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1 Sustaining Gains: Re®ections on Women in Science and Technology in the Twentieth-Century United States Sally Gregory Kohlstedt Advances in science and technology played key roles in the two world wars and in a space exploration program for which the twentieth century will undoubtedly be remembered. In that century, too, industrialized nations gave unprecedented support to systematic inquiry and, in many cases, privileged experimental and quantitative research. We may or may not agree with the lists of outstanding discoveries of the twentieth century—including radio and television , laser and ¤ber optics, nuclear technologies, genetic research, geological plate tectonics, and a myriad of others that made it onto lists published at the end of 2000 (e.g., National Academy of Engineering et al. 2000). But we do need to understand where women and gender ¤t into these twentieth-century stories of scienti¤c and technological accomplishments and to produce new, inclusive, and more complex accounts that acknowledge both women’s achievements and the discrimination that they faced. It is critical to understand that gains may be eroded and that sustaining women’s opportunities still requires attentive activism . In the past three decades historians have provided us new stories, data, and analytical perspectives that reveal both the accomplishments and the disparities that accompanied technological change in women’s lives (Ogilvie and Harvey 2000). Some undercut conventional wisdom.For example,while many electrical appliances reduced the actual physical labor required, they also often brought, as the title of Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s book suggests, More Work for Mother (1983). The so-called labor-saving devices carried expectations that women would use these tools to produce more complex and sophisticated menus, take advantage of the ease of electrical irons to create more elaborately ruf®ed dresses, and maintain cleaner and more attractively decorated homes. Margaret Rossiter (1982, 1995) has closely examined the women who were involved in science in the United States in two volumes that will be classics and a resource for scholars to mine for years to come. Here, too, her subtitle Struggles and Strategies (1982) suggests that there was nothing automatic about women’s participation in science . Rossiter conceptualized her project in terms of employment issues (from education and training to promotion and recognition) in an account that balances the extraordinary stories of individual survival and accomplishment with the often challenging, even hostile, collective circumstances of women in science and engineering that kept the number of such stories relatively small. A brief history may reveal something of the patterns of women’s participation in science and technology, as well as the particularities of individual women ’s experiences as moderated by time, place, discipline, and personal circumstances . This history raises multiple issues relating to the gender identities of, and the gender inequalities faced by, academic women. Knowing how women in mathematics, science, and technology have historically positioned themselves in relation to the larger cultural setting should help us as we chart our own way. The speci¤c questions we ask and the analytical approaches that we take to current issues are signi¤cantly different from those taken by reformminded activists a century ago. But in many ways the concerns that they had about recruiting and retaining girls and women in science and technology also involved, in a fundamental way, the problems that we still seek to resolve. The fact that their solutions produced signi¤cant successes but also contained an undertow (Evans 2003) that sometimes constrained them and their successors is instructive as we measure our own sense of achievement and lay out shortand long-term goals and plans. This essay selectively dips into history, allowing us to see the “struggles and strategies”that frame our own experiences a century later. What should emerge as particularly compelling is the extent to which women in scienti¤c ¤elds consciously forged a path that they hoped would bring advantages to the women who came after them. Since I am a historian of science, I am better at reviewing the past than forecasting the future—but, as an activist, I am convinced that we must create personal and collective visions of what we want to accomplish in our own immediate environments and then raise our sights to think ahead about what might, indeed must, happen locally, nationally, and globally. Women of Distinction While women have been part of science and technology throughout history , in the late nineteenth century professionalizing practices circumscribed previous amateur activities even as they rationalized meritocracy and certi¤cation as...

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