"Women's backwardness in chess may change, but it has been the history." -------------------------------- compare with:
"Blacks' backwardness in academia may change, but it has been the history."
A friend of a friend was a black woman who was in comparative lit at Harvard. After the first session of one humanities course, the prof asked her and the other black student in class to stay after he dismissed class. Then he told them: "You do realize that the highest grade you can get in this class is a C?"
It's stuff like this that makes "history."
In addition, people, even the most illuminated leftists are still in thrall to assumptions based on an ideology of the individual. They do not understand that an individual is always a member of a group and, in some sense, at the pinnacle of that group. They are not in any way self-made. What they are able to do or not do has a lot to do with their identification with that group and with social support or lack of support for that groupo. So, although the four-minute mile stood for a long time as an impossibility, once it was broken (the social expectation changed), all of a sudden a whole bunch of runners were able to break it.
Whatever one's inborn talents are, I notice that circumstance and social context are huge factors in what one can do with this talent. To take some personal examples:
1. High expectations. My father told me my whole life that I was good at math. As a result, although I most definitely do not have a mathematical imagination, I have always done very well in math and was a math major through first year of college.
2. Necessity. I don't particularly like nor am interested computers, but due to the need to support my family and to the fact that tech writing pays well, I have earned my living for the last twenty years writing programming manuals for engineers: low level debugging, networking API's, build tools of all sorts, compilers, etc. All self-taught. And, I say this in all humility, I'm pretty good at it. Unfortunate that I don't get to ply my intelligence in a field that actually interests me.
3. Social support. In my first year in college (UCLA), I was taking Honors Chem, Honors Physics, etc. I was the only female in the class. I had no support from any one and I felt like a complete freak. I had a horrible time in class and would go to sleep as soon as I opened a book. I certainly had the intelligence to understand the stuff, but I had zero social support, and this made it impossible to concentrate.
So any mention of "history" when it comes to groups that have been traditionally excluded from a discipline is next to meaningless.
Joanna