Ruth Oldenziel

The Shoulders We Stand On and the View from Here: Historiography and Directions for Research

Our approaches to gender and technology are unabashedly interdisciplinary. Scholars studying technology and scholars explicating gender systems have provided us with a versatile set of tools for thinking about interactions of gender and technology in historical context. The articles collected in this special issue of Technology and Culture draw not only on the work of scholars within the community of this journal, but also on that of gender theorists, gender historians, and feminist sociologists of science and technology. In this essay we lay out a brief historiography, a map of the work we rely on. We gather it as an invitation to others to join and extend a complex conversation.

Versatile Tools: Gender Analysis and the History of Technology

This volume introduces a new generation of historical scholarship. Historians of technology have long encouraged each other to find ways to broaden studies of technology: to incorporate womens experience as well as mens; to maintain historical understandings of context and contingency; to resist narrowing studies of technology to the machine shop or the drafting table. These articles pursue the implications of such prescriptions, making use of recent theoretical literature on gender to explore connections between technology and culture in ways not fully possible before. Following such paths of inquiry makes clear this projects formidable scope. Gender ideologies play a central role in human interactions with technology, and technology in Western culture is crucial to the ways male and female identities are formed, gender structures defined, and gender ideologies constructed. Despite the pervasive importance of both gender and technology as parts of the human experience, scholars have only begun to explore their historical interrelationships. Seeking to facilitate a richer conversation about these issues, we address this introduction, and the historiographical essay following, to both historians of technology and scholars studying gender.

Boys and Their Toys: The Fisher Body Craftsman's Guild, 1930-1968 and the Making of a Male Technical Domain

La societe Fisher qui fabrique et commercialise des miniatures dautomobiles pour les enfants est a lorigine du fondement dun domaine technique masculin

Gender and scientific management – Women and the history of the International Institute for Industrial Relations, 1922‐1946

The relationship between the women’s reform movement and scientific management has been neglected because secondary literature has focussed primarily on class relations rather than on gender. Moreover, the neutral‐sounding formulations of scientific management discourse and the diversification of the women’s activism after suffrage has obscured linkages between both movements. Through the case study of the International Institute of Industrial Relations, through which many women reformers of different stripes found each other, the author argues that scientific management had a special appeal for women reformers and should prompt a reconsideration of the connections between gender and the scientific management movement.

Signifying Semantics for a History of Technology

It has been almost twenty years to the day since, as a young graduate student, I was confronted with a most disconcerting discovery: my approved thesis proposal, The Changing Meanings of Gender and Technology: Engineering in the U.S., 1880-1945, seemed to be based on quicksand. In 1984, the academic vocabulary had just been enlarged by Joan Scotts seminal article, Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis;1 and the notion of genderascategory seemed to provide a useful tool for examining not only the relations between men and women, but also the politics of representations of masculinity and femininity. I assumed, perhaps naively, that technology was grounded in a material reality, and thought I needed no theorization or explanation nothing beyond a handy working definition, in other words to begin my intellectual enterprise. The Oxford English Dictionary and the then-current fifteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica served as the most logical starting point. Indeed, the encyclopedias article Technology by Eugene Ferguson (1917-2004) and Melvin Kranzberg (1916-1996) provided the lemma I had not yet discovered that in the 1960s and 1970s these founding fathers of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) sought to establish not only a journal called Technology and Culture^ but also the history of technology as a new domain of knowledge. Feeling myself safely anchored in reality, I thus ventured

Decoding the Silence: women Engineers and Male Culture in the U.S. 1878-1951

Abstract The article takes womens own voices as its point of departure to decode womens struggles and strategies in entering engineering in the USA. Despite their pioneering effort, women engineers identified with male middle‐class values rather than with feminist ideals: their reluctance to articulate themselves and their reliance on a “borrowed identity” should be understood as part of their class identity. Looking at the institutional forces that shaped womens entry into engineering schools from the 1870s until the time they organized collectively into the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) in 1951, the author describes three pathways into engineering: patrimonial patronage, matrimonial sponsorship and corporate apprenticeship. Despite womens free access to primary and secondary education, American women engineers faced similar obstructions as did their European counterparts because academic skills did not guarantee employment on the shopfloor or in the field where male codes of hands‐on experience a...

Karen Johnson Freeze, 22 October 1945–19 March 2009: A Tribute

It was the American Karen Freeze (fig. 1) who wove the social fabric of our scholarly community in eastern, central, and southeastern Europe. Karen showed us that, despite received notions, this region has never been isolated from western Europe—even during the most divisive years of the cold war. She embodied the shared history of “eastern” and “western” Europe. Karen was the perfect person to help us include the eastern European experience—and scholars—in the Tensions of Europe Network. Her knowledge of eastern and western Europe came from both scholarship and experience. For extended periods, she lived and worked in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and Russia. She was fluent in Czech and Danish, and well-versed in Russian and German. Karen’s Ph.D. dissertation was entitled “The Young Progressives: The Czech Student Movement, 1887–1897” (Columbia University, 1974). Later, she taught modern eastern and central European studies and European women’s history at Brandeis University and Harvard University. The Czech Republic became a second home for Karen. In 1983, she met Pavel and Radka Světlíkovi, a Czech pastor and his wife, who became, like many others, part of her extended family. After the Velvet Revolution, the three collaborated on many projects. Together, they founded the Czech branch of the international charitable environmental organization A Rocha.