On the importance of history

Those who have been blessed with the opportunity to view the comedic brilliance that is Mean Girls may have thought the main character's name - Cady - was a strange choice for the lead role in a mainstream American film.

In fact it is in keeping with the film's theme of female empowerment; it shares its unusual spelling with the birth surname of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an 18th-century pioneer in the American women's rights movement.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Before she began her activism in the name of gender equality, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was also an abolitionist. She attended the International Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840, where she and every other female present were required to sit in a roped-off section where the men in attendance would not have to look at them. This incident was partly responsible for pushing her politically active spirit towards the issue of women's rights.

The Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840

Also present at the convention, and one of the only women to be included in the painting of the event, was one Baroness Byron. The name should sound familiar; she was the long-suffering wife of the poet Lord Byron, and mother of Ada, Countess Lovelace -- a brilliant and highly educated mathematician who is now regarded as the world's first computer programmer.

Annabella Byron, 1812

And that is how Mean Girls and Lord Byron conspired to make me consider the invention of the world's first analytical engine.