AUTUMN STANLEY: WHY THEN, SO FEW?
If women have at least equal inventive capacity with men, and were in the early days of human economic development probably the premiere technologists by virtue of their larger areas of work, why, then are there so few great women inventors? The answer is that they have not been few; it is only that history has not recorded them. In other words, the real question is not, Why so few? but, Why do we know so few? (Stanley, 1995, p. xxviii).
With these four threads in mind, I want to talk a bit more specifically about Autumn Stanley’s impressive 1995 book, Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology. Stanley's work, over seven hundred pages long, provides a robust intellectual and historical backdrop that serves in part to explain why women are often marginalized and/or dismissed in terms of the ways they are situated with, addressed by, and work within technology generally—and, as I will argue—new media spaces and practices more specifically.
Stanley’s text has two foci:
- to focus for the first time on women’s contributions to technologies, and
- to revise our culturally situated definition of “technology.“
Stanley began preparing the text in the late 1970s. When it was first published in 1995, Stanley wasn’t the first author to focus on women’s contributions to technologies, but she was the first author to do so using this particular framework.
In the text, Stanley articulated a set of reasons to help us see the ways in which women’s contributions were erased, ignored, or absorbed. She noted the educational and developmental limitations placed on girls and women.
A handful of scholars in rhet/comp and technical communication have drawn on Stanley’s work. Most notable is Katherine Durack. In a 1997 Technical Communication Quarterly article, Durack noted two assumptions related to the absence of women in the history of technical work: first, that women are not significant producers of technical work or writing, and, second, that women’s tools don’t count as technology or as technologically significant.
Durack drew on Stanley, Cynthia Cockburn, and other feminist scholars and historians to note that although women use machines and tools, their work is not considered technically significant and thus their knowledge isn’t considered competence.
In her book, Stanley asked, “why, then, so few?” (1995, p. xxviii). Women are inventive and creative. Women develop and build. Even culturally situated the way we are, why are there, historically, so few documented cases of women as inventors, and, more importantly, women as the holders and bearers of intellectual property rights?
In framing a feminist critique of women’s relationships to technology and development and in presenting historical examples of women’s impact on technology and development, she situates women’s work in the cultural-historical regime of ownership and intellectual property. Stanley (1995) suggested six reasons why women are often invisible in the legacy documents and artifacts related to intellectual property:
- Patents cost money. Trademark protection costs money. And registration processes can take months and months to pursue.
- Patents require extensive legal and business literacies and abilities. The onus for patent and trademark protection is on the person requesting protection for their work. That requires an inventor or creator to thoroughly research existing inventions, ideas, logos, and other material to make sure that there’s no conflict.
- Up until and through the nineteenth century, even if a woman navigated the patent process, her husband would be the patent owner and holder.
- Inventing and patenting require technical experience typically restricted from girls and women.
- Women have been encouraged to adopt a self-image that includes hesitance to claim ownership over ideas. Certainly, women have historically been enculturated to be demure about their abilities and skills, especially if those skills step into masculine territory.
- Women are socialized to give and share. The intellectual property system is built upon single, isolated ownership, laying claim over one’s ideas and staking claims over property. Women haven’t historically been socialized into this way of seeing the world.
Imagine that it’s 1845. A woman comes up with a handy carrier to carry more eggs safely from the chicken coop to the house. It’s probably not in the forefront of her mind to take the idea, hoard the idea, patent the idea, produce the product, and reap the rewards. Chances are, she shares the idea with the woman down the road. This is more of a gift ideology, an economy of sharing, than an ownership-and-control regime.
Stanley proposed a set of options for a woman inventor and creator: She could learn all the technical, legal, logistical, and political skills herself and attempt to navigate the intellectual property regime; she could hire experts to navigate the system for her; she could sell her ideas to an invention-development group; or she could give up.
An option that Stanley overlooked—appropriately so, I think, given her historical focus—is to resist the intellectual property regime. To create, share, produce, and distribute outside of this system.
Although many women likely fell upon socialization and giving as a womanly trait, I would guess that some women deliberately avoided the regime of intellectual property. They likely knew of the patent and development process and avoided it. And I suspect that more women are deliberately doing so today.
index | introduction | history | stanley | digital(creation) |
digital(dangers) | ip resistance | conclusions | bibliography
dànielle nicole devoss | devossda@msu.edu