CNU professor pens book about early history of women in science fields

NEWPORT NEWS-Maybe you've seen this commercial. It starts with a little girl splashing her boots in a creek, and her mom calls out, 'Sammy, sweetie, don't get your dress dirty.'

A couple of years later, the same girl is discouraged from exploring wildlife on the beach. In another scene, she's told to hand a power drill over to her brother.

The commercial ends with the girl in her school hallway looking at a poster for a science fair while she's applying lip gloss.

'Our words can have a huge impact,' the narrator says. 'Isn't it time we told her she's pretty brilliant, too?'

Such advertisements are fueled by a push to encourage more students, especially girls, to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math, also known as STEM fields.

But as one Christopher Newport University professor shows in her recent book, efforts to encourage girls to get involved in science are not new. In fact, there's evidence of such work dating back to World War II, before the women's' rights movement in the 1960s and '70s. And some of the obstacles that hindered progress back then still exist, she said.

'These are things that are pretty familiar to us today, but they have a much longer history,' Laura Puaca, CNU assistant professor of history said. 'They were talking about this in the context of the '50s.'

Puaca is also the co-director of the university's Women's and Gender Studies program.

Puaca said her interest in women in science fields started back when she was a student in college.

She said her curiosity was sparked while she was researching for an honors thesis on the topic of women during World War II. She recalls coming across newspaper clippings that recruited women for science jobs during the war.

'It was really, really interesting to me,' she said.

But it wasn't until after she came to CNU in 2008 that she started to dig deeper into the topic and learned that there was a much larger story. The research inspired her recent book, 'Searching for Scientific Womanpower: Technocratic Feminism and the Politics of National Security, 1940-1980.'

The book chronicles efforts during the war to gain support for education and employment opportunities for women in science and engineering fields. During the time period, she said, people believed that not using all the country's 'scientific manpower' would be wasteful. Although, feminist reformers masked the work under the cloak of 'national security,' not equality.

'Doing so would have been seen as radical, or potentially subversive,' she said, 'something particularly problematic in the era of McCarthyism.'

In her research of academic archives at universities, like Harvard, Cornell and Iowa State, Puaca said she found that many of the same people responsible for the earlier efforts carried the work into the 1960s and '70s.

While Puaca's book ends at 1980, she said connections to present-day efforts are expressed in its epilogue. She said no doubt progress has been made since World War II.

But she said she still sees some setbacks, like using 'national security' to justify equality for girls.

There is evidence of this, she said, for example, in an Aug. 18 Time Magazine article, 'Cracking the Girl Code: How to End the Tech Gender Gap.

The article begins with a high school girl who is scared to be one of the only girls in a computer science class. Just 12 percent of computer science degrees go to women, according to the article.

'Changing that kind of mind-set is a national strategic challenge,' it states.

Puaca said the story brings her back to the World War II articles in her research.

'The efforts are still sometimes justified...(as) national security,' she said. 'The language is incredibly familiar.

Pawlowski can be reached by phone at 757-247-7478. Get the book

'Searching for Scientific Womanpower: Technocratic Feminism and the Politics of National Security, 1940-1980,' by Laura Puaca, 304 pages, printed by the University of North Carolina Press, $31.46 in paperback at http://www.amazon.com and $31.87 at http://ift.tt/vggwU1

Entities 0 Name: Puaca Count: 5 1 Name: Politics of National Security Count: 2 2 Name: Laura Puaca Count: 2 3 Name: CNU Count: 1 4 Name: Cornell Count: 1 5 Name: Time Magazine Count: 1 6 Name: University of North Carolina Press Count: 1 7 Name: Harvard Count: 1 8 Name: NEWPORT Count: 1 9 Name: Pawlowski Count: 1 10 Name: Sammy Count: 1 11 Name: Iowa State Count: 1 12 Name: Christopher Newport University Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1iuBBiL Title: Powerful Ad Shows What A Little Girl Hears When You Tell Her She's Pretty Description: Posted: Print Article A new Verizon commercial cites a sad statistic by the National Science Foundation: 66 percent of 4th grade girls say they like science and math, but only 18 percent of all college engineering majors are female.

Share :