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Once and future power
Women’sStudiesInt. Printed in the USA.
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Vol. IS, No. 2, pp. 193-203, 1992
0277-5395192 S5.00 + .OO 0 1992 Fkrgamon Press Ltd.
ONCE AND FUTURE POWER Women as Inventors AUTUMNSTANLEY Institute for Historical Study, 241 Bonita, Los Trances Woods, Portola Valley, CA 94028, U.S.A.
Synopsis-Male control of human technology, like patriarchy, is neither a divine dictum nor an environmental imperative, but a social construction of the Bronze Age or later. Indeed, women, as main providers from gathering-hunting times into the Neolithic period, were arguably once foremost among human technologists and inventors. Gathering was being done with tools long before projectile hunting became prevalent, and some of the earliest stone tools are now linked to such “women’s work” as processing plants for food. Archaeologists now acknowledge that some of women’s earliest tools were perishable, and thus largely lost to the record. If women were once our primary technologists-or even first among equals-shifts to male control must have taken place for many technologies at some point(s) in our past. In an effort to arrive at a paradigm for these shifts, and to understand the present gendering of invention, a possible scenario is sketched for one technology whose takeover postdates written history, and the overall shift is examined in terms of changing power relations between the sexes (the creation of patriarchy), the role of play, and the empowerment possibilities in women’s reclaiming technology.
When the Greeks tried to explain the earliest origins of technology and invention in their culture, they came up with a female answer: Athena, the Great Contriver, giver not only of agriculture but of all the mechanical arts as weN. Even later, when the male smith-god Hephaestus appeared on Olympus, he was clearly a junior partner in Athena’s workshop. And when the western world’s first industrial spy, Prometheus, came on his daring mission to Olympus, he stole fire from Hephaestus, but he stole the mechanical arts from Athena (Frazer, 1930; Graves, 1955). The Roman equivalents of these deities are Minerva and Vulcan. Minerva, probably originally Etruscan, receives the same generalized credit for the origins of most important early technology as Athena does: At her temple in Rome, Minerva presided over all handicrafts, professions, and arts (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1958). The Athena/ Minerva figure is credited specifically with the first shipbuilding and the first horsebreaking and with inventing both distaff and Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Minneapolis, MN, U.S.A., in June 1988, and to the Society of Women Engineers (San Francisco Bay Area), in November of that year.
needle-indeed, as Boccaccio (1355-1359) notes, with the whole art of working in wool, from carding and spinning to weaving. Minerva invented architecture. Athena may have come from the same area of northern Africa as did the olive, and she is said to have shown her people how to crush olives with a millstone and press the oil from them. Athena/Minerva also invented the cart -including the wheel? -was first to make iron weapons and armor, created the flute or shepherd’s pipe from bird bones, discovered numbers, and arranged them in the manner which we still keep today-including a knowledge of zero? (Boccaccio, 1355-1359; Gage, 1870; Mozans, 1913). The Greeks and Romans were not alone in the female cast of their technology-origin myths. Miti-Miti, ancestress of the Siberian Koryaks, surpassed her husband in cunning inventions (Drinker, 1948); Tsenabonpil, ancestral heroine of the Melanesian New Irelanders, gave her people all knowledge (Powdermaker, 1933); and Sarasvati, goddess of wisdom and science, speech and music, devised the Sanskrit script. Sarasvati is particularly significant for Western culture as her fate parallels that of once-powerful female deities in the Near East and Europe. Queen of Heaven before the rise of the cult 193
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of Brahma, she was assimilated to it as Brahma’s wife, yet credited with inventing all the arts of civilization: music, letters, mathematics, calendars, magic, the Vedas, and all other branches of learning. Indeed, Sarasvati has been called the Minerva of Hinduism (Benjamin Walker, 1968; Barbara Walker, 1983). Brigit has a similar place among the Irish, as giver of all arts and crafts (Graves, 1955). Myth is not history, of course, and these myths do not prove that if patent offices had existed in the Neolithic period-or earliermost patentees would have been women. But people who lived much closer than we to the events in question apparently thought so, and wove their explanatory tales accordingly. ’ Moreover, though myths are not history, neither are they created out of nothing. Perhaps the mythmakers drew upon still older tales in which woman/technology was a natural linkage. At minimum, the myths suggest surviving traditions reflecting women’s significant prehistoric contributions to human economy and technology. Females were the main providers both in the gathering-hunting economy that prevailed for over 90% of human history and in the early horticultural or mixed economies that followed in many areas (Lee & DeVore, 1968; Martin & Voorhies, 1975).* As major providers, women were perforce the main workers of the group (cf. Tanner, 198 1). Before the specialization of “toolmaker” arose, the workers in each area of human endeavor invented and improved their own tools. Further, even if invention were equal for the two sexes, because technology was more easily transmitted among females (i.e., within the basic social unit of mother and daughters; Tanner, 1981). Thus, crediting a female ancestor or deity with the origins of technology may have seemed as logical to the first technology-origin taleweavers as to modern anthropologists (cf. Zihlman, 198 1). For purposes of this discussion, then, let us operate from a set of premises dramatically at variance with the later myth of Man the Provider/Inventor: 1. Women were probably once the primary technologists of the species (from the protohuman era through the gathering-hunting millennia to early Neolithic times).
2. Women still invent; that is, even after males take over many technologies and areas of work originated by females, women’s contribution is greater than previously imagined. 3. Women invent significant things, whether as defined in male-oriented histories of technology or as rationally redefined to include important aspects of human technology now taken for granted and omitted from consideration. 4. Knowledge of this important past can empower women, Yet by the 18th century AD, at least in western culture and male establishment thought, things had changed to the point where Voltaire could baldly state, “There have been very learned women as there have been women warriors, but there have never been women inventors” (1764). How did this change- which I have elsewhere called a takeover- happen? Was the takeover absolute, as Voltaire’s pronouncement would indicate, and if not, how thorough was it? What are the implications for women’s empowerment? The scenario whereby men replace women as primary technologists of the human species is a complex one that is still being unearthed-in some cases literally so- by archaeologists. Moreover, it will have almost innumerable local variations. Doing it justice is beyond my scope here, but a few essential points can be given. First of all, we must distinguish between technologies arising and developing organically within a society and those introduced or imposed from outside by trade or conquest. Either sex, of course, could invent an indigenous tool or technology, but, particularly in conquest, the men might be likelier to receive a new technology introduced from outside. Horticulture, pottery, and herbal medicine are three technologies invented by women in most cultures where they arose, often developing within the society for hundreds or even thousands of years. Where they are taken over by men, it is generally when the activity becomes commercialized or “professionalized.” For example, when a society begins to produce food not just for individual families, but in mass quantities to be sold in towns and cities or traded abroad for lux-
Once and Future Power
uries or raw materials- when cultivation is no longer something a girl learns from her mother and does as part of her daily tasks, but involves technology that is formally transmitted, and approaches a full-time job in its time commitments-then males begin to produce it rather than females (cf. Sumerian Farmer’s Almanac in Kramer, 1963). A similar development may happen in potterymaking, where pottery becomes a trade good rather than something women make for their own cooking, storage, and baby-feeding vessels. These developments are speeded-perhaps initiated-where new technology, such as the animal-drawn plough, irrigation, and the potter’s wheel, arises or is introduced from outside. This, of course, is too simple. For one thing, sometimes the female and male technologies exist side by side for long periods, as among the Rif tribes of North Africa where, as late as the 192Os, the men threshed wheat using animals while the women threshed rye by hand using sticks (Coon, 1931). In Nubia, too, women’s hand-built pottery survived through two brief flourishings of much-admired wheel-thrown pottery that has been assumed to be done by males (W. Adams, 1988). Other factors were involved as well, and technological takeovers sometimes occurred in the context of a more general shift in power relations between the sexes. Among these other factors, at least in the Near East, were a birth explosion,3 significant population growth, climate changes, depletion of the group’s former prey animal, warfare, and religious change (from an earth-centered goddess-worship to worship of sky-gods, and eventually, in the Hebraic tradition, to a single male sky-god). To compress the argument severely, both the birth explosion and population growth cause more reproductive and nurturant work for women just when their productive responsibilities are sharply increasing as well, as the group depends ever more heavily on cultivation. The population increase results in killing or driving off the remaining large prey animals, which may leave the hunters (by then usually male) looking for another role. If population threatens or exceeds the carrying capacity of the land, women’s fertility, once a source of power and status, begins to seem a mixed blessing-per-
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haps even a liability-and something that must be controlled. If the climate change is a drying trend, people begin to focus on the sky, source of rain, rather than on the earth, which in gathering-hunting days brought forth food freely for the taking, as in the Hebrew myth of Eden. A technological response to a drying trend (and/or to crowding that forces people to use marginal lands) is to develop irrigation systems. These, in turn, along with agriculture’s disruption of traditional nomadic migratory routes and life patterns, lead to conflict between herders and farmers, symbolized in the Hebrew Bible by Cain and Abel. Moreover, large-scale irrigation agriculture, at least in areas like Sumer by the third millennium BC, becomes a specialized, full-time occupation, knowledge of which is transmitted in writing from father to son (Kramer, 1963), thus drastically diminishing woman’s productive role in the society. As population continues to grow and societies become more complex, conflict becomes warfare. Warfare, in turn, provides men with the new role they sought and, as it becomes institutionalized, gives them a new power base within the society. Women’s prestige, already threatened by the devaluation of their fertility and by the shrinkage in their economic role, is further undermined by the shift to sky-gods and the challenge of war-leaders-who-would-be-king to women-centered religion, matriliny, and clan-based egalitarian social order. This scenario is elaborated more fully in two forthcoming publications (Stanley, in press, Mothers and daughters of invention: Notes for a revised history of technology; Stanley, in press, Creation). Herbal medicine can illustrate further the takeover paradigm for a single technology. Women were the healers in the Near East, inventing and improving their mainly herbal remedies for millennia, so long as medicine was something a woman practiced mainly for her family or a few rural or village neighbors, sometimes without pay. She learned her remedies and their uses from her mother or another local wise woman. However, when medicine began to be seen as a source of income -in short, when it became professionalized-a matter of treating wealthy patients for considerable sums of money - men
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began to enter the occupation (Rohrlich, 1980) and eventually took it over.4 Again, when, as in medieval and early modern Europe, medicine becomes something to be studied formally in a university (run by the male-dominated Roman Church), something done professionally and for pay, something one must be licensed to do (again by the Church, at least in 16th century England), or actually done by the priests (as in 14th century Norway), and when the healing work of the remaining wise women becomes linked in churchmen’s minds with an older religion they have vowed to stamp out, then the takeover becomes a juggernaut powered by a combination of greed and religious fervor. Now the question arises whether the technological takeover was as complete as Voltaire’s dictum would indicate. Certainly not, although the research to prove it is difficult and in some cases only now appearing (see, e.g., Anderson & Zinsser, 1988; Boulding, 1976; Bridenthal, Koonz, & Stuard, 1987; Stanley, in press, Mothers; and Daryl Hafter’s forthcoming book on women and the guilds in 18th century France). However, we can say immediately that until well into the 19th century, more than 90% of all production, even in Europe, took place in the home. Women belonged to several of the guilds,5 invented insecticides, new fabric weaves, new kinds of lace, new foods, new art forms, new agricultural machines, rotary engines, and pneumatic tires. Women even continued to work as healers, despite all the penalties against it (see, e.g., Hurd-Mead, 1938; Pelling, 1980). Not only did they function as obstetricians and midwives, but they also invented medical and surgical apparatus, new remedies and operations, and new contraceptives .
