Protest to Power : The Women Who Paved The Way. Join our live discussion on this podcast topic on 26th Aug, 4pm IST

What man needs to keep track of 28 days?

That was the question an anthropology professor asked Sandi Toksvig when she was a student at Cambridge.

The class had just been shown a bone with 28 incisions, often described as “man’s first attempt at a calendar”

Everyone dutifully wrote it down.

Then the professor asked:
“What man needs to mark 28 days?”

And suggested it could have been a woman’s first attempt at a calendar to track her menstrual cycle.

Whether or not that particular interpretation is historically proven, the question behind it stayed with me:

How often have we assumed the person behind an innovation was a man simply because we weren't told otherwise?

And that made me think about something else.

The Indian freedom struggle.

Ask someone to name women who contributed to it.
Quickly they'll come up with 👇🏻

Rani Lakshmibai.
Sarojini Naidu.
Aruna Asaf Ali.

And then the list starts getting harder.

Not because women weren't there.

They absolutely were.

They organised. They protested. They wrote. They fought. They built movements. They took enormous risks.

We just don't remember enough of their names.

And I don't think this is limited to freedom fighters either.

There are women who changed science, technology, education, politics, art and society. Their stories somehow became footnotes while the men around them became history.

So join @Mali and I, in our live TwoXTalks podcast as we talk about these women.

The title is : Protest to Power: The Women Who Paved the Way, where we'll dig into the stories of women who fought, created, challenged and changed things but weren't always given their due.

Some will be Indian.
Some won't be.
Some will be famous for something completely different from what they actually contributed.

Since @Mali and I'm a woman, we are very likely to go on a completely different tangent while trying to stay on the topic at hand.

And if we didn't do that, take away our license for being a woman, lol

I'm hoping that by the end of it, if I ask you to name women who changed history, your list will be a lot longer than just Rani Lakshmibai.

So who is one woman you think more people should know about? We'll research and give her a shoutout in our podcast!

TwoXTalks by TwoXTopia | Because TwoXTopia was made for conversations like this.