IP

... é intencionalmente parcial: foi escrita por homens, para homens.

Ainda hoje as mulheres disfarçam o facto de serem mulheres para não serem ostracizadas, em todas as áreas: é exemplar o caso de J. K. Rawlings, aconselhada a publicar os livros, não com o seu nome mas com iniciais pela razão de os rapazes não comprarem um livro escrito por uma mulher...

Há toda uma história desconhecida para reescrever de invenções e descobertas atribuídas a maridos e pais para não ofender a masculinidade.

It was Dr. Kober who cataloged every word and every character of Linear B on homemade index cards, cut painstakingly by hand from whatever she could find. (During World War II and afterward, paper was scarce, and she scissored her ersatz cards — 180,000 of them — from old greeting cards, church circulars and checkout slips she discreetly pinched from the Brooklyn College library.)

On her cards, she noted statistics about every character of the script — its frequency at the beginnings and ends of words, and its relation to every other character — with the meticulousness of a cryptographer. Sorting the cards night after night, Dr. Kober homed in on patterns of symbols that illuminated the structure of the words on the tablets. For as she, more than any other investigator, understood, it was internal evidence — the repeated configurations of characters that lay hidden within the inscriptions themselves — that would furnish the key to decipherment.

DR. KOBER and Mr. Ventris met only once, and by all accounts did not like each other. But through her few, rigorous published articles, which together form a how-to manual for deciphering an unknown script, she handed him the key to the locked room. After her death, using the methods she devised, he attacked the mystery with renewed vigor and brought about its solution.

It is now clear that without Dr. Kober’s work, Mr. Ventris could never have deciphered Linear B when he did, if ever. Yet because history is always written by the victors — and the story of Linear B has long been a British masculine triumphal narrative — the contributions of this brilliant American woman have been all but lost to time.