A few quick examples follow: Sung Dynasty documents suggest that Taoist nuns invented variolation (inoculation with the smallpox virus itself rather than with the milder cowpox virus). Women were also in charge of variolation as observed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkey and introduced by her into England in the 18th century (Stanley, in press, Mothers). In the 11th century, Trotula of Salerno devised the classic surgical operation for perineal repair (Hurd-Mead, 1938). A 16th century Swiss
physician, Marie Colinet, was first to use a magnet to remove steel fragments from the eye (Hurd-Mead, 1938). In the 19th century, Mme Rondet of France invented an improved resuscitation tube for infants (Dall, 1860), and 70 years before Fleming’s “discovery” of penicillin, Elizabeth Stone, a healer working with lumberjacks in the North Woods of Wisconsin (U.S.A.), used penicillin therapy (Stellman, 1977). Outside the healing field, in the late 18th century Catherine Greene made her still-controversial contribution to Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin (Gage, 1870; Hammond, 1898). In the early 19th century, Ann Manning of New Jersey collaborated with her husband in inventing the first important U.S. reaper, predating Cyrus McCormick’s more famous machine by 15 years. She also collaborated with her husband on a clovercleaner, and then went on to make her own improvements on these machines (Mozans, 1913). Also in the 19th century, Mlle Anne Crepin of France invented the bandsaw (1846) (Alphandery, 1962; Kaempffert, 1924), and her countrywoman Mme Lefebvre patented the first process for fixing nitrogen from the air (1859) (Mozans, 1913). A German woman made an effective IUD out of her gold wedding ring, and Shaker Eldress Tabitha Babbitt (U.S.) independently invented the rotary saw. All this is to say nothing of such modern wonders as Kevlar@ (a fiber many times as strong as steel, used in bulletproof vests), Scotchgard@ (a stain- and waterrepellent coating for clothing, carpets, upholstery-and the tiles of the U.S. Space Shuttle), Liquid Paper@ (a quickdrying correction fluid for typists), and such computer breakthroughs as the first technology for directing a computer with words rather than strings of numbers, the first business computer, the first editing capability, the first on-line reservation system for airlines, the first portable voice-controlled computer.6 Women’s modern medical inventions are legion; examples that leap to mind are the blue-baby operation, the DPT vaccine, the important fungicide Nystatin, Terramycin and other antibiotics, radioimmunoassay (RIA), the prototype heart-lung machine, an improved rocking bed for polio victims, and a talking wheelchair-all invented or co-in-
Once and Future Power
vented by women in the 20th century (Stanley, in press, Mothers). Why, then, has it seemed, not only to Voltaire, but to the common wisdom until recently, that women inventors were few and far between? Most fundamentally, perhaps, because Western culture has for centuries defined technology mainly according to what men do, and named women’s inventions in ways that diminish them or conceal the fact that they are inventions. For example, if a man invents a remedy or palliative for some ailment, it will be called a medical invention, and people may expect him to try to patent it or profit from it in some way. However, if a woman invents the same preparation, it will be called a “home remedy” or an “old wives’ tale,” and people may be surprised or even disapproving if she tries to patent it rather than passing it on freely to others. A whole body of women’s inventions and reinventions created under pioneering conditions in the late 19th century and during the Great Depression of the 1930s is dismissed as “makedo” (Westin, 1976) and not only unpatented, but virtually unknown. Second, women hold only a small fraction of the world’s patents, and most people tend to equate patents and invention. The highest estimate I have seen for women’s current annual share of U.S. patents is 8%‘; most other estimates range between 2 + % and nearly 5 % (Office of Technology Assessment and Forecast, 1984, 1987). The ratio may be somewhat better in the former Soviet Union (if the nearly 25 % women in their Society of Inventors and Rationalizers is any indication [VOIR 1978]), but is markedly worse in England and in Canada (Brody, 1985; Amram, 1988; Hossie, 1986; Stanley, in press, Mothers). The U.S. figures for the 19th century are incomplete (a fire destroyed all records in 1836, and not all preexisting patents were restored), but available evidence indicates that women held less than 1% of all U.S. patents granted through February 28, 1895 (cf. LWP, 1888-1895). One fairly obvious reason why women held so few U.S. patents in the 19th century was that before the Married Women’s Property Acts were passed,8 even if a married woman did patent something, the patent, the invention, and all profits therefrom would be her husband’s property. These statistics seem grim at first glance
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and have led to a defensive posture on the part of the few who have written about women inventors. Properly analyzed, however, the numbers -and especially their trend can be seen as hopeful. If we accept roughly 1% as women’s share of some 500,000 American patents granted from 1836 to early 1895, then even the most conservative estimate of women’s share of the 5,000,OOOU.S. patents granted as of this writing (2+ %) is both a doubling of the 19th century’s relative numbers and a more than twenty-fold increase in the absolute numbers, from under 4000 to nearly 100,000. U.S. women’s patenting activity soared after the Civil War (a phenomenon usually attributed to the war-time losses of supporting males, but arguably also attributable to the new property laws), and has been increasing, sometimes exponentially, ever since. Women patented more inventions in 10 selected years between 1903 and 1921, for example, than they did for virtually the whole 19th century (1809 to early 1895)-over 5000 as opposed to under 4000 (LWP, 1888-1895; U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, 1923). The trouble (for women’s relative share of U.S. patents) is that yearly totals for men, particularly foreign nationals, have been increasing markedly as well -not so fast as women’s, but from a far larger initial base. Annual totals of women’s U.S. patents continue to rise. But does invention empower women? The answer is yes, with some complications. Let us first look at two intriguing complications and then explore some of the ways in which invention does -or can-empower women. The first complication is that women tend to deny they are inventors. Such denial is not a female monopoly. The inventor has a mixed reputation in post-industrial western culture, alternately welcomed as savior and feared as untrustworthy loner, creator of technology that can destroy the earth, put people out of work, or tempt them to play God. However, in my own research and in a recent Canadian study, (McDaniel, 1988) women resist the inventor role and label far more strongly than do men.9 Moreover, and this seems crucial, men resist that label for women. In other words, the reasons for women’s denial are not far to seek: the cultural stereo-
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type that women do not invent, the mixed reputation of the inventor role (complicated by women’s current distrust of high technology), and men’s resistance. Among these, the most interesting - worth another book -is male resistance to women as inventors. The roots of this phenomenon may go back to the takeover/power shift discussed above. I suggest that men, once having appropriated the inventor’s role, began to see invention as their creative equivalent to women’s childbearing.10 Thus they have long been, and still are, less willing to surrender it to the modern feminist rethinking of gender roles than virtually any other of the roles males have usurped and held since the Bronze Age. If so, this could help to account for the fact that technology, and specifically invention, is the last major area of human endeavor to receive a compensatory history. A second complication is that there are at least two major types of invention: (a) the practical and immediately useful solution to an existing problem, such as the Liquid Paper@, the better mousetrap, and (b) the invention that has no present use, or cannot be built with existing technology- but will be seen eventually as a breakthrough, winning its inventor, at the very least, posthumous immortality. Obvious examples here are Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th century flying machines and Charles Babbage’s 19th century computer. Holography, for a more recent example, had no known use when it was invented (Halsbury, 1971). The gendering of invention is yet another book of its own, and can only be touched on here, but some have argued that women tend to create the practical, immediately useful, problem-solving type of invention, whereas men create more of the rare visionary/foundational/breakthrough inventions that will later be described as far ahead of their time. This oversimplified formulation (e.g., Amram, 1988), falls far too neatly into the old stereotypes. Among other things, it ignores the problem of how (and by whom) “breakthrough” or “foundational” technology has been defined for the past 2000 years or so. Clearly, (a) the received definitions discriminate against women’s contributions to technology, and (b) some women in all ages have created breakthrough inventions by any
