Four Huddersfield women who changed the world
Yesterday was International Women’s Day, and to mark it, reporter looks at some of the incredible women Huddersfield has produced, their achievements, their quirks and their stories. And none of them featured in your school history textbooks...
WELL-BEHAVED women rarely make history, Marilyn Monroe once said. But sadly, neither did a lot of women who actually did break the stiff rules there to hold them back.
Huddersfield has a rich history; once an economically-booming town thanks to the textiles industry and its rail and canal links, the town has produced a Prime Minister, Rugby League, stories of Luddites and many a film star.
But did you know we are also the birthplace of the coding used to create the modern-day search engine? A huge contributor to getting women the vote? And early pioneers for women’s sexual health? Of course you didn’t. Because none of the people responsible are men.
While the majority of scientists were scratching their heads over these new things called computers and how to talk to them, Karen Sparck Jones was teaching them how to understand humans. Born in 1935 to a chemistry lecturer and a Norwegian immigrant, Karen decided she wasn’t going to wait for any man to teach her about computer programming, and did so herself.
Living by her motto, ‘computing is too important to be left to men’, Karen developed a way to combine statistics with linguistics – research which was considered unorthodox by her male peers but is now considered the basic principle for almost every modern search engine.
The most impressive thing? She produced this research in 1972 – 18 years before the first search engine was created. she was actually thrown out of the WSPU – a group of women who actively encouraged throwing stones at shop windows – because they found her ‘unmanageable’.
During her time as a Suffragette, Dora was arrested for constantly interrupting her university chancellor’s speech demanding he speak out about the force-feeding of imprisoned Suffragette alumni on hunger strike. A few months later, she broke into the Southport Empire Theatre, climbed up a dome atop the building and waited for