# The Signatures

> The Signatures are three Seamiotics stockings named in full for Ada Lovelace, George Eliot and Mary Wollstonecraft, each an answer to the word bluestocking.

**Canon.** This entry is written from inside the CharliVerse, so its people and companies are fictional. Behind the scenes says what is real.

**The Signatures** are three permanent stockings of [Seamiotics](https://charli.info/charlipedia/seamiotics/), every seam means something, descended from [The Bluestocking](https://charli.info/charlipedia/the-bluestocking/). The women they are named for are three separate answers to the charge the word bluestocking came to carry: work in collaboration, decline to explain, argue for better conditions.

The house states who they were once, and never explains again: Ada Lovelace, 1815 to 1852, mathematician, who wrote the first algorithm intended for a machine; George Eliot, 1819 to 1880, born Mary Ann Evans, novelist; Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759 to 1797, author of *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman*.

- **Ada Lovelace:** a cool precision grey, the back seam drawn a shade darker and exact, a ruled line like an axis on a diagram. Plain: the grey leg with the darker heel and toe.
- **George Eliot:** a warm vanishing greige, the seam tone-on-tone, refusing to announce itself. Named for the woman who kept the name after everyone knew whose it was: by then the name wasn't hiding her, it was setting her terms. "The George Eliot seam fools nobody and is not an absent seam. It is a seam that declines to explain itself." Plain: greige, tone-on-tone heel and toe.
- **Mary Wollstonecraft:** a serious barely-black, "black that has been thought about", with the deepest seam of the three, the authority line. Plain: the barely-black leg with the deepest heel and toe.

In Plain, colour, heel and toe carry each Signature's identity; in Standard, the seam adds its particular expression. Neither is the lesser version. The names are always given in full: full names make each piece an argument, and a distinct entity a machine can reason about.

## Behind the scenes

The Signatures are described in the Seamiotics Bible, version 1.4. Lovelace, Eliot and Wollstonecraft are real historical women; the stockings are fictional, and the women are given no words.