definition (cf. Bindocci, 1983; Stanley, in press, Mothers). However, for present purposes, we will use this stereotype. One basic, if indirect, indication of women’s tendency toward the practical as opposed to the visionary in invention is that women’s inventions are apparently more likely, on the average, to be profitable than are men 3.l’ Why does this happen? Why do women invent, so to speak, for the present, while at least a few men invent for the future? In the simplest terms -and to whatever degree the stereotype is true- because men have more time-and more license from society and more freedom within families -for playI* than do women. This includes intellectual play. Aside from a very few elites, women work harder and longer hours than men in all cultures, even today, as common sense, feminist scholars, and United Nations timebudget studies reveal (e.g., Anderson & Zinsser, 1988; Boulding, 1976; Hochschild, 1990; Mason, 1894; Nerlove, 1974; Vann, 1977). Says Arlie Hochschild about women working paid jobs, “women worked roughly 15 more hours each week than men. Over a year they worked an extra month of 24-hour days. Over a dozen years, it was an extra year of 24-hour days” (emphasis mine). Freedom from distraction is as important as time itself. If a man wants to go fishing or retreat into his study to work out an idea, his wife will keep the children occupied while he does so, but the reverse would still be surprising. Moreover, all too much of women’s fulltime work outside the home tends to be mind-numbing and physically confining rather than intellectually stimulating and physically varied. And it is out ofplay, out of daydreaming, out of flights of intellectual fancy, that breakthrough inventions arise. Since this contradicts another stereotype and thus may seem paradoxical, recall that the Chinese invented gunpowder for fireworks, not for weapons; Hero of Alexandria harnessed steam for toys and entertainments - mechanical birds that flapped their wings, temple doors that opened by themselves, etc. -and Vaucanson invented rubber tubing while trying to create a model duck! Indeed, automata in general, now considered the origin of modern robotics, were evidently
Once and Future Power
first devised as toys or models (J. Adams, 1988; Price, 1979). Derek de Solla Price makes a different but related point about intellectual play when he suggests (1979) that early scientific instruments arose out of attempts to model theories (explanations) of natural phenomena: The answer, I think, lies in a very ancient tradition of instruments and ingenious mechanical devices that were on the whole utterly useless except they gave us ultimately the computer, the atom bomb, and the space age. . . . It is a mistake to see any early instruments as measuring devices and tools. They exist . . . as a sort of philosophical technology, a simulation of nature, which philosophically is a tangible version of a theory. . . . [D]eep in antiquity, [people] used and developed special crafts to make models . . . which for them constituted explanation. . . . [emphasis mine] Price goes on to illustrate his thesis with examples from water clocks to astrolabes to the Tower of Winds in the Roman Agora of Athens (9ff.). He concludes with the Antikythera mechanism from the 1st century BC, whose fantastically complex gears evidently were intended to model the relationship between solar and lunar cycles. The differential gearing created here is what, centuries later, made possible the mechanization of threadspinning, thus giving rise to the invention of factories. It is also (still later) what makes it possible for automobile wheels not only to drive but to turn cornersII*13. Price calls this kind of gearing “the first mechanical sophistication that is completely non-obvious,” and notes, “You have to think a lot and play with gears a lot and want to do it like the heavens do it rather than usefully[,J to invent that”‘2 (emphasis mine). To return to the question whether invention empowers women, and if so, as I suggest, how this might occur, let us look again at the other side of the same coin: women’s inventions tend to be more profitable than men?. It is also true that women are now starting new businesses at a greater rate than men, and that women’s new businesses fail less often than men’s. Indeed, perhaps the protagonist of the U.S. Horatio Alger myth
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(the rags-to-riches story) should be called Horatia! At least, women can take note that: 1. Money is still power in Western society, and women still have markedly less of it than men. Creating an invention and either licensing it to others or starting a business to exploit it herself can afford a woman a better income than available in most female-defined jobs. 2. Creating an invention can confer social mobility. In a system where increasingly the rich get richer, where education is becoming more costly and less widely available, and where women are all too often shunted into dead-end jobs or onto welfare, a woman with little education can be trapped at or near the poverty line, especially if she is divorced and/or has children to support. But lack of education is not necessarily a bar to invention. Indeed, observers have remarked on the number of inventions created by those with very little education and/or no training in the field in which they invented (e.g., Ciarlante, 1978; Stanley, in press, Mothers). Lack of technical training may be a handicap for completing certain kinds of high-tech inventions; but it is no bar to having the original idea, and the technical help can be hired if the idea is good enough. Moreover, it is often the small idea-like Frisbee@ (a saucer-like toy to sail through the air) and Silly Put@ (a highly plastic tactile toy and molding composition) and Liquid Paper@ and Scotchgard@- the last two, as noted, both women’s inventions that make the most money. A successful invention gives a disadvantaged woman a chance to slip around the system’s barriers to economic comfort and middle- or upper-middle-class status. Education can then follow, if desired. 3. Invention, like all free-lance pursuits, confers considerable freedom once it can be pursued full time. Since many women’s jobs are not only low-paying and deadend, but stingy about vacations and inflexible in hours, women may want to consider this as an alternative. Admittedly, this is not for everyone. A first invention may demand months or years of long hours of work, which at first must be added to other work hours. But there is no boss and no time clock; and once some
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freedom is attained, work schedules can be accommodated to children’s schedules -or to the inventor’s most creative hours. Since the end product will be something of the woman’s own, furthering her progress toward a goal of her own choice, the work can seem light. A profitable invention can enable a woman to break out of the 9-to-5 rat race altogether and evaluate what she would really like to do with her life. Eventually, it even may confer the free time to create the playful, future-oriented inventions discussed above-and give us our Leonardas at last. A likely example is Susan Huhn, inventor of a computerized voting machine in the 1970s (U.S.), who at last report was contemplating radical improvements in computer technology in a country retreat made possible by profits from her patent (Stanley, in press, Mothers) . 4. Invention can give women a voice in social change in at least two ways. First, invention is a form of utopian thinking-and action. To invent something is not only to say how one would like society changed, but actually to help bring that change about. Two inventions that leap to mind here are the U-turn signal and an electronic device allowing parents to control which TV programs their young children watch, both conceived by Mari Harper of Southern California (Stanley, in press, Mothers). Second, successful women have the opportunity to help other women, not only as role models, but as employers; and not merely as employers, but as creators of more humane and supportive workplaces. Successful women often grasp this opportunity, as the following U.S. examples suggest. Many 19th century inventors and entrepreneurs, aware of women’s economic disadvantages, set out to remedy the situation. Poet, spiritualist, and inventor Amanda Theodosia Jones, after patenting a vacuum-canning process, started a canning company that employed only women. Charlotte Smith, reformer and advocate for women inventors, started a Women’s Printing Company in St. Louis in the 1870s to print her successful Inland Monthly Magazine; and Ellen Demorest
and Susan King, one an inventor and both entrepreneurs, founded a women’s tea company, hiring an all-female sales force (NAB’, 1971 S.V. Jones; Stanley, unpublished manuscript). In the 20th century, Tillie Lewis (dietfoods innovator and cannery executive) had such an advanced program of employee benefits that a striking union exempted her plant from their 1940 strike. The package included day-care centers, transportation for distant workers, and rest periods for elderly workers. Lore Harp and Carole Ely, computer company inventor-entrepreneurs, gave childcare and housecleaning help as regular employee benefits in the 1970s. Bette Graham, the inventor and entrepreneur of Liquid Paper@, was renowned for the beauty and comfort of her company’s working environment, including original art works on the walls, an employee library, a communications center, an art and sculpture collection, and a Child Development Center for employees’ children (Emerson, 1983; Marlow, 1979; Stern, 1979). Before women can reap the full benefits of the inventor’s role, they may have to reclaim both halves of it-not only the practical, immediately useful side, but the farsighted, playful side. For it is the latter that brings society’s highest rewards in the form of admiration and prestige. The latter may also do most to overcome women’s denial that they are inventorsin other words, finally succeed in smashing the stereotype against women inventors. Meanwhile, however, much can be done with what women have already claimed of the role and with what women have already achievednow that that achievement is at last being revealed. ENDNOTES 1. This argument is fully set out in my forthcoming book, Mothers and Daughters of Invention. I am not the first to make it (see, e.g., Mason, 1894; and Mozans, 1913); but mine is the first book-length scholarly treatment of women as inventors. Everything not specifically documented here refers to this book. 2. In rigorous scientific examinations of the subsistence arrangements of surviving gathering-hunting or foraging groups, in which all food brought in by both sexes over an extended period of time was tallied and weighed, women provided 60-80% of the food, by weight, for all groups studied-except for those living north of the Arctic Circle (Lee & DeVore, 1968). 3. As I make clear elsewhere (Stanley, in press, Mothers; Stanley, in press, Creation), a birth explosion
