During my undergrad senior year, a professor told me I should pursue a PhD because as a woman, I would have no trouble winning grants. Of course, the prejudice women face in such fields goes the other way too. That first week, we celebrated a birthday with a group lunch at Hooter’s of all places, and I remember my new coworkers looking around the table before someone finally said, “Maybe we’ll need to pick a new restaurant next time.” When I first joined my work group, I was the only woman.

There aren’t as many secretary positions as there used to be.” Then there was the freshman physics TA who told me, “I don’t know what woman are doing in this class. After I answered, “aerospace engineering,” he replied, “Oh, so you’re going to be a flight attendant.” I remember a friend’s neighbor asking me what I was going to study at university the fall. Raised to believe I could do anything, this was an animosity I didn’t foresee when I selected engineering as a major. (Of course, I would never condone an illicit career in real life.) As an aerospace engineer and a flight controller in Mission Control, I am grateful to the generations before me who knocked down so many barriers and enabled my career.īut today’s society still carries expectation and I know what it is to be underestimated. I’m blessed to live in a century, and country, where the opportunities afforded to women are nearly boundless. And in a field where clandestine activity is required, a female assassin probably used being underestimated to her advantage. While outlining the novel I set in Tudor England, I realized 16 th century society would have shared my same expectations in this regard. What possessed Locusta to reach so far beyond expectation, to fulfill her sadistic cravings with poison? Where would she have learned her craft? How would she have honed the alchemy? The musings manifested in my historical fiction thriller, Apricots and Wolfsbane. My mind pondered what had motivated a female from Gaul to pursue such violence in AD 54.

Even as a modern, non-traditional gal, it contradicted my expectation.

I first came across that fact last fall: the world’s first serial killer was a woman. More surprisingly, the world’s first serial killer belonged to the more “fragile” and “demure” gender. A woman wrote the first computer program.

Men have accomplished most “firsts” in history, but there are some notable exceptions.

Apricots and Wolfsbane by K.M. Pohlkamp