misbehaving.net

"prehistoric woman-targeted gadgets"

Today, Boing Boing posted a link to an article about women's gadgets in the 1920s and 1930s. It's fascinating to see how marketers have targeted women over the years.

In the above image, "From 1928 to 1933, Kodak manufactured several colored and deco-styled cameras that were designed to attract women. Among the camera kits designed was the Vanity Kodak Ensemble outfit, which included a color-coordinated camera, lipstick holder, compact, mirror and change purse in a fitted case."

Dignifying Science & Rosalind Franklin

BoingBoing posted two great entries about women in science today that i thought others would enjoy:

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Women scientists' unsung stories in comic-book form

"Rosalind Franklin's story is one of many great and unsung women scientists' stories recounted in the brilliant, Eisner-nominated comic book Dignifying Science, which features the work of Jen Sorensen, Anne Timmons, Ramona Fradon, Marie Severin and others, and the stories of scientists like Marie Curie, Emmy Noether, Lise Meitner, Barbara McClintock, Birute Galdikas, and Hedy Lamarr."

You can read the first three pages.

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Rosalind Franklin: Crick and Watson's uncredited collaborator

Many of you wrote in response to the Crick obit from earlier today to remind us of the unsung and uncredited hero of DNA, Rosalind Franklin. Here's what Allison says about her:

It is past due that Dr. Rosalind Franklin received credit for actually being the scientist who demonstrated the helical nature of DNA. Her crystallography was crucial to the subsequent elucidation of DNA structure and replication. Her research was used without her knowledge or permission.

Dame Stephanie Shirley and F International

Datatid, a Norwegian computer magazine, wrote several times about Stephanie Shirley - or 'Steve' as she liked to call herself according to Datatid - in the 1980s.
Dame Shirley started F International in England in 1962 - a company for programmers and computer consultants who wanted (needed?) to work from home. In 1987 F International had 1100 employees (or associates?) - most of them women, and 75% worked from home.

It's an amazing story and I would like to know more about this. I only found one presentation of her, and it seems to have been written for Who’s Who 2002.

Anyone who knows anything about this company or Shirley?

On This Day in Women's History

Over on Alas, A Blog this month, they're running a daily feature of On This Day in Women's History. Great reading...take a look!

Liminal spaces

A friend (by my personal definition) of mine, after reading a biography of Dorothy Hodgkin, wonders about liminal spaces:

In terms of the history of science and medicine in the C20th, what we see is the emergence of new areas and disciplines, which didn't fit into accepted models (cf Hodgkin's problem of where crystallography could possibly 'fit' into the existing Oxford sciences set-up). They didn't provide safe 'jobs for the boys' so they tended to attract people who couldn't play the 'getting on in a solid career game', because they weren't, for reasons of gender, class, ethnicity, political views, educational history, or all of the above, going to be let anywhere near that playing field.

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Then these fields become more established and start setting rules and boundaries and terms of admission and also, quite often, rewriting their histories to produce a solid patriarchal genealogy, trying to un-inscribe their complex, fluid and unorthodox origins. This process doesn't however, usually allow for the inclusion as 'the right people to be doing this' of various marginalised groups... and may even be intended specifically or by implication to exclude them.

What say ye? Is this true of today's high-tech also? Where are the liminal spaces, and are there women in them? Does high-tech have formerly liminal spaces, rewritten history? Is this part of the story behind accidental techies?

history, credit and identity

Like many students of computing, i was inspired by Vannevar Bush from my earliest days. "As We May Think" and follow-up writings on the Memex helped define a century of thought and computational effort.

Yet, as Michael Buckland is uncovering, much of Bush's fame is misplaced. Bush's seminal ideas around the Memex were actually developed and patented over a decade before Bush by a Jewish chemist named Emanuel Goldberg.

Goldberg's role in history was eclipsed in part because of his identity as a Jewish German man. (The German's did not respect the thought of the Jews and post-WWII, the world did not respect the thought of the Germans.) He is not alone. Only recently has Ada Lovelace been given credit for her contributions to scientific computing; she was eclipsed by Charles Babbage because of her identity as a woman.

I wonder how many other inventions in technology are not properly credited to their creators because of their identity.

digitales 2003

Digitales2003 is calling for stories and texts about gender and technology. Different stories:

One often hears that girls are not interested in technical things because they are too cold and too systematic, but what about telling them that one of the pioneers of computing wanted to create a machine that would enable him to contact his lost loved one and that he died like Snow White after eating a poisoned apple : isn't that a beautiful fairy tale?

That's certainly a different way of telling Turing's story. Do you think it would really help women in technology? (via Hilde)