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can take place without creating a population explosion; and if this happens, women are affected more severely than men. However, in the Neolithic Near East, there was certainly a significant population increase as well. 4. Let us be absolutely clear here, too, that the new male medicine was not superior to the old herbal medicine (Rohrlich, 1980). Consisting largely of bleeding and prayer- except where women healers had communicated some of their formulas to male friends or relatives-it was often worse than nothing. In short, the new male doctors were portent-wise and plant-foolish. We are only now coming to appreciate what was lost in the medieval and early-modern European holocaust of wise women: Not until the second decade of the 20th century did a random patient bringing a random ailment to a random doctor have a better than even chance of benefitting from the encounter (Gross, 1966)! 5. Daryl Hafter, who has been researching women’s participation in European guilds, reported in 1985 that as late as the 18th century in Rouen, France, at least 10 guilds had female or mixed-gender membership. “These craftwomen,” says Hafter, were in full command of their technology. They trained apprentices and judged masterpieces. They deliberated on the use of new technology. . . It was their license to perform the technical operations that gave them status within their families and the legal right to manipulate institutions in the world at large for their own benefit.” 6. In the absence of a pertinent diary entry by Greene herself, written confirmation by Whitney, his biographers, or his descendants, this controversy can probably never be settled beyond a reasonable doubt. Some scholars find it significant that Whitney shared his royalties with Greene; and a Shaker Manifesto of 1890 alleged that Whitney had verbally confessed his indebtedness to her. Note, too, that M. B. Hammond, cited in the text, though obviously intending to deny Greene any credit, confirms the hairbrush-suggestion story as part ofhis denial. This episode and other contributions listed here and in the following three paragraphs are treated at length in my book. On the subject of noncredit to women, note that Fritz Haber later received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1918) for a nitrogen-fixation process, the earliest of which was developed-and patentedby Mme Lefebvre of Paris in 1859 (Stanley, in press, Mothers)
7. This figure is for 1985 only, and limited to patents with at least one patentee living in the United States (Amram, 1988). 8. The first of these acts, which allowed married women to hold property in their own names, was passed by Mississippi in the late 1830s; but they were not prevalent in the United States until about the time of the Civil War (1860s). 9. Women resist this label even in the face of such hard evidence as patents held or membership in corporate invention teams. Women inventors contacted for biographical information routinely say, “Yes, I did this, but I wouldn’t call myself an inventor.” The authors of the Canadian study, after analyzing interviews and questionnaires from 21 women inventors, note, “Even more disturbing is the finding that these women inventors actually deny to themselves that they are inventors. They have so internalized the myth that women are not inventors that they tend to deny their own experience in order
to accept the prevalent belief propagated by the dominant group” (McDaniel, 1988). 10. I am struck by Derek de Solla Price’s (1979) wording in a lecture tracing the origins of technology (and many early mechanisms usually classed as scientific instruments) to the human desire to create tangible models of theories about natural phenomena: It is a mistake to see any early instruments as measuring devices and tools. They exist . . . as . . a simulation of nature, which philosophicala tangible version of a theory. ly is . [Dleep in antiquity [people] . . developed special crafts to make models. tangible thingswhich for them constituted explanation, participation, a sort of do-it-yourself creator kit, of which an Einstein or a Newton used a mathematical equivalent: a model that gives you participation in creation. [emphasis mine] Whether or not the ancient inventors of Price’s examples consciously thought this way or not, Price obviously does. 11. According to The Patent Record (a U.S. inventor’s periodical) for December 1899 (pp. 14-15). “fully 75%” of patents taken out by women in the past 5 years (1895-99) were profitable (cf. Marden, 1903). This is an astonishing percentage, considering that most inventors never see a penny of profit from their inventions. A contemporary estimate is that over 90% never do (Emshwiller, 1991). This greater rate of profitability for women’s patents apparently continues into the mid-20th century, where a study commissioned by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee found women’s patents somewhat more profitable than the average (Tuska, 1961). 12. On the role of play in invention and technology, see, for example, J. Adams, 1988; McClain, 1983; and Price, 1979.
REFERENCES Adams, James L. (1988). Big kids’ toys: Technology as entertainment. Stanford Magazine, Summer, 40144. Adams, William Y. (1988). Puzzle of the Nubian pots. Archaeology, Mar./Apr., 46-53. Alphandery, Marie Fernande (1962). Dictionnaire des inventeurs francais. Paris: Editions Seghers. Amram, Fred (1988). Invention as problem-solving: Special contributions of female inventors. Paper presented at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Minneapolis, MN. Anderson, Bonnie, & Zinsser, Judith P. (1988). A histo-
ry of their own: Women in Europe from prehistory to thepresent. New York: Harper & Row. Bindocci, Cynthia Gay (1983). Identification of technology content for science and technology centers. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV. Boccaccio, Giovanni (1963). Of famous women, 13559. (Guido A. Guerino, Trans.) New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers. Boulding, Elise (1976). The underside of history. Boulder, CO: Westview. Bridenthal, Renate, Claudia Koonz, & Susan Stuard
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(1987). Becoming visible: Women in European history (2nd ed.). New York: Houghton Mifflin. Brody, Judit. (1985). Patterns of patents: Early British inventions by women. Paper presented at the 17th International Congress of the History of Science, Berkeley, CA. Ciarlante, Marjorie. (1978). A statisticalprofile of emi-
nent American inventors, I700-1860: Social origins and role. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. Coon, Carleton. (1931). Tribes of the Rif. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum. Dahlberg, Frances (Ed.). (1981). Woman the gatherer. New Haven, CT Yale. Dall, Caroline. (1860). Historical pictures retouched. Boston: Walker Wise. Drinker, Sophie. (1948). Music and women. New York: Coward McCann. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (1958). Chicago: William Benton. Emerson, Sandra. (1983). Bambi meets Godzilla: Life in the corporate jungle. In Jan Zimmerman (Ed.), The technological woman. New York: Pergamon Press. Emshwiller, Brent. (1991, August 27). Inventors who hit paydirt offer lessons for success. The Wall Street Journal, p. B2. Frazer, Sir James George. (1930). Myths on the origin of fire. London: Macmillan. Gage, Matilda Joslyn. (1870). Woman as inventor. Fayetteville, NY New York State Woman Suffrage Association. Graves, Robert. (1955). Greek myths. Baltimore, MD: Penguin. Gross, Martin. (1966). The doctors. New York: Random House. Hafter, Daryl. (1985). Women’s use of technology in 18th-century Rouenaise guilds. Paper presented at the 17th International Congress of the History of Science, Berkeley, CA. Halsbury, Earl of. (1971, June). Invention and technological progress (4th annual Spooner Lecture). The Inventor pp. 10-34. Hammond. M. B. (1898. October-July). Correspondence oi Eli Whitney relative to the invention of the cotton gin. American Historical Review III pp. 90127. Hochschild, Arlie. (1990, March/April). The second shift: Employed women are putting in another day of work at home. Utne Reader pp. 66-73. Hossie, Linda. (1986, March 6). Society a hurdle for women inventors. Toronto Globe & Mail, p. A3. Hubbard, Ruth, & Marian Lowe. (1983). Woman’s nature: Rationalizations of inequality. New York: Pergamon Hurd-Mead, Kate Campbell. (1938). A history of women in medicine. Haddam, CT Haddam Press. James, Edward T., James, Janet Wilson, & Boyer, Paul S. (Eds.). (1971). Notable American women 1607-1950. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kaempffert, Waldemar. (1924). A popular history of American invention. New York: Scribner’s. Kramer, Samuel N. (1963). The Sumerians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. LWP: United States Patent Office, 1888-1895. Women
inventors to whom patents have been granted, 1790
