Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science and Technology (review)

Toys and Tools in Pink is based on the author’s previously published essays on obstacles to recruiting women into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Carol Colatrella asserts that “This book applies critical theories elaborated by feminist critics, narratologists, and social studies of science scholars to identify particular constellations of narrative reference of gender, science, and technology” (p. 25), mainly through an analysis of novels and films. She describes her objective on page 6: “Analyzing texts about women, science and technology prepares women for working in fields traditionally dominated by men and could help reduce bias and negative attitudes toward women.” No evidence is adduced in support of this hypothesis.

Of the 188 pages of text, 141 are devoted to plot summaries of books, movies, and television shows, which range from classics of Western literature by Ovid, Balzac, Zola, Mary Shelley, Hawthorne, and Melville to children’s cartoons, with sparse representation in between. No author can be expected to survey all of Western literature and film, even that subset which could be construed as representing women’s interactions with science and technology. Still, if there is some guiding principle behind Colatrella’s choice of examples, it entirely escaped this reviewer. Colatrella says that she is excluding most science fiction from her analysis (p. 5), but then goes on to devote nine pages (63–72) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). There is no mention of other nineteenth-century portrayals such as Margaret Oliphant’s feisty and resourceful seamstress in Kirsteen (1890), Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1866), with its gas-poisoner arch-villainess, or Charlotte Yonge’s aspiring young doctor Janet Carey in Magnum Bonum (1879). Similarly, female characters in the television series iCarly, Grey’s Anatomy, and Power-puff Girls are discussed and analyzed, but the evolution of women’s roles in the Star Trek series from the 1960s to the 1990s is mentioned briefly only twice in the text (pp. 162 and 187).

Colatrella calls our attention to a 1991 film, Eve of Destruction, in which a robot created by a woman scientist goes on a rampage, enabled by its lack of an “off” switch (pp. 162–63), but does not mention Data’s daughter Lal in Star Trek: the Next Generation, who, unlike human children, could be stopped in her tracks with a switch on her neck. Inexplicably, the female robot in the iconic film Metropolis (1927) is not mentioned, nor is the cyborg Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager. The examples chosen for the “Babe Scientist” chapter (pp. 108–37) do not include any Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica characters. “Max,” the female cyborg of Dark Angel, is also among those missing from this chapter, as is the nefarious neuroscientist Rachel Palmquist in Richard Dooling’s 1998 novel Brain Storm.

The most irritating aspect of Colatrella’s work to a historian of technology, however, is that while women in science and technology are her theme, neither “science” nor “technology” is defined, even in very loose terms. Anything containing computer chips appears to be “technology” in this author’s world, and refrigerators, typewriters, and cameras are included, but sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, food processors, automobiles, and even firearms are not so privileged. Women control “technology” when they fly aircraft, build robots, look through telescopes, or make telephone calls, but not when they cook, drive cars, carry guns, make films, or write books.

Another missing definition undermines Colatrella’s central message that analysis of negative gender stereotypes in popular culture will somehow help repair the “leaky pipeline” of young women in STEM careers (pp. 1, 14, 27). What exactly is a “negative gender stereotype”? If popular culture is a major culprit in keeping women out of science, we must then explain why two centuries of negative stereotypes of male scientists, engineers, and doctors have failed to discourage young men from entering these professions. Apparently, the ambition of boys to enter the...