Iconic Communication: An Annotated Bibliography by W. H. Huggins and Doris R. Entwisle (review)

Abstract

Communication Autumn Stanley (bio) To the editor: Archimedes said, “Give me where(on) to stand, and I will move the earth.” Judith McGaw (“Inventors and Other Great Women: Toward a Feminist History of Technological Luminaries,” Technology and Culture 38 [1997]: 214–231) suggests I perform an equivalent feat—i.e., emulating the “many fine studies of male inventors”—in thin air. Though flattered by her estimate of my powers, I must protest. Those “fine” studies are grounded in centuries of male-oriented technohistory, supported by models, drawings, colleagues’ and descendants’ testimony, corporate histories, technical analyses, obituaries, personal papers, Dictionary of American Biography (DAB) profiles, book-length biographies, etc. The field of women inventors, by contrast, has lacked even a substantial list of names, much less the necessary sources for such studies. For example, the prolific nineteenth-century U.S. inventor/entrepreneur Helen Blanchard left no papers, no will. The DAB and Notable American Women (NAW) alike omit her. Weeks of research were required to date her professional debut. Betsy Baker refused to try for a patent; Julia Hall kept Charles’s letters, but he discarded hers. Emily Duncan’s favorite granddaughter and namesake was unaware her grandmother held patents; Bertha Lamme’s important work at Westinghouse was a mystery to her only daughter—and a one-liner in her colleague-brother’s autobiography. Even Margaret Knight, the best-known U.S. woman inventor to date, has no DAB profile or book-length biography, and her NAW profile is shockingly weak in technical analysis. Lillian Russell’s biography omits her patent, and recent newspaper coverage of Gertrude Elion’s Nobel Prize tended to omit her forty-four patents, though they cover the significant drugs that won her the prize, and though the (same) patents of her male cowinner were always mentioned. That is what Mothers and Daughters of Invention is about: providing the Archimedean support, the data fulcrum for moving an earthweight of denial that women invent. It is the first book to examine women’s inventive achievement by area of invention, and continuity between prehistoric and modern contributions. Pace McGaw, it is biographical, and well beyond dancing dogs. It creates a foundation for others to build upon in writing the [End Page 203] fuller biographical and comparative studies McGaw, the Times reporter, and I would all like to see. It is, above all, a serious work, and deserves to be taken seriously. In short, the compensatory history of technology was born with my book and is still in its infancy, though McGaw would alternately smother it in its cradle and consider it already grown. (In the latter mode, she criticizes me for not citing certain sources—some of which were not published until after the relevant chapters were written or after the book was in press [1990]—and for citing others [such as Smithsonian, which I used to show persistent androcentrism, and The National Enquirer, which I used not as technical authority but as popularity marker].) As for whether this is an important infant, suppose for a moment that technohistory had until now been written of, by, and for females, focusing on gathering and food-knives, not hunting and arrowheads; on pottery, spinning, weaving, and gardens rather than large-scale irrigation or city walls; on herbal medicine and contraception rather than siege engines; on lace, not armor; on laundry technology and new foods rather than factory machinery and steam engines. Archimedes, Da Vinci, and Arkwright would have died unsung. We would know the milkmaid’s name better than Jenner’s, and revere the Shropshire healer and her foremothers, not Dr. Withering, who reduced her complex dropsy remedy to digitalis. Think what an outpouring of joy, funds—and imitators—would greet the scholar bringing these lost males to light! Paradoxically, McGaw seems aware of the missing fulcrum when she rues “disconcerting” numbers of citations of personal correspondence and documents in my possession (p. 223, n. 10). This is the (unsurprising) result of primary research—which I trust has not become politically incorrect. I learned of female inventors from colleagues, professional journals, women’s magazines, books on women’s achievement, patent records, news stories, or patents columns; interviewed living women or sent...