to July I, 1888 (with supplements, 1892, 1895). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Lee, Richard, and DeVore, Irven. (1968). Man the hunter. Chicago: Aldine. Marden, Orison S. (1903). Woman as inventor. In 0. S. Marden (Ed.), The consolidated encyclopedic library (pp. 4086-4089). New York. Marlow, Joan. (1979). The great women. New York: A & W Publishers. Martin, M. Kay, & Voorhies, Barbara. (1975). Female of the species. New York: Columbia University Press. Mason, Otis T. (1894). Woman’s share in primitive culture. New York: Appleton. McClain, Ellen. (1983). Do women resist computers? Popular Computing 2(3), 66-78. McDaniel. Susan. (1988). Mothers of invention? Meshing the roles of ‘inventor, mother, and worker. Women’s Studies International Forum II(l), 1-12. Mozans, H. J. (1913). Woman in science. New York: Appleton. Reprinted by M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1976. Nerlove, Sara B. (1974). Women’s workload and infant feeding practices: A relationship with demographic implications. Ethnology 13,297-314. O’Bryon, James Fredrick. (1975). A profile of users of the U.S. patent system: 1968 and 1973. Unpublished master’s thesis, M .I .T., Cambridge, MA. Office of Technology Assessment & Forecast, United States Patent Office (1984, 1987). Profile of female inventors. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Pelling, Margaret. (1980). Tradition and diversity: Medical practice in Norwich, 1550-1640. In Leo S. Olschki (Ed.), Scienze, credenze, occulte, livelli di cultura, Proceedings of the Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Florence, June 26-30. Powdermaker, Hortense. (1933, 1971). Life in Lesu: The
study of a Melanesian society in New Ireland. New York: Norton. Price, Derek De Solla. (1979). Proto-astrolabes, protoclocks, proto-calculators: The point of origin of high mechanical technology. In Denise Schmandt-Besserat (Ed.), Early technologies: Invited lectures on
the Middle East at the University of Texas at Austin, Vol. 3. Malibu, CA: Undena. Rohrlich, Ruby. (1980). State Formation in Sumer and the subjugation of Women. Feminist Studies, 6(l), 76-102. Stanley, Autumn. (in press). The creation of patriarchy revisited. Mentalities/Mentalites 7(2). Stanley, Autumn. (in press). Mothers and daughters of
invention: Notes for a revised history of technology. Mutuchen, NJ: Scarecrow. Stanley, Autumn. (1991). More hell and fewer dahlias: A life of Charlotte Smith, 1840-1917. Unpublished manuscript. Stellman, Jeanne M. (1977). Women’s work, women’s health: Myths and realities. New York: Pantheon. Stern, Ava. (1979). The self-made woman. Unpublished manuscript. Tanner, Nancy. (1981). On becoming human: A model
of the transition from ape to human and the reconstruction of early human social life. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Tuska, C. D. (1961). Independent inventors and thepatent system. United States Senate, Committee on the
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Judiciary, Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights (Study No. 28). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. United States Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau. (1923). Women’s contributions in the field of invention. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Vann, Richard. (1977). Women in preindustrial capitalism. In Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Eds.), Becoming visible: Women in European history. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. VOIR, 1978: Vsesoyuznoye obschchestvo izobretatelei i ratsionalizatorov mezhdu IV i V s’ezdami [All-Union Society of Inventors and Rationalizers Between its Fourth and Fifth Congresses]. Moscow: Profizdat.
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Voltaire. (1764). Dictionnaire philosophique, S.V. Femmes. Walker, Barbara. (1983). The woman’s encyclopedia of myths and secrets. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Walker, Benjamin. (1968). The Hindu world: Vol. I. New York: Prager. Westin, Jeane. (1976). Making do: How women survived the ’30s. Chicago: Follett Publishers. Women as inventors. (1900, January 6). Literary Digest 20(l), 14-15. Zihlman, Adrienne. (1981). Women as shapers of the human adaptation. In Frances Dahlberg (Ed.), Woman the gatherer (pp. 75-120). New Haven, CT Yale University Press.
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Vol. IS, No. 2, pp. 193-203, 1992
0277-5395192 S5.00 + .OO 0 1992 Fkrgamon Press Ltd.
ONCE AND FUTURE POWER Women as Inventors AUTUMNSTANLEY Institute for Historical Study, 241 Bonita, Los Trances Woods, Portola Valley, CA 94028, U.S.A.
Synopsis-Male control of human technology, like patriarchy, is neither a divine dictum nor an environmental imperative, but a social construction of the Bronze Age or later. Indeed, women, as main providers from gathering-hunting times into the Neolithic period, were arguably once foremost among human technologists and inventors. Gathering was being done with tools long before projectile hunting became prevalent, and some of the earliest stone tools are now linked to such “women’s work” as processing plants for food. Archaeologists now acknowledge that some of women’s earliest tools were perishable, and thus largely lost to the record. If women were once our primary technologists-or even first among equals-shifts to male control must have taken place for many technologies at some point(s) in our past. In an effort to arrive at a paradigm for these shifts, and to understand the present gendering of invention, a possible scenario is sketched for one technology whose takeover postdates written history, and the overall shift is examined in terms of changing power relations between the sexes (the creation of patriarchy), the role of play, and the empowerment possibilities in women’s reclaiming technology.
When the Greeks tried to explain the earliest origins of technology and invention in their culture, they came up with a female answer: Athena, the Great Contriver, giver not only of agriculture but of all the mechanical arts as weN. Even later, when the male smith-god Hephaestus appeared on Olympus, he was clearly a junior partner in Athena’s workshop. And when the western world’s first industrial spy, Prometheus, came on his daring mission to Olympus, he stole fire from Hephaestus, but he stole the mechanical arts from Athena (Frazer, 1930; Graves, 1955). The Roman equivalents of these deities are Minerva and Vulcan. Minerva, probably originally Etruscan, receives the same generalized credit for the origins of most important early technology as Athena does: At her temple in Rome, Minerva presided over all handicrafts, professions, and arts (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1958). The Athena/ Minerva figure is credited specifically with the first shipbuilding and the first horsebreaking and with inventing both distaff and Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Minneapolis, MN, U.S.A., in June 1988, and to the Society of Women Engineers (San Francisco Bay Area), in November of that year.
needle-indeed, as Boccaccio (1355-1359) notes, with the whole art of working in wool, from carding and spinning to weaving. Minerva invented architecture. Athena may have come from the same area of northern Africa as did the olive, and she is said to have shown her people how to crush olives with a millstone and press the oil from them. Athena/Minerva also invented the cart -including the wheel? -was first to make iron weapons and armor, created the flute or shepherd’s pipe from bird bones, discovered numbers, and arranged them in the manner which we still keep today-including a knowledge of zero? (Boccaccio, 1355-1359; Gage, 1870; Mozans, 1913). The Greeks and Romans were not alone in the female cast of their technology-origin myths. Miti-Miti, ancestress of the Siberian Koryaks, surpassed her husband in cunning inventions (Drinker, 1948); Tsenabonpil, ancestral heroine of the Melanesian New Irelanders, gave her people all knowledge (Powdermaker, 1933); and Sarasvati, goddess of wisdom and science, speech and music, devised the Sanskrit script. Sarasvati is particularly significant for Western culture as her fate parallels that of once-powerful female deities in the Near East and Europe. Queen of Heaven before the rise of the cult 193
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of Brahma, she was assimilated to it as Brahma’s wife, yet credited with inventing all the arts of civilization: music, letters, mathematics, calendars, magic, the Vedas, and all other branches of learning. Indeed, Sarasvati has been called the Minerva of Hinduism (Benjamin Walker, 1968; Barbara Walker, 1983). Brigit has a similar place among the Irish, as giver of all arts and crafts (Graves, 1955). Myth is not history, of course, and these myths do not prove that if patent offices had existed in the Neolithic period-or earliermost patentees would have been women. But people who lived much closer than we to the events in question apparently thought so, and wove their explanatory tales accordingly. ’ Moreover, though myths are not history, neither are they created out of nothing. Perhaps the mythmakers drew upon still older tales in which woman/technology was a natural linkage. At minimum, the myths suggest surviving traditions reflecting women’s significant prehistoric contributions to human economy and technology. Females were the main providers both in the gathering-hunting economy that prevailed for over 90% of human history and in the early horticultural or mixed economies that followed in many areas (Lee & DeVore, 1968; Martin & Voorhies, 1975).* As major providers, women were perforce the main workers of the group (cf. Tanner, 198 1). Before the specialization of “toolmaker” arose, the workers in each area of human endeavor invented and improved their own tools. Further, even if invention were equal for the two sexes, because technology was more easily transmitted among females (i.e., within the basic social unit of mother and daughters; Tanner, 1981). Thus, crediting a female ancestor or deity with the origins of technology may have seemed as logical to the first technology-origin taleweavers as to modern anthropologists (cf. Zihlman, 198 1). For purposes of this discussion, then, let us operate from a set of premises dramatically at variance with the later myth of Man the Provider/Inventor: 1. Women were probably once the primary technologists of the species (from the protohuman era through the gathering-hunting millennia to early Neolithic times).
