Technikatörténeti szemle 15. (1985)

TANULMÁNYOK - Amram, M. Fred: Women’s contributions to the history of technology

FRED M. AMRAM* WOMEN'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY In courses designed to enhance creativity, my students, especially female students, have inquired why my examples of inventors are always male. Ignorance has always been my excuse. After several years of research, my students and I have published a series of papers which begin to develop a history which documents that woman's work does include invention. Our focus, thus fas, has been American female inventors. We are, however, anxious to begin cross-cultural comparisons. Women's creativity has been exhibited in a diversity of areas including science and technology. The history, however, points primarily to women who observe, catalogue, count. There is a difference in style and product between inventing and counting, between Marie Curie and Maria Mitchell. I am not arguing that one style is better or worse, more or less useful. They are, however, clearly different from each other. On the one hand there is a rich history of female botanists and astronomers who have helped to clarify our understanding of sciene by observing, counting, and cataloguing. There is another history of women who make changes by inventing. An example is the chemist Patsy Sherman who has some thirteen patents for the well-known (and profitable) Scotchgard polymers for repelling dirt and stains from textile products. The difference between the observers and the inventors is indirectly clarified by the long-distance runner Chalotte Lettis when she says I see women and they don't do anything; only men do things. This is the nature of the oppression of women in our society: men do and women just are. I'd rather be one who does ... (1) In our study we use patent records as our primary source of information because they are clear, generally available, and because they provide useful leads to other sources. Patents also provide an imperfect history of technology as well as an imperfect history of female inventors in the United States. Before the creation of the U.S. Patent Office in February of 1790, American colonists went to Europe to record their inventions. The very first patent granted * General College, University of Minnesota. U. S. A.