Famous Women, Banknotes, and Online Abuse

Oxford, England — Last night, as I dined in Somerville College, my host during a visit to the University of Oxford, a chain of thoughts led me to reflect on the linguistic abuse women endure on social media.

Like Caroline Criado-Perez, for example. She was a victim of highly focused Twitter hostility in 2013.

“Die you worthless piece of crap,” said one tweet. “I will find you and you don’t want to know what I will do when I do,” wrote a troll; “you’re pathetic, kill yourself before I do.”

“Ya not that gd looking. To rape u be fine” said another message. “Rape?! I’d do a lot worse things than rape you!!” said another. And so it continued, sometimes at a rate of 50 tweets per hour, from numerous accounts, threatening rape and murder. She was terrified, almost to the point of a breakdown.

What had she done to attract this torrent of hate? She ran a successful social-media campaign to persuade the Bank of England to put the image of a woman, Jane Austen, on a redesigned £10 note, replacing Darwin. (The planned redesign of the £5, replacing social reformer Elizabeth Fry by Winston Churchill, will leave no woman other than Queen Elizabeth II on any British banknote by late 2016.)

In Britain you can be jailed for tweets. A defense based on constitutional protections for political speech is out of the question: no written constitution, no Bill of Rights. Online abuse is just menacing behavior, and illegal.

The threats against Criado-Perez were largely due to two baby-faced grinning losers in their twenties: a jobless recluse living on state benefits, and a drunk repeatedly arrested for public disorderliness (a woman, surprisingly; she also faced a charge of assaulting a policeman while awaiting trial for the Twitter abuse). Both were prosecuted and convicted in 2014: One got eight weeks’ jail, the other got 12.

On the wall above the high table in Somerville are oil paintings of the former principals of the college. All are women. The leadership tradition did not change when the undergraduate body became co-ed. Like the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Somerville is not an all-female community, just a community in which women’s work is taken seriously. Its name honors the self-taught Scottish mathematician and scientist Mary Somerville (1780-1872). But she was not an alumna; she was never allowed to get anywhere near attending a university. Neither her parents nor her first husband, Samuel Greig, approved of her studies. She educated herself in secret, poring over Euclid’s Elements and Newton’s Principia.

Luckily, her second husband proved more supportive of her intellectual ambitions, and she began to move in circles where she could meet scientists who appreciated her abilities, and publish articles and books. Laplace wrote to her to say that she was one of only three women who had truly understood his work. The others were the astronomer Caroline Herschel “and a Mrs. Greig of whom I know nothing.” (Amusingly, this “Mrs. Greig” was Mary Somerville, back when she bore her first husband’s surname, so Laplace was actually talking about just two women.)

I think Mary Somerville would be pleased with the college that bears her name today. And perhaps also by another recent development. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), one of the three banks licensed to print Scottish banknotes, recently ran a Facebook referendum to decide which of three distinguished Scots should appear on a Scottish banknote: the physicist James Clerk Maxwell, the civil engineer Thomas Telford, or Mary Somerville.

Alumnae of the eponymous college participated eagerly, and Mary forged ahead, ending with 4,100 votes. Then, with only hours to go, votes for Telford began to flood in, and he surged to apparent victory at 5,100. RBS, smelling a rat, asked Facebook to investigate. The massive pro-Telford vote had emanated in huge clumps from sites in India and Bangladesh. Someone had paid click farms to boost the Telford vote and make sure a woman didn’t win.

RBS ruled this illegitimate, and declared Mary Somerville the winner. In late 2017 she will appear on a new RBS £10 note, Internet trolls or no Internet trolls.

One might wonder why proposals to recognize famous women through images on banknotes should provoke such fury. But we might be giving the trolls too much credit. By all accounts, Criado-Perez’s attackers are barely capable of holding reasoned political views. One seems to have taken up misogynistic trolling simply to provoke; the other’s excuse was that she was drunk.

They didn’t rank Austen below Darwin; I doubt they could say anything much about the work of either. But like Tay, the catastrophically misbehaved Microsoft chatbot, they were easily corrupted by the nastier nutballs of the Twittersphere into tweeting slurs and obscenities — which at root weren’t even sincere. There’s a difference between genuine misogynists and idiots aping them.