2. Women still invent; that is, even after males take over many technologies and areas of work originated by females, women’s contribution is greater than previously imagined. 3. Women invent significant things, whether as defined in male-oriented histories of technology or as rationally redefined to include important aspects of human technology now taken for granted and omitted from consideration. 4. Knowledge of this important past can empower women, Yet by the 18th century AD, at least in western culture and male establishment thought, things had changed to the point where Voltaire could baldly state, “There have been very learned women as there have been women warriors, but there have never been women inventors” (1764). How did this change- which I have elsewhere called a takeover- happen? Was the takeover absolute, as Voltaire’s pronouncement would indicate, and if not, how thorough was it? What are the implications for women’s empowerment? The scenario whereby men replace women as primary technologists of the human species is a complex one that is still being unearthed-in some cases literally so- by archaeologists. Moreover, it will have almost innumerable local variations. Doing it justice is beyond my scope here, but a few essential points can be given. First of all, we must distinguish between technologies arising and developing organically within a society and those introduced or imposed from outside by trade or conquest. Either sex, of course, could invent an indigenous tool or technology, but, particularly in conquest, the men might be likelier to receive a new technology introduced from outside. Horticulture, pottery, and herbal medicine are three technologies invented by women in most cultures where they arose, often developing within the society for hundreds or even thousands of years. Where they are taken over by men, it is generally when the activity becomes commercialized or “professionalized.” For example, when a society begins to produce food not just for individual families, but in mass quantities to be sold in towns and cities or traded abroad for lux-
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uries or raw materials- when cultivation is no longer something a girl learns from her mother and does as part of her daily tasks, but involves technology that is formally transmitted, and approaches a full-time job in its time commitments-then males begin to produce it rather than females (cf. Sumerian Farmer’s Almanac in Kramer, 1963). A similar development may happen in potterymaking, where pottery becomes a trade good rather than something women make for their own cooking, storage, and baby-feeding vessels. These developments are speeded-perhaps initiated-where new technology, such as the animal-drawn plough, irrigation, and the potter’s wheel, arises or is introduced from outside. This, of course, is too simple. For one thing, sometimes the female and male technologies exist side by side for long periods, as among the Rif tribes of North Africa where, as late as the 192Os, the men threshed wheat using animals while the women threshed rye by hand using sticks (Coon, 1931). In Nubia, too, women’s hand-built pottery survived through two brief flourishings of much-admired wheel-thrown pottery that has been assumed to be done by males (W. Adams, 1988). Other factors were involved as well, and technological takeovers sometimes occurred in the context of a more general shift in power relations between the sexes. Among these other factors, at least in the Near East, were a birth explosion,3 significant population growth, climate changes, depletion of the group’s former prey animal, warfare, and religious change (from an earth-centered goddess-worship to worship of sky-gods, and eventually, in the Hebraic tradition, to a single male sky-god). To compress the argument severely, both the birth explosion and population growth cause more reproductive and nurturant work for women just when their productive responsibilities are sharply increasing as well, as the group depends ever more heavily on cultivation. The population increase results in killing or driving off the remaining large prey animals, which may leave the hunters (by then usually male) looking for another role. If population threatens or exceeds the carrying capacity of the land, women’s fertility, once a source of power and status, begins to seem a mixed blessing-per-
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haps even a liability-and something that must be controlled. If the climate change is a drying trend, people begin to focus on the sky, source of rain, rather than on the earth, which in gathering-hunting days brought forth food freely for the taking, as in the Hebrew myth of Eden. A technological response to a drying trend (and/or to crowding that forces people to use marginal lands) is to develop irrigation systems. These, in turn, along with agriculture’s disruption of traditional nomadic migratory routes and life patterns, lead to conflict between herders and farmers, symbolized in the Hebrew Bible by Cain and Abel. Moreover, large-scale irrigation agriculture, at least in areas like Sumer by the third millennium BC, becomes a specialized, full-time occupation, knowledge of which is transmitted in writing from father to son (Kramer, 1963), thus drastically diminishing woman’s productive role in the society. As population continues to grow and societies become more complex, conflict becomes warfare. Warfare, in turn, provides men with the new role they sought and, as it becomes institutionalized, gives them a new power base within the society. Women’s prestige, already threatened by the devaluation of their fertility and by the shrinkage in their economic role, is further undermined by the shift to sky-gods and the challenge of war-leaders-who-would-be-king to women-centered religion, matriliny, and clan-based egalitarian social order. This scenario is elaborated more fully in two forthcoming publications (Stanley, in press, Mothers and daughters of invention: Notes for a revised history of technology; Stanley, in press, Creation). Herbal medicine can illustrate further the takeover paradigm for a single technology. Women were the healers in the Near East, inventing and improving their mainly herbal remedies for millennia, so long as medicine was something a woman practiced mainly for her family or a few rural or village neighbors, sometimes without pay. She learned her remedies and their uses from her mother or another local wise woman. However, when medicine began to be seen as a source of income -in short, when it became professionalized-a matter of treating wealthy patients for considerable sums of money - men
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began to enter the occupation (Rohrlich, 1980) and eventually took it over.4 Again, when, as in medieval and early modern Europe, medicine becomes something to be studied formally in a university (run by the male-dominated Roman Church), something done professionally and for pay, something one must be licensed to do (again by the Church, at least in 16th century England), or actually done by the priests (as in 14th century Norway), and when the healing work of the remaining wise women becomes linked in churchmen’s minds with an older religion they have vowed to stamp out, then the takeover becomes a juggernaut powered by a combination of greed and religious fervor. Now the question arises whether the technological takeover was as complete as Voltaire’s dictum would indicate. Certainly not, although the research to prove it is difficult and in some cases only now appearing (see, e.g., Anderson & Zinsser, 1988; Boulding, 1976; Bridenthal, Koonz, & Stuard, 1987; Stanley, in press, Mothers; and Daryl Hafter’s forthcoming book on women and the guilds in 18th century France). However, we can say immediately that until well into the 19th century, more than 90% of all production, even in Europe, took place in the home. Women belonged to several of the guilds,5 invented insecticides, new fabric weaves, new kinds of lace, new foods, new art forms, new agricultural machines, rotary engines, and pneumatic tires. Women even continued to work as healers, despite all the penalties against it (see, e.g., Hurd-Mead, 1938; Pelling, 1980). Not only did they function as obstetricians and midwives, but they also invented medical and surgical apparatus, new remedies and operations, and new contraceptives .
