Make a Woman Make

Make a woman understand

in the land of what and why

how she played the game with

dignity, her head held high.

They called her a mathematical fairy

a beauty and a wife,

her friends were male and genius

who all enhanced her  life.

Despite the scandal of being

thought of as an equal with

Dickens and Faraday;

and Charles Babbage’s grand plans

of building an Analytical engine

which she understood and wrote in ink

of how she could make it think.

How and why. How and why still,

in a land ruled by a Queen which

in her name was an entire age:

woman hating then and now

men in fits, in rage

struggle with snarls and spittle flying

all of them denying

a woman could have been a thinker,

a maker,

like them.

 

This poem is about Lady Ada Lovelace, the first person to design a computer program (for Charles Babbage’s unbuilt Analytical Engine).

Men to this day find reasons to denigrate her and deny her achievements.