I only buy the Sunday Times for one reason. The puzzle page. The combination of the cross fit of crosswords and the mental gymnastics of the Giant Sudoku can keep me occupied for hours, and while the rest of the paper is consigned to the scrap heap within minutes of its opening, Heaven help anyone in the house who even dares to move the hallowed puzzle page.

In amongst these language and mathematical challenges is something called Brain Test, by Trivia Tom. There are always twenty questions, and I feel ever so highly educated when I get them correct, and even cleverer when I justify my excuses for the wrong answer or when I have no answer at all. I wasn’t even born then. Hate Opera at the best of times. Stupid Sport to waste time on knowing, and of course: Who the hell knows that rubbish anyway?

This Sunday, August 9th, and fittingly Woman’s Day, I felt more than a little embarrassed by my lack of knowledge and even more ashamed by my lack of consciousness.

A question floored my ego, and even more so, my justifications for not knowing found no solid ground whatsoever.

16. “Valentina Trechekova (sic) was the first woman to do what?

1. Break the sound barrier

2. Go into space

3. Reach the South Pole

4. Summit Mount Everest

I had no clue.

And worse, was that I didn’t know a single name of any woman who had accomplished those things, so I couldn’t even narrow my odds for a lucky guess. I knew every man though, as the names Chuck Yeager, Yuri Gagarin, Sir Edmund and Amundsen rolled out of the filing systems of the left brain of my male dominated library.

I couldn’t say I wasn’t born then. All of these feats had been accomplished long before I was born – the last one being Yuri’s foray into space in 1961, some eight years before my birth. I could not deny that stories of Human endeavor hadn’t fascinated me since the day I could pick up a Guinness Book of World Records, let alone read one. I had no excuse for not knowing.

Why were these efforts of men so widely known and celebrated, yet the women who accomplished these extraordinary endeavours were much like the rest of my Sunday Times – largely tossed aside for the recyclers.

As this epiphany of significant realization sunk in, I thought too, that in fact these women may well have had far greater hurdles to overcome than even the feats themselves.

How much societal noise would Jackie Cochran have had to endure in her pursuit of breaking the sound barrier? And how many more barriers did she break besides the one of sound amidst many a deaf ear?

Did Ann Bancroft suffer more cold shoulders and frosty receptions from potential funders than the icy weather she overcame to be the first women to have stood at both poles as late as 1993? That is more than eighty years after the well documented race between Scott and Amundsen, meaning that only a handful of people alive when Amundsen won, would still have been alive to witness Bancroft’s own triumph.

Was the height of Mount Everest just another step in the journey of a hundred other hurdles which Junko Tabei had to climb to stand tall on the summit of Everest on the 16th May 1975?

Had I known of these three incredible women, I would have known that Valentina Tereshkova (Correct spelling, Trivia Tom) was indeed the first woman in space.

I wonder how many closed-minded males she would have met before enjoying the freedom of open space?

Steve Hall

In honour of all women in South Africa and beyond. And not just because it’s women’s month.

(Source: Wikipedia)