A few quick examples follow: Sung Dynasty documents suggest that Taoist nuns invented variolation (inoculation with the smallpox virus itself rather than with the milder cowpox virus). Women were also in charge of variolation as observed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkey and introduced by her into England in the 18th century (Stanley, in press, Mothers). In the 11th century, Trotula of Salerno devised the classic surgical operation for perineal repair (Hurd-Mead, 1938). A 16th century Swiss
physician, Marie Colinet, was first to use a magnet to remove steel fragments from the eye (Hurd-Mead, 1938). In the 19th century, Mme Rondet of France invented an improved resuscitation tube for infants (Dall, 1860), and 70 years before Fleming’s “discovery” of penicillin, Elizabeth Stone, a healer working with lumberjacks in the North Woods of Wisconsin (U.S.A.), used penicillin therapy (Stellman, 1977). Outside the healing field, in the late 18th century Catherine Greene made her still-controversial contribution to Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin (Gage, 1870; Hammond, 1898). In the early 19th century, Ann Manning of New Jersey collaborated with her husband in inventing the first important U.S. reaper, predating Cyrus McCormick’s more famous machine by 15 years. She also collaborated with her husband on a clovercleaner, and then went on to make her own improvements on these machines (Mozans, 1913). Also in the 19th century, Mlle Anne Crepin of France invented the bandsaw (1846) (Alphandery, 1962; Kaempffert, 1924), and her countrywoman Mme Lefebvre patented the first process for fixing nitrogen from the air (1859) (Mozans, 1913). A German woman made an effective IUD out of her gold wedding ring, and Shaker Eldress Tabitha Babbitt (U.S.) independently invented the rotary saw. All this is to say nothing of such modern wonders as Kevlar@ (a fiber many times as strong as steel, used in bulletproof vests), Scotchgard@ (a stain- and waterrepellent coating for clothing, carpets, upholstery-and the tiles of the U.S. Space Shuttle), Liquid Paper@ (a quickdrying correction fluid for typists), and such computer breakthroughs as the first technology for directing a computer with words rather than strings of numbers, the first business computer, the first editing capability, the first on-line reservation system for airlines, the first portable voice-controlled computer.6 Women’s modern medical inventions are legion; examples that leap to mind are the blue-baby operation, the DPT vaccine, the important fungicide Nystatin, Terramycin and other antibiotics, radioimmunoassay (RIA), the prototype heart-lung machine, an improved rocking bed for polio victims, and a talking wheelchair-all invented or co-in-
Once and Future Power
vented by women in the 20th century (Stanley, in press, Mothers). Why, then, has it seemed, not only to Voltaire, but to the common wisdom until recently, that women inventors were few and far between? Most fundamentally, perhaps, because Western culture has for centuries defined technology mainly according to what men do, and named women’s inventions in ways that diminish them or conceal the fact that they are inventions. For example, if a man invents a remedy or palliative for some ailment, it will be called a medical invention, and people may expect him to try to patent it or profit from it in some way. However, if a woman invents the same preparation, it will be called a “home remedy” or an “old wives’ tale,” and people may be surprised or even disapproving if she tries to patent it rather than passing it on freely to others. A whole body of women’s inventions and reinventions created under pioneering conditions in the late 19th century and during the Great Depression of the 1930s is dismissed as “makedo” (Westin, 1976) and not only unpatented, but virtually unknown. Second, women hold only a small fraction of the world’s patents, and most people tend to equate patents and invention. The highest estimate I have seen for women’s current annual share of U.S. patents is 8%‘; most other estimates range between 2 + % and nearly 5 % (Office of Technology Assessment and Forecast, 1984, 1987). The ratio may be somewhat better in the former Soviet Union (if the nearly 25 % women in their Society of Inventors and Rationalizers is any indication [VOIR 1978]), but is markedly worse in England and in Canada (Brody, 1985; Amram, 1988; Hossie, 1986; Stanley, in press, Mothers). The U.S. figures for the 19th century are incomplete (a fire destroyed all records in 1836, and not all preexisting patents were restored), but available evidence indicates that women held less than 1% of all U.S. patents granted through February 28, 1895 (cf. LWP, 1888-1895). One fairly obvious reason why women held so few U.S. patents in the 19th century was that before the Married Women’s Property Acts were passed,8 even if a married woman did patent something, the patent, the invention, and all profits therefrom would be her husband’s property. These statistics seem grim at first glance
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and have led to a defensive posture on the part of the few who have written about women inventors. Properly analyzed, however, the numbers -and especially their trend can be seen as hopeful. If we accept roughly 1% as women’s share of some 500,000 American patents granted from 1836 to early 1895, then even the most conservative estimate of women’s share of the 5,000,OOOU.S. patents granted as of this writing (2+ %) is both a doubling of the 19th century’s relative numbers and a more than twenty-fold increase in the absolute numbers, from under 4000 to nearly 100,000. U.S. women’s patenting activity soared after the Civil War (a phenomenon usually attributed to the war-time losses of supporting males, but arguably also attributable to the new property laws), and has been increasing, sometimes exponentially, ever since. Women patented more inventions in 10 selected years between 1903 and 1921, for example, than they did for virtually the whole 19th century (1809 to early 1895)-over 5000 as opposed to under 4000 (LWP, 1888-1895; U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, 1923). The trouble (for women’s relative share of U.S. patents) is that yearly totals for men, particularly foreign nationals, have been increasing markedly as well -not so fast as women’s, but from a far larger initial base. Annual totals of women’s U.S. patents continue to rise. But does invention empower women? The answer is yes, with some complications. Let us first look at two intriguing complications and then explore some of the ways in which invention does -or can-empower women. The first complication is that women tend to deny they are inventors. Such denial is not a female monopoly. The inventor has a mixed reputation in post-industrial western culture, alternately welcomed as savior and feared as untrustworthy loner, creator of technology that can destroy the earth, put people out of work, or tempt them to play God. However, in my own research and in a recent Canadian study, (McDaniel, 1988) women resist the inventor role and label far more strongly than do men.9 Moreover, and this seems crucial, men resist that label for women. In other words, the reasons for women’s denial are not far to seek: the cultural stereo-
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type that women do not invent, the mixed reputation of the inventor role (complicated by women’s current distrust of high technology), and men’s resistance. Among these, the most interesting - worth another book -is male resistance to women as inventors. The roots of this phenomenon may go back to the takeover/power shift discussed above. I suggest that men, once having appropriated the inventor’s role, began to see invention as their creative equivalent to women’s childbearing.10 Thus they have long been, and still are, less willing to surrender it to the modern feminist rethinking of gender roles than virtually any other of the roles males have usurped and held since the Bronze Age. If so, this could help to account for the fact that technology, and specifically invention, is the last major area of human endeavor to receive a compensatory history. A second complication is that there are at least two major types of invention: (a) the practical and immediately useful solution to an existing problem, such as the Liquid Paper@, the better mousetrap, and (b) the invention that has no present use, or cannot be built with existing technology- but will be seen eventually as a breakthrough, winning its inventor, at the very least, posthumous immortality. Obvious examples here are Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th century flying machines and Charles Babbage’s 19th century computer. Holography, for a more recent example, had no known use when it was invented (Halsbury, 1971). The gendering of invention is yet another book of its own, and can only be touched on here, but some have argued that women tend to create the practical, immediately useful, problem-solving type of invention, whereas men create more of the rare visionary/foundational/breakthrough inventions that will later be described as far ahead of their time. This oversimplified formulation (e.g., Amram, 1988), falls far too neatly into the old stereotypes. Among other things, it ignores the problem of how (and by whom) “breakthrough” or “foundational” technology has been defined for the past 2000 years or so. Clearly, (a) the received definitions discriminate against women’s contributions to technology, and (b) some women in all ages have created breakthrough inventions by any
definition (cf. Bindocci, 1983; Stanley, in press, Mothers). However, for present purposes, we will use this stereotype. One basic, if indirect, indication of women’s tendency toward the practical as opposed to the visionary in invention is that women’s inventions are apparently more likely, on the average, to be profitable than are men 3.l’ Why does this happen? Why do women invent, so to speak, for the present, while at least a few men invent for the future? In the simplest terms -and to whatever degree the stereotype is true- because men have more time-and more license from society and more freedom within families -for playI* than do women. This includes intellectual play. Aside from a very few elites, women work harder and longer hours than men in all cultures, even today, as common sense, feminist scholars, and United Nations timebudget studies reveal (e.g., Anderson & Zinsser, 1988; Boulding, 1976; Hochschild, 1990; Mason, 1894; Nerlove, 1974; Vann, 1977). Says Arlie Hochschild about women working paid jobs, “women worked roughly 15 more hours each week than men. Over a year they worked an extra month of 24-hour days. Over a dozen years, it was an extra year of 24-hour days” (emphasis mine). Freedom from distraction is as important as time itself. If a man wants to go fishing or retreat into his study to work out an idea, his wife will keep the children occupied while he does so, but the reverse would still be surprising. Moreover, all too much of women’s fulltime work outside the home tends to be mind-numbing and physically confining rather than intellectually stimulating and physically varied. And it is out ofplay, out of daydreaming, out of flights of intellectual fancy, that breakthrough inventions arise. Since this contradicts another stereotype and thus may seem paradoxical, recall that the Chinese invented gunpowder for fireworks, not for weapons; Hero of Alexandria harnessed steam for toys and entertainments - mechanical birds that flapped their wings, temple doors that opened by themselves, etc. -and Vaucanson invented rubber tubing while trying to create a model duck! Indeed, automata in general, now considered the origin of modern robotics, were evidently
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first devised as toys or models (J. Adams, 1988; Price, 1979). Derek de Solla Price makes a different but related point about intellectual play when he suggests (1979) that early scientific instruments arose out of attempts to model theories (explanations) of natural phenomena: The answer, I think, lies in a very ancient tradition of instruments and ingenious mechanical devices that were on the whole utterly useless except they gave us ultimately the computer, the atom bomb, and the space age. . . . It is a mistake to see any early instruments as measuring devices and tools. They exist . . . as a sort of philosophical technology, a simulation of nature, which philosophically is a tangible version of a theory. . . . [D]eep in antiquity, [people] used and developed special crafts to make models . . . which for them constituted explanation. . . . [emphasis mine] Price goes on to illustrate his thesis with examples from water clocks to astrolabes to the Tower of Winds in the Roman Agora of Athens (9ff.). He concludes with the Antikythera mechanism from the 1st century BC, whose fantastically complex gears evidently were intended to model the relationship between solar and lunar cycles. The differential gearing created here is what, centuries later, made possible the mechanization of threadspinning, thus giving rise to the invention of factories. It is also (still later) what makes it possible for automobile wheels not only to drive but to turn cornersII*13. Price calls this kind of gearing “the first mechanical sophistication that is completely non-obvious,” and notes, “You have to think a lot and play with gears a lot and want to do it like the heavens do it rather than usefully[,J to invent that”‘2 (emphasis mine). To return to the question whether invention empowers women, and if so, as I suggest, how this might occur, let us look again at the other side of the same coin: women’s inventions tend to be more profitable than men?. It is also true that women are now starting new businesses at a greater rate than men, and that women’s new businesses fail less often than men’s. Indeed, perhaps the protagonist of the U.S. Horatio Alger myth
