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Technology and Culture 43.1 (2002) 175-177



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Book Review

Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges: Comparing the History of Women Engineers, 1870s-1990s


Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges: Comparing the History of Women Engineers, 1870s-1990s. Edited by Annie Canel, Ruth Oldenziel, and Karin Zachmann. London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999. Pp. xix+290. £30.

This study of the entry of women into engineering in Euro-American culture is important for both historians of engineering and scholars investigating gender and technology. The essays focus on "the specific circumstances under which women entered engineering" (p. 3) in Austria, Britain, [End Page 175] France, Germany, Greece, Russia, Sweden, and the United States, and show that in all these countries women's participation in engineering professions increased over time. In most of them, however, women tended to cluster in chemistry and architecture and were excluded from mining, electrical, and mechanical engineering.

Women and supportive men employed several strategies that varied according to sociopolitical system, culture, and historical circumstances. Women's movements and feminist organizations, industrialization and growth fueled by mass consumption, and mobilization during the world wars appear to be a crucial elements in all cases. Where private enterprise was strong, women allied themselves with powerful men or entered engineering through the influence of fathers and husbands. In some fields they gained access to new disciplines before gender coding solidified. Some governments forced engineering schools to open their doors to women, sometimes women created separate schools. Centralized government successfully promoted women engineers in East Germany (perhaps partly because Russian occupiers were able to force the educational system to accept women) but failed in Austria. Androcentric and patriarchal institutions (engineering societies, educational elites, gendered systems of prestige, hegemonic ideology) as well as women's social roles (as mothers, housekeepers, caretakers for young, old, and ill) and gender roles (demands for "feminine deportment") generally worked against women's participation.

This brief review concentrates on two of the book's essays, the first being Karin Zachmann's account of East Germany, where Soviet officials actively worked to open education and engineering to women and excluded classes. The process was slow because of invested androcentric academic interests and perhaps national resistance to Soviet plans. Yet the proportion of women technicians and engineers is impressive. Zachmann discusses the key expectation that women are responsible for housework and care of children and adult dependents, while, as women have entered engineering, men have not proportionally increased their housework or care of dependents. In centrally planned economies, however, good day care was widely available. Though little discussed by any of the other contributors to this volume, women's "double day" is apparently a major cause for women exiting engineering careers in the United States.

The second essay is that of Boel Berner, who sets her analysis of "genderization of professional engineering" (p. 75)--using the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm as the case study--in the theoretical framework about technology and masculinity provided by Brian Easlea, Carolyn Merchant, and David Noble. Berner relys on anthropological concepts provided by Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron, Basil Bernstein, and Ralph Turner. Men graduates of elite schools distinguished themselves from women, but more importantly from other men; theoretical science and mathematics helped maintain a "public hierarchy between men" (p. 87). [End Page 176] The educational system produced a "tough" or even abusive schedule that only "real" men could survive. If I understand Berner correctly, this military model for engineering helped create homo-social bonds, and she has partially explained one of my findings about the Colorado School of Mines: actions that would now result in charges of assault were commonly part of students' experience up to the 1960s. Some CSM graduates valued these experiences, while for others they were so traumatic that they would not discuss them even forty years later. Obviously, when women enter a zone of masculinity, male gender socialization will be disrupted or changed.

This book provides a great start, but let me offer a wish list for others who may follow up: Essays about women or gender in...

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