computer programmers
Men create, program, and market computers, make war and
produce science and art with them; women microwire them in computer
factories and enter data in computerized offices; boys play games, socialize,
and commit crimes with computers; girls are rarely seen in computer
clubs, camps, and classrooms. But women were hired as computer programmers
in the 1940s because
the work seemed to resemble simple clerical tasks. In fact, however, programming
demanded complex skills in abstract logic, mathermatics, electrical circuitry,
and machinery, all of which . . . women used to perform in their work.
Once programming was recognized as “intellectually demanding,” it became
attractive to men. (Donato 1990, 170)
A woman mathematician and pioneer in data processing, Grace M. Hopper,
was famous for her work on programming language (Perry and Greber
1990, 86). By the 1960s, programming was split into more and less
skilled specialties, and the entry of women into the computer field in the
1970s and 1980s was confined to the lower-paid specialties. At each stage,
employers invoked women’s and men’s purportedly natural capabilities for
the jobs for which they were hired (Cockburn 1983, 1985; Donato 1990;
Hartmann 1987; Hartmann, Kraut, and Tilly 1986; Kramer and Lehman
1990; Wright et al. 1987; Zimmerman 1983).
It is the taken-for-grantedness of such everyday gendered behavior
that gives credence to the belief that the widespread differences in what
women and men do must come from biology. To take one ordinarily unremarked
scenario: In modern societies, if a man and woman who are a
couple are in a car together, he is much more likely to take the wheel than she
is, even if she is the more competent driver. Molly Haskell calls this takenfor-
granted phenomenon “the dirty little secret of marriage: the husbandlousy-
driver syndrome” (1989, 26). Men drive cars whether they are good
drivers or not because men and machines are a “natural” combination
(Scharff 1991). But the ability to drive gives one mobility; it is form of
social power.
In the early days of the automobile, feminist co-opted the symbolism
of mobility as emancipation: “Donning goggles and dusters, wielding tire
irons and tool kits, taking the wheel, they announced their intention to
move beyond the bounds of women’s place” (Scharff 1991, 68). Driving
enabled them to campaign for women’s suffrage in parts of the United
States not served by public transportation, and they effectively used
motorcades and speaking from cars as campaign tactics (Scharff 1991,
67–88). Sandra Gilbert also notes that during World War I, women’s ability
to drive was physically, mentally, and even sensually liberating:
For nurses and ambulance drivers, women doctors and women messengers,
the phenomenon of modern battle was very different from that experienced by
entrenched combatants. Finally given a change to take the wheel, these post-
Victorian girls raced motorcars along foreign rods like adventurers exploring
new lands, while their brothers dug deeper into the mud of France. . . .
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Retrieving the wounded and the dead from deadly positions, these oncedecorous
daughters had at last been allowed to prove their valor, and they
swooped over the wastelands of the war with the energetic love of Wagnerian
Valkyries, their mobility alone transporting countless immobilized heroes to
safe havens. (1983, 438–39)
Not incidentally, women in the United States and England got the vote for
their war efforts in World War I.
Social Bodies and the Bathroom Problem
People of the same racial ethnic group and social class are roughly the
same size and shape — but there are many varieties of bodies. People have
different genitalia, different secondary sex characteristics, different contributions
to procreation, different orgasmic experiences, different patterns
of illness and aging. Each of us experiences our bodies differently, and
these experiences change as we grow, age, sicken, and die. The bodies of
pregnant and nonpregnant women, short and tall people, those with intact
and functioning limbs and those whose bodies are physically challenged
are all different. But the salient categories of a society group these attributes
in ways that ride roughshod over individual experiences and more
meaningful clusters of people.
I am not saying that physical differences between male and female
bodies don’t exist, but that these differences are socially meaningless until
social practices transform them into social facts. West Point Military Academy’s
curriculum is designed to produce leaders, and physical competence
is used as a significant measure of leadership ability (Yoder 1989). When
women were accepted as West Point cadets, it became clear that the tests
of physical competence, such as rapidly scaling an eight-foot wall, had
been constructed for male physiques — pulling oneself up and over using
upper-body strength. Rather than devise tests of physical competence
for women, West Point provided boosters that mostly women used — but
that lost them test points — in the case of the wall, a platform. Finally, the
women themselves figured out how to use their bodies successfully. Janice
Yoder describes this situation:
I was observing this obstacle one day, when a woman approached the wall in
the old prescribed way, got her fingertips grip, and did an unusual thing: she
walked her dangling legs up the wall until she was in a position where both
her hands and feet were atop the wall. She then simply pulled up her sagging
bottom and went over. She solved the problem by capitalizing on one of women’s
physical assets: lower-body strength. (1989, 530)
In short, if West Point is going to measure leadership capability by physical
strength, women’s pelvises will do just as well as men’s shoulders.
The social transformation of female and male physiology into a condition
of inequality is well illustrated by the bathroom problem. Most
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