"Technology Is to Science as Female Is to Male."

This title caught my eye as I leafed through a recent issue of Technology & Culture, the journal of the Society for the History of Technology. Ruth Schwartz Cowan had chosen the theme for her presidential address-partly in jest but mostly in earnest-and if her goal was to startle and attract attention, in my case she certainly succeeded.

Parts of the speech I read with cautious interest. I stress the word cautious, because when it comes to the subtleties of feminist theory, I am not totally at ease. But what I understood to be the main point of the essay struck me with great force. This is the "subsumption thesis," the idea that the most significant aspects of technology have been subsumed under the discipline of science. It follows that if science includes technology (as "man" is sometimes said to include "woman"), it is, by implication, a larger and more important topic.

One might say that this is merely a matter of semantics; but the fact is that words have tremendous force and implication. For example, some upholders of academic tradition scorn "women's studies" on the grounds that women are merely a subset of "mankind." A similar belittlement of engineering is implied each time the profession is called "applied science." The consequences in public image and, yes, in dollars-grants, salaries, and the like-are only too real.

To Cowan-who is a historian as well as a feminist-this concept is doubly irksome. In academe the study of technology was long viewed as merely a part of the history of science, and a not very important part at that. For decades, efforts to get leaders of the History of Science Society to pay more attention to the history of technology were unavailing. Rather than suffer continuing condescension, several technology specialists in 1957 decided to form a society of their own.