Life is complicated, as Winnipeg-born rocket scientist Yvonne Brill, who died last week, must have known all too well.
On her way to a lifetime of scientific achievements, she first had to overcome being refused entry into the University of Manitoba’s engineering program because they couldn’t accommodate a woman at a required outdoor engineering camp.
Her obituary in the New York Times last Saturday — the focus of a storm of controversy and accusations of sexism — is testimony to those complexities.
But the “tempest in a crock pot,” as some are calling it, that her obituary became, also speaks volumes about how society values some accomplishments and undervalues others, often the very accomplishments that reveal a great deal about us.
Brill’s obituary was in the Times because she was such a notable person. Its first line, however, didn’t focus on her accomplishments as an internationally renowned scientist, but as a mother and cook.
“She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. ‘The world’s best mom,’ her son Matthew said,” is how the obituary originally began.
The article was later rewritten to begin: “She was a brilliant rocket scientist …” although the references to following her husband from job to job and being the “world’s best mom” were not changed.
Reaction on Twitter and other social media was head-snappingly swift. “Ugh. Can you imagine a man’s obit with this lead paragraph?” was a common quip. And, no, you really couldn’t.
One blogger made that point by writing an Albert Einstein obituary in the spirit of the Times piece on Brill: “Family man who invented relativity dies: He made sure he shopped for groceries every night on the way home from work, took the garbage out, and hand washed the antimacassars. But to his stepdaughters he was just Dad. ‘He was always there for us,’ said his stepdaughter and first cousin once removed Margo.”
Meanwhile, the Times public editor weighed in with a column that concluded that the obituary’s emphasis on domesticity “had the effect of undervaluing what really landed Mrs. Brill on the Times obituaries page, her groundbreaking scientific work.”
Which is the nub of the issue. Brill would not, of course, have been featured in a New York Times obituary had she not been a groundbreaking rocket scientist. Even then, the obituary seemed not to know how to classify her — mother and cook or rocket scientist? But why not all three?
The domestic side of her life was clearly important to her. She did, indeed, follow her husband William Franklin Brill, a chemist, around the U.S. from job to job and took time off to raise a family — that is how women balanced family life and careers, if they had them, in those days. It is something that makes her accomplishment as a scientist all the more remarkable and likely gave her a perspective on life that many of her colleagues did not have.
Brill’s obituary, once you got past the stroganoff reference, was full of fascinating details about her scientific career and how she overcame challenges while pursuing that career. Her development of a more efficient thruster allowed orbiting satellites to stay in space longer because they didn’t need to carry as much fuel. She contributed to moon missions and the Mars observer.
She worked with NASA developing the rocket motor for the space shuttle. She received numerous honours for her work, including the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama in 2011.
Equally important, she displayed a resilience that had to have helped her succeed in a field in which there were few women. “You just have to be cheerful about it and not get upset when you get insulted,” she once said.
While there was a problem of priority in the way the obituary was originally written, Brill’s story was more remarkable because of both the public and private sides of her life.
To simply portray her as a brilliant scientist, in fact, would do her a disservice and draw a one-dimensional portrait of a woman whose accomplishments deserve a more rounded tribute.
