Science on the Home Front: American Women Scientists in World War II (review)

World War II has had an undeniable hold on America's cultural consciousness. It has seemed to be the pivotal moment at which American culture was formed anew—a moment rhetorically divorced from the shabby threads of Depression-era culture that had preceded the war, and uniquely predictive of the scientific and technological, the "rational," future that was to come. Whatever the elements of truth contained in this collectively held belief in the power of World War II to reshape American culture, the claims made about this period are too often overstated, and consequently those narratives that do not shy away from, and instead delve deeply into, the complexities of the period produce welcome disturbances to the historical canon.

Jordynn Jack's study of women in science in the World War II period is one such disturbance. Jack's study affords a glimpse into a wartime culture that, in spite of conventional historical expectations, continued to be unreceptive toward women at work, pace for the iconic Rosie the Riveter. As Jack effectively demonstrates, the supposed "new" world created by World War II marked neither a rupture in gender relations in the workplace nor a discrete point of origin for a new feminist ideology, but rather only a "fleeting shift" that ultimately served to recapitulate, not challenge, the deep-rooted, long-standing conservatism of American culture (p. 2). Jack's shrewd positioning of her analysis of working women specifically within the confines of scientific culture honors the real expansion of science into public life taking place in this period while simultaneously challenging the limitations of our view of this science, as chiefly illustrated and problematized by the atomic bomb. Though Jack does include a case study of women physicists working on the Manhattan Project, that study stands alongside three other case studies of women working in other "scientific" arenas (psychology, anthropology, and nutrition). Taken together, these four case studies offer a complex starting point, both for the analysis of the constraints faced by women in World War II and its immediate aftermath and, more tacitly, of the nature and meaning of science in this same period.

Taking a kind of discourse analysis as her methodological entrée into her study, Jack's narrative proceeds by looking at the rhetorical frameworks that constrained women in the scientific workplace and examining how individual women responded. We are thus greeted in this series of case studies by a cadre of women characterized by their negotiation not with other human actors, but with the discourses of science that, Jack argues, form the real foundation of science's culture. This emphasis on discourse forms one of the most important pieces of this text, since, as Jack convincingly shows, though discourse may originate with human actors, it is discourse itself that recapitulates, reifies, and, thus in a real way, creates scientific culture. Jack not only identifies discourse as a formative presence in the constructing of the tacit but profound power structures of this culture, but also, and more fundamentally, acknowledges its role as a constructor of those qualities of science—its objectivity, disinterestedness, neutrality, and unfettered access to truth—that we often mistake for intrinsic.

Each of Jack's case studies offers an object lesson in the power of discourse. In the first one, which describes women psychologists and their assessment of their current and future place in psychology, it is the discourse of gender neutrality that is not challenged by women, despite their recognition of the inequities implicit in this language. In her analysis of why this discourse was not challenged, Jack arrives at the historical heart, in some sense, of her matter: the overlapping significances of science and the American war effort, even of the American way of life, made any challenge to science, especially in terms of those supposedly intrinsic qualities...