Sunday, June 21, 2015
Fannie Farmer for $10 bill!
Might as well join in this dumb thing. The requirement is an American female, already dead, who "did something for Democracy".
Well, I have no idea what "Democracy" is, but if we arbitrarily call it something like "making life better for ordinary people", then Fannie is genuinely ideal.
She brought sanitary and nutritious and precise cooking to ordinary women. Her recipes were based on careful but practical measurement, which was a new concept at the time. This made it possible for poor women and new immigrants to cook decent and healthy food 'by the rules'. The skill of cooking was no longer a secretive family heirloom. Fannie also specialized in shaping diets for medical purposes such as diabetes.
Less seriously, Fannie meets the unspecified but empirical criterion of being ugly as sin. I expect she was a little less awful when young, but the existing pictures are just as horrible as Susan B. Anthony. Her picture has already been used in a banknote-style engraving, so you can see how unbearable the real thing would be.
It would be nice to have a bill that you could look at without flinching. I can think of three women who meet the nominal criteria and would also be easy on the eyes. Ann Dvorak, Karen Black, and Blanche Barrow. Of course that's not gonna happen.
And even less seriously, Fannie satisfies the post-modern taste for disability rights and trans-ness. She was a paraplegic after adulthood, and did all of her teaching from a sitting position. We don't have medical certainty, but biographies imply that her paralysis was 'hysterical' (as they said back then) or a 'conversion disorder' (as we say now). 
Labels: Metrology
¶ 9:30 AM
