Equality education: tell your child that a woman invented Wi-Fi

Tell your daughter that if we have Wi-Fi today it was thanks to a woman, an actress and an engineer with a marvelous brain and extraordinary beauty: Hedy Lamarr (Austria, 1914). Tell your daughter that the queen Juana I of Castile She was not crazy but suffered the despotism of her father, her husband and her son. Tell your daughter that Marie CurieA two-time Nobel laureate, in 1906 she became the first woman to set foot in a classroom at the Sorbonne University as a professor. Tell your daughter that the Prado Museum exists thanks to a culturally restless woman, the queen Isabel de Braganza. The girls of the 21st century need references, so tell them the lives of all of them.

The journalist Nieves Conconstrina (Madrid, 1961), which every afternoon at SER’s ‘La Ventana’ tells us the story as they had never told us, has just published ‘History in trouble’ (Montena), where he rescues fundamental international figures from culture, research and politics. Among the protagonists, there are men, like Galileo Galilei, who discovered the satellites of Jupiter in 1610; or Harvey Milk, the politician who in the 70s of the 20th century fought for the rights of homosexuals in the United States. But also many women. Logically.

Conconstrina, who has no children or nephews, assures that she has not written a history book for children. “I have written this book as I always do, as I know how to do it & rdquor ;, admits the journalist, who always bathes with humor and irony what is studied in a thoughtful way in cabbages. The publisher is the one that has made sure that ‘The story in distress’, flooded with vignettes and with a very colloquial language, is an ideal book to read at home. To read to your son and daughter. To discover that history has not only been signed by great men but also great women.

In ‘The History in Trouble’ he talks about the gay rights, of the cruelty of king cress (Fernando VII), of the abuses and ignorance of the Church, of the machismo in science, from the novel that is the Bible & mldr; Politics, wow. Can we and should we talk politics with our little ones? “Of course & rdquor ;, replies the author.

“Boys and girls are smarter than they seem. You have to speak to them directly. Adapting the language, okay. But you don’t have to hide things. Why can’t the policy be explained to them? Everything in life is political, even the bollard on the street. Children constantly ask why they want to know. Let’s tell them things & rdquor ;, he adds.

The daughter of practically illiterate parents but determined that their two daughters study, Concostrina began to search books and stories for answers to everything. And he found them. “You have to read so that they don’t fool you & rdquor;, she comments after remembering how, in her schoolgirl days, a priest -Father Ángel- gave her “a tremendous host & rdquor; when he told her that he had no sin to confess.

The journalist -who learned the trade during the 16 years that she worked in ‘Diario 16’ doing journalism of “street and bars” – insists that parents speak openly about politics. And that they use certain words. “In the 21st century there are no neo-Nazis, they are Nazis. There is no new fascism, it is the same old fascism, that of the Hitler youth& rdquor ;, criticize. Concostrina, in fact, captured the war and postwar life in one of her books, ‘Antonia’, a tribute to her mother and all the women who suffered hunger, scabies, lice and the black market in the 1940s .

In ‘History in trouble’ you can see the critical spirit of Concostrina with the church, the monarchy, the right-wing parties, the recalcitrant machismo & mldr; When he talks about the Italian, Renaissance, astronomer and mathematician Galileo, for example, he remembers how he collided with the church and the “Bullshit like cathedrals & rdquor; what does the bible say. In the chapter dedicated to Marie Curie he explains how such an eminence – he discovered radium and polonium – was rejected to enter the Academy of Sciences from France. He also mentions how the engineer and Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr- who patented a wireless system that constantly changed frequency and which, over the years, ended up being used to develop GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi networks- suffered the unbearable machismo of his husband and a whole society that did not give him the recognition he deserved in life.

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Read ‘The Troubled Story’ to your sons and daughters. We, at home, have already started. My 6-year-old son already knows that the one who invented Wi-Fi (the most important thing in the world for him) was a woman. It’s not bad at all.