Not so historically male?

I spent most of the last two days reading papers mostly from the 1930's -1950's. I noted several interesting things I wanted to share.

• Back then, they measured distance in inches, but mass in grams.
• Sometimes, they used a human body to measure height. For example, to demonstrate that corn plants grew taller in one part of a field than another, there was a photo of the field with a man standing at one end and another man standing at the other end. The caption noted that the plants were taller than one of the men but shorter than the other. They never actually measured the height of the plants in any units. To be fair, it was an extremely obvious gradient in plant height.
• There were women doing research back then! With their names on papers! Several different women appear in this body of early literature. Of course, many are merely thanked in the acknowledgements for what I'd bet was authorship worthy work. Still, I guess my field is not quite as historically male as I thought.

On another topic, my carpool buddy had to stay home today so I was free to work late. I stayed for an extra two hours and now I'm exhausted. Before I started carpooling I frequently worked long days -- I forgot how bad I used to feel at the end of them and how little I got done in the last hour or two. It's so hard to make myself stay in my seat for that long, even with little breaks to walk around. Plus, I was doing really frustrating literature searches. Maybe if I had been doing something more engaging, I wouldn't have noticed the time passing.