(Spoilers here, guys, but not ones that actually affect anything about the plot, and it’s more truthfully about a subject I don’t want to put behind a cut.)
…and can we also talk about the fact she “gave it all up” for her kids and how goddamn sad that is?
Those boys may fear her but they better start showing a little more respect.
Can we talk about how utterly implausible it is that someone who was a genius in their field and loved it would choose to give that up, for anything? Then let’s talk about all the amazing sixty-something female professors in British academia who have changed their disciplines while also parenting.
In order not to explode with rage at this nonsense, I am rapidly constructing an alternate canon in which she may have told her family she gave it up for them, but in fact she was forced out due to sexism/shenanigans, and has been writing a brilliant mathematical treatise all these years while pretending to be ‘gardening’, ‘listening to Classic FM in the study’ and ‘attending Women’s Institute meetings’. Also, given where the show appears to be going with deceitful female characters I suggest that in season 4 she whips out this treatise and either uses her skills to defeat ‘Moriarty’ or it turns out she’s been working for him all along. Because she was bored.
can we also talk about how mathematics* in particular is a) an extraordinarily young field and b) incredibly male-skewed even today, leaving is going to mean “basically never coming back”, and it’s pretty much unthinkable for me that if a woman had fought her way into those ranks she’d give it up to the point that her genius children have no idea and no respect for her at all
Mrs H: I’m going to have a talk with your mother, I really am.
Sherlock: You can if you’d like, she understands very little.this is so inconceivable to me because when you’re that in love with math (or any other subject, presumably), it’s bound to come out in your every day life: you notice number patterns everywhere, you mentally take apart little number puzzles to figure out the mechanism behind them, you link ordinary things to different math concepts because it’s right there
like, almost certainly she would’ve tried to explain higher math to little mycroft entirely too early, because at that level yours & everyone else’s idea of what “basic knowledge” is different and you’re convinced that if you can just explain the right way, they’ll understand
basically they just threw out this “math genius”** line to make the holmes family interesting without doing any work to back it up, so thanks so much for respecting the viewers like that because there’s literally no evidence to back it up
*honestly “dynamics of combustion” sounds like a thermo book, but canon says math, so
**what field
Well yes, I understand everything you have said here, and believe me I would never, ever want any woman — any person — to deny their genius and abandon their calling. In a perfect world, this would never happen — in fact, it is never happened it would probably make this a perfect world.
But… when you have children with extraordinary needs — well. No one need to year all the “Been there, Done that”. There is parenthood (which is challenging enough) and then there are children who, through no fault of their own or yours, become your full-time job.
And in the ‘70’s? No question. The parent who would have given everything else up to deal with the special-needs children (and yes, that term is accurate here) would have been Mummy.
Guys, no. Like sublim8 says. This is a thing that women HAVE DONE. Women I know personally, and the mothers of people I’m friends with. This was a very harsh and common reality for women in math, engineering, technology, and hard sciences for many years, into the 1970s and even the 80s.
It isn’t just about what she had time for, either. If you were a woman in one of those fields (and even, to some extent, today) and you chose to get married and have a family, then you were often ‘punished’ by your peers—your colleagues, your fellow academics—because as far as THEY were concerned, you had chosen motherhood over your academic field. You stopped finding people who would work with you. You stopped finding people who would publish you. ESPECIALLY if you were a woman whose name had some cred behind it, you were seen as a traitor to your discipline.
Their mom ‘gave up’ mathematics, despite being a published author in her field, because by choosing to have children she was choosing a life path that other academics exiled her for.
And in that situation, it is not entirely unheard of for a woman to simply drop her work. Because sometimes it hurts too much. No one said she stopped thinking about it or stopped loving it or stopped teaching her boys about the delights of the patterns to be found in the world (in fact, given their knack and training in observation, I suspect that she very actively shared that love with them). But she stopped being a practicing scholar.
This is not some theoretical TV-world characterization. This is a thing that happened, and sometimes still happens, to real people.