A slightly belated acknowledgement of a birthday yesterday of Kathleen Lonsdale, who discovered the hexagonal structure of benzene, an image burned into the brain of anyone who has ever studied organic chemistry.

(Twas my misfortune to do so in an agricultural science degree at Sydney Uni – I crammed vast number of chemical structures for the exam and forgot them all five minutes later, but not this one. It was a test of rote learning and nought else.)

But I won’t hold that against Kathleen, for as I learnt from Penny’s always excellent Born on This Date email – a new great woman every day… she was a true pioneer in women’s science.

Wikipedia has a short but solid account and there’s more of the chemistry here.

(Which reminds me I learnt today, from a source I can’t now recall that if you type “info” – without the quotes – after any search in Google it will give you as the first, separated, listing, Wikipedia.

Interesting that trends in the West (latest report out from Australia suggests that the next official figure will put the number of married women at 45% of the total) are being followed by China – where the age of marriage is rising significantly.

Chinese women have been delaying wedlock over the past decade and the average age for a woman to marry is now 24, a research report has found.
Since 1990, Chinese women have married between at 21.9 to 22.8 years old and the age was 22.6 in 2000, says a report published by China Youth and Children Research Center, an institution for helping the government set youth policies.

A cause for celebration – more free women in the world…

And in case you think that is extreme, landing in my inbox this morning is an account of how it used to be, from France in 1772:

The complainant [Marie-Françoise Bertaud, linen merchant in Paris, who is seeking a legal formal separation]… in marrying sir Gagneur, had no other intention that to run her business with her husband as they had agreed. Sir Gagneur, far from performing as he had promised his wife in helping her run her business, a month after their marriage left her and went to live with a girl nicknamed the Hungarian, who was in sir Restier’s troupe of tumblers, at the St-Germain fair.
One evening it got into sir Gagneur’s head to bring his concubine home to sup there; the complainant, his wife, opposed this, not wanting to admit this concubine to her table; the sir Gagneur mistreated his wife in hitting her and then drawing his sword against her…

It goes on with an astonishing familiar tale – hubbie comes and goes, mostly goes, to the Hungarian and a succession of other women (the tally is four illegitimate children with different women, frequently beats and threatens his wife, she tries again and again to make the marriage work.
(From the excellent Sundries.)