor later requested his name be removed from the rebuttal. The journal declined.
For the next three decades, Dr. Marsh expanded her research to include whether women had opinions, whether they experienced Tuesday the same way other people did, and whether they had been present at historical events that, until her intervention, had been described as attended exclusively by people.
Her 1979 monograph, "They Were There: A Corrective," is now considered foundational. Her 1988 follow-up, "Still There," was more concise but equally influential.
The scientific establishment's relationship with her work remained complicated throughout her lifetime. The National Academy of Sciences awarded her its highest honor in 1991 and then spent the remainder of the decade quietly revising its own archives to reflect her findings without issuing a formal acknowledgment of what was being revised or why.
"We celebrate her contributions to the field," said academy spokesperson Gerald Fitch in a statement released Tuesday. "Her work has meaningfully advanced our collective understanding of the broader human-adjacent landscape."
Dr. Marsh, when shown a draft of a similar statement in 2019, read it twice, folded it in half, and placed it in the recycling bin without comment. This was widely interpreted as generous.
Former students described her as exacting, patient in the way that people are patient when they have been waiting for something for forty years, and completely unwilling to accept "it's complicated" as a methodological framework.
"She used to say that the most dangerous phrase in science was 'everyone already knows that,'" said Dr. Yolanda Reeves, who completed her doctorate under Dr. Marsh in 1997. "She said if everyone already knew it, someone would have written it down. And if no one had written it down, then no one actually knew it. They just thought they did, which is different, and worse."
Dr. Marsh is survived by her research, three graduate students who are continuing her documentation work, and a filing cabinet in her office at the university that none of her colleagues have yet had the nerve to open.
Services will be private.
The story we are making fun of: https://theonion.com/gloria-steinem-researcher-who-discovered-existence-of-women-dead-at-92/