The Personal is Archival: Researching and Teaching With Stories of Women Engineers, Scientists, and Doctors

Personal stories from archives are essential to understand the historical gendering of American science, medicine, technology, and innovation. Advocates promoted science, medicine, and engineering to young men, yet the twentieth-century brought increasing numbers of women into STEM education and employment. This paper illustrates the above by offering guidance to key archival and digital collections that show how women (individually and as groups) made places for themselves in modern science, technology, and medicine. Sources illustrate complex intersections for women simultaneously shaping professional and personal identities. This paper suggests how historians can reach beyond individual biographies to build broader analyses that deploy insights about personal experiences to parse cultural understandings of STEM and diversity. It models pedagogy foregrounding women’s lived experiences for classwork analyzing science, technology, and innovation. By integrating archival stories, educators can bridge gaps between STEM majors and other students through engaging dialogue about the past/present/future gendering of intellectual life and work

Men in the Food Lab, Women in the Engine Shop

Democracy\u27s colleges promised higher education opportunities to the sons and daughters of America\u27s working classes. Many land-grants had incorporated that promise in their degree programs by establishing majors aimed specifically at one sex. At their inception, home economics and engineering were among the disciplines considered discrete by gender. This bias remained well into the 1970s, about a hundred years later, before that supposed assumption came under strenuous attack. Bix\u27s essay provides a necessary corrective. She shows that a not negligible portion of both curricula contained members of the opposite sex almost from their beginnings. Students chose to major in what they wished rather than in some curriculum designated appropriate for them. These gender-benders did not escape notice. Sometimes they endured ridicule and questioning. But their successes in receiving the degrees of their choice proved the persistent flexibility of land-grants as well as their openness to change. By permitting students to take courses of study initially designed for members of the opposite sex, land-grants ultimately helped weaken barriers traditionally raised to keep men and women in separate spheres

Bessie Coleman: Race and Gender Realities Behind Aviation Dreams

OVER THE FIRST THREE DECADES FOLLOWING THE WRIGHT BROTHERS ’ TRIUMPH AT KITTY HAWK, AMERICANS ACROSS RACIAL AND GENDER LINES BECAME FASCINATED by the rich possibilities of flight. Especially after World War I (WWI), ordinary men and women were enraptured by what historian Joseph Corn has called “the gospel of aviation,” popular fascination with the marvelous, even magical, implications of flying. Many thrilled to the sense of leaving behind Earthbound limits, exploring suggestions that aviation had the power to cure disease, avert wars, and literally bring human beings closer to heaven

Girls Coming to Tech: A History of American Engineering Education for Women

Engineering education in the United States was long regarded as masculine territory. For decades, women who studied or worked in engineering were popularly perceived as oddities, outcasts, unfeminine (or inappropriately feminine in a male world). In Girls Coming to Tech!, Amy Bix tells the story of how women gained entrance to the traditionally male field of engineering in American higher education. As Bix explains, a few women breached the gender-reinforced boundaries of engineering education before World War II. During World War II, government, employers, and colleges actively recruited women to train as engineering aides, channeling them directly into defense work. These wartime training programs set the stage for more engineering schools to open their doors to women. Bix offers three detailed case studies of postwar engineering coeducation. Georgia Tech admitted women in 1952 to avoid a court case, over objections by traditionalists. In 1968, Caltech male students argued that nerds needed a civilizing female presence. At MIT, which had admitted women since the 1870s but treated them as a minor afterthought, feminist-era activists pushed the school to welcome more women and take their talent seriously.In the 1950s, women made up less than one percent of students in American engineering programs; in 2010 and 2011, women earned 18.4% of bachelor’s degrees, 22.6% of master’s degrees, and 21.8% of doctorates in engineering. Bix’s account shows why these gains were hard won.https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/history_books/1003/thumbnail.jp

Equipped for Life: Gendered Technical Training and Consumerism in Home Economics, 1920-1980

In tracing the development of technical education in American colleges and universities, historians have tended, perhaps inevitably, to concentrate on engineering departments. Those programs tell an important story: the evolution of specialized disciplines from practical, shop-oriented learning to theoretical science. Also, engineering schools were (as many still are) dominated by male students and faculty, who often connected technical expertise to masculinity

Steve Jobs versus the Victorians: Steampunk, Design, and the History of Technology in Society

Steampunk aficionados often appreciate fantastically designed submarines, robot dirigibles, and even modified Victorian-style laptops for their own sake, as expressions of technological fun and creative energy. But on closer analysis, steampunk literature, film, and art also supply excellent commentary on important issues regarding the past, present, and future of technologies. How should objects be designed? Should they follow established historically inspired lines, or try to establish an innovative language of modernity? Who shapes our machines, and what establishes our context of technological choice? What values does technology reflect and/or impose? Who decides and who benefits; as historian David Noble has asked, Progress for whom? Progress for what?

A Bibliography of Technology and the African-American Experience

Over the last three decades or so, the field of the history of technology has expanded tremendously in both breadth and depth. Researchers in the United States and other countries have produced literally thousands of books and articles, spanning a long chronological stretch from ancient civilizations up to the present. The growing sophistication of this work has established the history of technology as a recognized academic field, one firmly grounded in the broad discipline of history as a whole

Spectacle, Symbol, Strain, and Showpiece: Americans and Technology in the 1930s

In 1928, American voters elected Herbert Hoover to the presidency, giddy with his confident assertion that upcoming years would bring continued increases in national prosperity. Herbert Hoover, who trained as an engineer at Stanford University and made a fortune in the mining business, embodied the faith that many observers of the 1920s placed in America\u27s new machine age. Indeed, as secretary of commerce in the early 1920s, Hoover had personally promoted the expansion of commercial aviation, development of radio, and even experiments with television

Biology and ‘Created Nature’: Gender and the Body in Popular Islamic Literature from Modern Turkey and the West

A common theme in today\u27s popular Islamic literature is defending traditional gender roles against forces of change. When addressing audiences who are strongly influenced by Western modernity, such as in Turkey and some immigrant populations in the industrialized West, this literature often justifies its pronouncements by invoking the apparent authority of science, especially biology. Authors paint a sharp dichotomy between men and women in body, mind, behavior, and character, asserting that such differences are inherent and immutable. In assuming masculine biological superiority, such writings sometimes end up offering a quasi-Aristotelian notion of the body, echoing theories of anatomy and physiology dating back to the medical and biological treatises of ancient Greece. Casting women as universally predisposed, physically and psychologically, toward emotionality, weakness, domesticity, and motherhood, these authors define the nature of the body in such ways as to counter more liberal notions

Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women: Autobiographical Sketches by Elizabeth Blackwell

The history of women as healers dates back many centuries, long before the life of Elizabeth Blackwell. We i have evidence of women as healers and midwives in ancient Greece; for example, some women have funeral inscriptions describing them with the terms midwife and physician. Women\u27s practice of medicine was not universally welcomed; in Athens during the fourth century BCE, female healers were apparently accused of performing illegal abortions and banned from the profession. Stories suggest that one of the era\u27s most famous medical women, Agnodice, had to cut her hair and dress in men\u27s clothing to attend physicians\u27 classes, since her practice of medicine was illegal. Allegedly, when her secret was revealed, Agnodice had won such support among a high-status female clientele that those women blocked their husbands and friends from punishing her. According to some accounts, Agnodice was permitted to continue her work, and the laws were amended to allow women to study and practice medicine as long as they confined their treatments to a female clientele.https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/history_books/1007/thumbnail.jp