Reckoning with Our Mistakes

An article about women engineers, published in 1908, has a promising start: If women are attending technical schools and are not legally blocked from working in a forge or firm, why do they face so many obstacles to employment? A reader in 2020 who discovers such a socially progressive question in the archives of Scientific American anticipates a discussion of sex discrimination. Perhaps women such as Emily Warren Roebling, who took over her husband's role as chief engineer on construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after he became bedridden, will be held up for their contributions to the field. Surely the article will feature the voice of Nora Stanton Barney, who had recently fought to become the first woman accepted as a junior member in the American Society of Civil Engineers and was active in the suffrage movement.

Alas, no. Author Karl Drews explains it simply: the obstacles “are inherent in the nature of the case and are due to women's comparative weakness, both bodily and mental.” He elaborates: “The work of the engineer is creative in the highest sense of the word. From his brain spring the marvels of modern industry,” in contrast to women, “whose notable performances have hitherto been confined to the reproductive arts.” The path to the workshop takes “blistered hands, not dilettante pottering and observation.” Drews declares that even “the most resolute and indefatigable of women” cannot overcome these difficulties. His rationale is sound, he says, because there has been “no great woman composer, painter, or sculptor.” Even “the best of woman novelists are surpassed by men.”

After making these conclusions in the first few paragraphs, Drews does something more insidious: he invokes data to support his case. The writer sent an inquiry letter to dozens of engineering firms and technical societies to “obtain some definite information on the subject.” But he manipulates the cherry-picked survey results to uphold his thesis. Drews denigrates the few women who do come up by baselessly attacking their skills; the sole engineer he deems worthy is uniquely “masculine.” When Drews discovers that some women in the U.S. Census identify themselves as boilermakers, he asks an electrical engineering institute if this can possibly be true. They reply that they are “too chivalrous” to permit such a thing. And poof! Those women's careers cease to exist.

In today's terms, we would say the author is gaslighting the experiences of women engineers when he is not erasing them outright. While the article is outrageous in tone, it is even more instructive as a case study in how the trappings of science have sometimes been misused in these pages to uphold systemic oppression. Under the cloak of empirical evidence, Drews and other writers entrenched discrimination by framing it as unimpeachable truth.