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(the rags-to-riches story) should be called Horatia! At least, women can take note that: 1. Money is still power in Western society, and women still have markedly less of it than men. Creating an invention and either licensing it to others or starting a business to exploit it herself can afford a woman a better income than available in most female-defined jobs. 2. Creating an invention can confer social mobility. In a system where increasingly the rich get richer, where education is becoming more costly and less widely available, and where women are all too often shunted into dead-end jobs or onto welfare, a woman with little education can be trapped at or near the poverty line, especially if she is divorced and/or has children to support. But lack of education is not necessarily a bar to invention. Indeed, observers have remarked on the number of inventions created by those with very little education and/or no training in the field in which they invented (e.g., Ciarlante, 1978; Stanley, in press, Mothers). Lack of technical training may be a handicap for completing certain kinds of high-tech inventions; but it is no bar to having the original idea, and the technical help can be hired if the idea is good enough. Moreover, it is often the small idea-like Frisbee@ (a saucer-like toy to sail through the air) and Silly Put@ (a highly plastic tactile toy and molding composition) and Liquid Paper@ and Scotchgard@- the last two, as noted, both women’s inventions that make the most money. A successful invention gives a disadvantaged woman a chance to slip around the system’s barriers to economic comfort and middle- or upper-middle-class status. Education can then follow, if desired. 3. Invention, like all free-lance pursuits, confers considerable freedom once it can be pursued full time. Since many women’s jobs are not only low-paying and deadend, but stingy about vacations and inflexible in hours, women may want to consider this as an alternative. Admittedly, this is not for everyone. A first invention may demand months or years of long hours of work, which at first must be added to other work hours. But there is no boss and no time clock; and once some
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freedom is attained, work schedules can be accommodated to children’s schedules -or to the inventor’s most creative hours. Since the end product will be something of the woman’s own, furthering her progress toward a goal of her own choice, the work can seem light. A profitable invention can enable a woman to break out of the 9-to-5 rat race altogether and evaluate what she would really like to do with her life. Eventually, it even may confer the free time to create the playful, future-oriented inventions discussed above-and give us our Leonardas at last. A likely example is Susan Huhn, inventor of a computerized voting machine in the 1970s (U.S.), who at last report was contemplating radical improvements in computer technology in a country retreat made possible by profits from her patent (Stanley, in press, Mothers) . 4. Invention can give women a voice in social change in at least two ways. First, invention is a form of utopian thinking-and action. To invent something is not only to say how one would like society changed, but actually to help bring that change about. Two inventions that leap to mind here are the U-turn signal and an electronic device allowing parents to control which TV programs their young children watch, both conceived by Mari Harper of Southern California (Stanley, in press, Mothers). Second, successful women have the opportunity to help other women, not only as role models, but as employers; and not merely as employers, but as creators of more humane and supportive workplaces. Successful women often grasp this opportunity, as the following U.S. examples suggest. Many 19th century inventors and entrepreneurs, aware of women’s economic disadvantages, set out to remedy the situation. Poet, spiritualist, and inventor Amanda Theodosia Jones, after patenting a vacuum-canning process, started a canning company that employed only women. Charlotte Smith, reformer and advocate for women inventors, started a Women’s Printing Company in St. Louis in the 1870s to print her successful Inland Monthly Magazine; and Ellen Demorest
and Susan King, one an inventor and both entrepreneurs, founded a women’s tea company, hiring an all-female sales force (NAB’, 1971 S.V. Jones; Stanley, unpublished manuscript). In the 20th century, Tillie Lewis (dietfoods innovator and cannery executive) had such an advanced program of employee benefits that a striking union exempted her plant from their 1940 strike. The package included day-care centers, transportation for distant workers, and rest periods for elderly workers. Lore Harp and Carole Ely, computer company inventor-entrepreneurs, gave childcare and housecleaning help as regular employee benefits in the 1970s. Bette Graham, the inventor and entrepreneur of Liquid Paper@, was renowned for the beauty and comfort of her company’s working environment, including original art works on the walls, an employee library, a communications center, an art and sculpture collection, and a Child Development Center for employees’ children (Emerson, 1983; Marlow, 1979; Stern, 1979). Before women can reap the full benefits of the inventor’s role, they may have to reclaim both halves of it-not only the practical, immediately useful side, but the farsighted, playful side. For it is the latter that brings society’s highest rewards in the form of admiration and prestige. The latter may also do most to overcome women’s denial that they are inventorsin other words, finally succeed in smashing the stereotype against women inventors. Meanwhile, however, much can be done with what women have already claimed of the role and with what women have already achievednow that that achievement is at last being revealed. ENDNOTES 1. This argument is fully set out in my forthcoming book, Mothers and Daughters of Invention. I am not the first to make it (see, e.g., Mason, 1894; and Mozans, 1913); but mine is the first book-length scholarly treatment of women as inventors. Everything not specifically documented here refers to this book. 2. In rigorous scientific examinations of the subsistence arrangements of surviving gathering-hunting or foraging groups, in which all food brought in by both sexes over an extended period of time was tallied and weighed, women provided 60-80% of the food, by weight, for all groups studied-except for those living north of the Arctic Circle (Lee & DeVore, 1968). 3. As I make clear elsewhere (Stanley, in press, Mothers; Stanley, in press, Creation), a birth explosion
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can take place without creating a population explosion; and if this happens, women are affected more severely than men. However, in the Neolithic Near East, there was certainly a significant population increase as well. 4. Let us be absolutely clear here, too, that the new male medicine was not superior to the old herbal medicine (Rohrlich, 1980). Consisting largely of bleeding and prayer- except where women healers had communicated some of their formulas to male friends or relatives-it was often worse than nothing. In short, the new male doctors were portent-wise and plant-foolish. We are only now coming to appreciate what was lost in the medieval and early-modern European holocaust of wise women: Not until the second decade of the 20th century did a random patient bringing a random ailment to a random doctor have a better than even chance of benefitting from the encounter (Gross, 1966)! 5. Daryl Hafter, who has been researching women’s participation in European guilds, reported in 1985 that as late as the 18th century in Rouen, France, at least 10 guilds had female or mixed-gender membership. “These craftwomen,” says Hafter, were in full command of their technology. They trained apprentices and judged masterpieces. They deliberated on the use of new technology. . . It was their license to perform the technical operations that gave them status within their families and the legal right to manipulate institutions in the world at large for their own benefit.” 6. In the absence of a pertinent diary entry by Greene herself, written confirmation by Whitney, his biographers, or his descendants, this controversy can probably never be settled beyond a reasonable doubt. Some scholars find it significant that Whitney shared his royalties with Greene; and a Shaker Manifesto of 1890 alleged that Whitney had verbally confessed his indebtedness to her. Note, too, that M. B. Hammond, cited in the text, though obviously intending to deny Greene any credit, confirms the hairbrush-suggestion story as part ofhis denial. This episode and other contributions listed here and in the following three paragraphs are treated at length in my book. On the subject of noncredit to women, note that Fritz Haber later received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1918) for a nitrogen-fixation process, the earliest of which was developed-and patentedby Mme Lefebvre of Paris in 1859 (Stanley, in press, Mothers)
7. This figure is for 1985 only, and limited to patents with at least one patentee living in the United States (Amram, 1988). 8. The first of these acts, which allowed married women to hold property in their own names, was passed by Mississippi in the late 1830s; but they were not prevalent in the United States until about the time of the Civil War (1860s). 9. Women resist this label even in the face of such hard evidence as patents held or membership in corporate invention teams. Women inventors contacted for biographical information routinely say, “Yes, I did this, but I wouldn’t call myself an inventor.” The authors of the Canadian study, after analyzing interviews and questionnaires from 21 women inventors, note, “Even more disturbing is the finding that these women inventors actually deny to themselves that they are inventors. They have so internalized the myth that women are not inventors that they tend to deny their own experience in order
to accept the prevalent belief propagated by the dominant group” (McDaniel, 1988). 10. I am struck by Derek de Solla Price’s (1979) wording in a lecture tracing the origins of technology (and many early mechanisms usually classed as scientific instruments) to the human desire to create tangible models of theories about natural phenomena: It is a mistake to see any early instruments as measuring devices and tools. They exist . . . as . . a simulation of nature, which philosophicala tangible version of a theory. ly is . [Dleep in antiquity [people] . . developed special crafts to make models. tangible thingswhich for them constituted explanation, participation, a sort of do-it-yourself creator kit, of which an Einstein or a Newton used a mathematical equivalent: a model that gives you participation in creation. [emphasis mine] Whether or not the ancient inventors of Price’s examples consciously thought this way or not, Price obviously does. 11. According to The Patent Record (a U.S. inventor’s periodical) for December 1899 (pp. 14-15). “fully 75%” of patents taken out by women in the past 5 years (1895-99) were profitable (cf. Marden, 1903). This is an astonishing percentage, considering that most inventors never see a penny of profit from their inventions. A contemporary estimate is that over 90% never do (Emshwiller, 1991). This greater rate of profitability for women’s patents apparently continues into the mid-20th century, where a study commissioned by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee found women’s patents somewhat more profitable than the average (Tuska, 1961). 12. On the role of play in invention and technology, see, for example, J. Adams, 1988; McClain, 1983; and Price, 1979.
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