Technology and Culture

Review Essay INVENTORS AND OTHER GREAT WOMEN: TOWARD A FEMINIST HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGICAL LUMINARIES JUDITH A. MCGAW Any American schoolchild can tell you that the history of technol­ ogy is the history of invention.1 And, as any SHOT member can at­ test, the focus on invention has not been confined to technology’s popular history. Until quite recently, by contrast, women’s inventive activity had few chroniclers. Indeed, as late as 1982, when I surveyed the literature on women and the history ofAmerican technology for Signs, although I was delighted to find an abundance of scholarship treating technology and women’s work both outside the home and within it, I was surprised to learn how little had been written about women’s relationship to that traditional staple of technological his­ tory: the history of invention. In one sense, of course, this is hardly surprising. Like many of the new histories that proliferated once the students of the sixties came of scholarly age in the seventies and eighties, much of women’s his­ tory emerged from the “new social history” with its concern for ordi­ nary people and everyday occurrences. It has been suspicious ofand, occasionally, even hostile to work that focuses on the elite or excep­ tional “great person.” Dr. Mc.Gaw is associate professor in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She thanks Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Mary Kelley, Karen Spilman, and Rita Wright for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this review, and Atsushi Akera for lending his expertise to some of her assessments. Opinions expressed are, of course, her own. ‘Books reviewed in this essay: Phyllis J. Read and Bernard L. Witlieb, The Book of Women’s Firsts: Breakthrough Achievements ofAlmost 1,000 American Women (New York: Random House, 1992); Anne L. Macdonald, Feminine Ingenuity: How Women Inventors Changed America (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992); Autumn Stanley, Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1993); Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek, Mothers ofInvention: From the Bra to the Bomb, Forgotten Women and Their Unforgettable Ideas (New York: William Morrow, 1987); Lynn Sherr andjurate Kazickas, Susan B. Anthony Slept Here: A Guide to American Women’s Landmarks. (New York: Times Books, 1994).© 1997 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/97/3801-0009JS0.1.00 214 Inventors and Other Great Women 215 More recently, though, times have changed. The youth of the six­ ties have arrived at midlife, many a young radical has achieved suc­ cess within the establishment, and the once-new social history is something current students receive as the teachings of the elders, something to be challenged. Then, too, we live in conservative times: war epics and tales of heroism are very much the fashion. Under these circumstances, feminists have also had good reason to seek role models and distinguished precursors. For example, recent fine biographies with special relevance for the history of technology in­ clude Susan Ware, Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Searchfor Mod­ em Feminism,2 Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America,3 and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise ofWomen’s Political Culture, 18301900 .4 As Anne L. Macdonald recounts in Feminine Ingenuity, feminist de­ bates over how best to acknowledge women’s technological creativity date at least to the 1876 centennial celebration’s planning stages. One camp, conventionally denominated radicals, emphasized “the prodigious output of unrecognized industrial women,” while their more conservative sisters argued that focusing on female inventors “would, in the long run, reflect well on women as a whole” (p. 76). Those who share the second sentiment can take heart that technolo­ gy’s history now includes three book-length treatments of women inventors, whereas none existed less than a decade ago. Moreover, unlike most books in our field, two of these, Macdonald’s book and Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek’s Mothers ofInvention, were treated to New York Times book reviews, while Autumn Stanley, author of Mothers and Daughters ofInvention, was interviewed by the Ymcswhen she...