Lynn Gilbert's Blog

Thrilled that the portraits transcend culture and continents, and are featured by Q Daily.

Thrilled to be sandwiched between great photographers like Richard Avedon and Imogen Cunningham in the AIPAD 2018 preview by The Eye of Photography.

I'm honored that The Washington Post featured both the portraits and the book Particular Passions on Insight, their photography blog. You can find the original post here

As part of the installation at AIPAD, we created printed material to accompany the portraits, providing context and depth. Here is the frontispiece to the materials, introducing the women and the show.

Enter our Kindle give-away to enjoy
Grace Murray Hopper, a top Kindle Short Read.
Enjoy the short, (10 page) oral biography of Grace Murray Hopper, whose work with early computers transformed mathematical symbols into words, helping to usher in the era of technology.

Editorial Reviews

One of those rare, rare books that pick your life up, turn it around and point it in the right direction.
--K.T. Maclay

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A giant of the technology revolution, a pioneer who envisioned the first programming language forever changing the world, this diminutive, 73-year-old woman greeted me in her equally diminutive sub-basement office.

When I met Grace Murray Hopper in 1978 at the Pentagon, she had come out of retirement. I descended to her office in a freight elevator and walked down a long dimly lit corridor, where paint was peeling off the walls and golf carts were stacked with equipment.

The small ordinary door which opened onto her office, revealed a tiny space with two desks, one for her and one for her secretary. The shelves behind her desk were filled with books, a flag, a clock that went counter clockwise, and awards. One memento, a ceramic figurine, represented a gremlin that could get into computers. She found a moth in a machine and coined the term computer bug.

Several other cubicles were filled with a variety of computers, one large, others looking like typewriters. She showed me a picture of a 51-foot unit and said, “One day small computers will perform the same tasks as large ones.”

A strong, no-nonsense woman, dressed in a black pantsuit (unusual for women in the seventies) and with a net covering her neat white hair, Hopper was at ease, direct, and warm, with a faint smile. She spoke gently.

At the time the category “Women in Science” did not exist in the libraries and, of course, neither did the internet. I unearthed pioneering subjects in science by using the yellow pages and calling scientific associations and organizations.

Grace Murray Hopper’s brief oral biography is one of 42 chapters in my book “Women of Wisdom,” about women who blazed new paths in fields traditionally open only to men. At the end of our meeting, this extraordinary woman said, “Thank you for thinking of me.”

- Lynn Gilbert

Yale is honoring Grace Murray Hopper, the woman who created COBOL and helped usher in the age of technology, by naming a building after her. In sharing the news, they shared my portrait and her oral biography from my "Women of Wisdom" series on their website. I would love to share it with you.

Read the article here.

PARTICULAR PASSIONS recounts the rich oral histories of pioneering women of the twentieth century from the arts and sciences, athletics and law, mathematics and politics.

We share their journeys as they pursue successful paths with intelligence and determination, changing the world for the millions of women and men who were inspired by them.

These stories will captivate, educate, and inspire you. Please purchase these stories at Apple or Amazon.

"People don’t change overnight. It doesn’t matter what the law says. You can have a civil rights act, you can make abortion legal, but you still have to deal with what people feel and think. And that’s what it’s all about. You slowly have to persuade people and hope they are reasonable enough to see things in a logical, objective way." Billie Jean King -- Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times. For a limited time -- enjoy the oral biography of Billie Jean King from her days on the court.