HURRICANES, SHIPS AND CRATERS ON THE MOON

Week 24: Notes

What is always or frequently named after or in honour of women and what isn’t, but should be, is the thread running through this programme.

Liz Skilton, a professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who specialises in the history of disaster and human response, tells of the WWII origins of why storms used to only have women’s names. Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed New Orleans in 2005 and Martha Teichner, a US-American television news correspondent reports on the struggle of its residents to rebuild it ever since. From Casual Navigator, a harbour pilot, we find out why ships traditionally were named after women. This is followed by three famous female ships celebrating a birthday party. Leila Zammar, who teaches Renaissance Studies at the Loyola University Chicago, is one of many fighting for more Italian streets to be named after women, a campaign that inspired others around the world. Teachers of the Door Step School in Mumbai started a programme celebrating slum kids who excel in school, by naming streets after them.

Saint Lucia, an island in the West Indies, is the only country in the world named after a woman, compared to 22 named after men, according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_named_after_people. But women on Saint Lucia face many severe problems, as Catherine Sealys, leader of the advocacy group Raise Your Voice Saint Lucia, recounts in the context of Women’s Day 2020.

On the moon six craters are named after women, one of them after Williamina Fleming, (1857 –1911), a Scottish astronomer, who lived and worked in the US. The programme ends with Stephanie E. Myers, US-American author, film producer and civic advocate examining the life of Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, (1744 –1818), queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain who has at least two cities in the US (Charlotte in North Carolina and Charlottesville in Virginia) named after her along with many others in places such as British Columbia, Canada, the Falklands and New Zealand.