Essay21Feb
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Alice, Comparative essay
The Future Looms - Sadie Plant
When Computers Were Women - Jennifer Light
Question - is there a deeper, natural connection between women and technology, particularly between women and software? Does software have a gender?
This essay is meant to compare and discuss two different texts relating to women in computing. Both essays were written by women, and both were published in 1999. The first text considered here is 'When Computers Were Women', by Jennifer Light, an essay discussing women's contribution into the technology world during and after the second World War. The second essay is 'The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics', by Sadie Plant. In this case, the author looks back at the computational icon of the 19th century, Ada Lovelace, and draws the relationship between women and computers through the practice of weaving.
The main theses of this essay relates to the idea that women and software are somehow interconnected. The two texts take two different approaches to the 'feminine' aspect of software development. One deems it inherent to the female spirit, while the other looks at gendering an occupation, a process that diminished its importance in the eyes of the general public and the media. It is important to note that, even though both texts were written by women, they often present the points of views of the men that were also present in the same context.
Both essays make reference to two real-life examples of women working in technology. Plant focuses her essay on the well-known Ada Lovelace, today an icon of women in computing, who worked with Charles Babbage in the 1800s on his Analytical Engine, a computer that could perform simple calculations. Respectively, the second essay presents the work of women in technology during and after the second World War, particularly on the ENIAC computer, which calculated ballistics trajectories. In both cases, women with great mathematical skills were assigned the software side of the project, while the men were in change with designing and building the hardware. In the case of the ENIAC, a large number of recent female graduates were hired due to the shortages in male workforce. This was a consequence of men being sent to war, a purely practical economical reason for women to replace men in their previous positions. Ada Lovelace, on the other hand, was a highly privileged woman with a natural affinity to mathematics and computing, which led to her involvement with the Analytical Engine. Therefore, we are looking at women from different time periods and contexts, who got involved in technology for very different reasons. Here, we can also highlight an important distinction between the viewpoints of the two essays—the first one looks at the relationship between women and software from a philosophical perspective, the second one focusing on a more material viewpoint.
The idea that software and women are interlaced is developed in both texts, although from very different perspectives. Sadie Plant dives deep into history, looking at how weaving, a very sophisticated and programmatic practice of arranging threads into a particular patters, has always been associated with women. Rather than being dismissed as "women's work", as it is in the case of ENIAC, the importance and complexity of weaving is clearly recognized. Moreover, the design of Babbage's Analytical Engine is based on the design of the first automated loom, which used punch cards to record patterns of weaving, much like the algorithms used in programming. Plant states that, since weaving came so naturally to women throughout history, programming should have the same kind of connection.
In contrast, the programming work women were doing during World War Two, even though just as intricate, was seen as less important than whatever men were working on. The assumption that software simply reproduces the same notions and computations over and over again is clearly meant to suggest that the work that is put into programming is menial and of less importance than that of building hardware. The male engineers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics considered that doing computational work was a waste of their skills and time, and that these tasks should be assigned to women instead. Thus, women and software both were considered to be working in the service of men, the software being a subordinate of the hardware.
Both weaving and computational work required, then more than now, working in a particular rhythm. Mechanization has generally transformed the natural rhythms in which women were weaving and making calculations by hand, and machines have taken over production in many areas where women used to work manually. When such developments occur, the manual work that came before, and ultimately helped this development take place, is often overlooked. This was the case of ENIAC, whose software was based on, and built through the manual work of women. The machine's achievements were ultimately praised completely independently of all the labour behind it. The software was seen as an invisible layer, hidden inside the physical machine build by the men, working in the interest of the man and his machine. Surprisingly, in the case of Ada, her legacy lived on way further than that of Babbage, through the ADA programming language used by the US Defence Department.
The two perspectives of the relationship between women and software are extremely different. On one hand, the complexity of software development is inherent to the way in which women have always worked. This viewpoint recognizes the work of women at the level of excellence at which they were performing, as well as the abstract aspect of their work which made it less approachable for men. On the other hand, the repetitive aspect of programming is seen as a form of clerical work with less value than engineering in Light's essay. In this case, "women's work" is no longer considered complex and abstract, but rather menial and unimportant, compared to the work that men were performing, and therefore pushed into anonymity.
As stated earlier, women's work in software is presented in dual form - as repetitive work that simulates and reproduces reality, or as conceptual work rooted deep into the history of humanity. In both perspectives, the work is given a gender, female. I believe the conceptualization of software as weaving is more than a metaphor, but a view based in reality. An example here would be the women working on the Apollo software which was hand-woven to contain all the 0s and 1s necessary for takeoff into space. Dismissing the work of women as simple and repetitive is a gross underestimation of the complexity of the patterns they create.
Tash
On female authorship in American and Indonesian literary history
Comparing interviews: with Ursula Le Guin and with Melani Budianta
In Western literary history, the exclusion and distortion of female authorship has been a feature of feminist critique for some time. This is not the case all over the world. A country like Indonesia is at a different juncture in the evolution of both their literary tradition and their experience of feminism. Without a history of suffrage but with more volatile political and religious tensions, equality in Indonesia is grounded in a different context. So what is the current role of women’s writing in their respective canons? In her 1995 interview I am a Woman Writer, I am a Western Writer, author Ursula Le Guin discusses this issue, and shares her personal experiences dealing with the male-dominated literary establishment. Twenty years later, in an interview with Jurnal Perempuan (Women’s Journal) acclaimed Indonesian critic Melani Budianta examines similar questions in the context of Indonesian literature. Together, Le Guin and Budianta each help chart the rise, fall and current position of female authorship in American and Indonesian literature.
To begin with, both Le Guin and Budianta express a similar discontent with the representation of women in the recording of literary history. Both stress the way that male writers are more widely recognized and canonized than their female counterparts. Furthermore, in the instances when female writers have entered the literary ‘mainstream’, there is resistance. Le Guin (p.197) is emphatic in her reaction: “It just seems so damn silly to me to leave out half our writers. Nearly half of our fiction has been written by women. Often while they were alive these women were beloved and popular, respected, but as soon as they died the lid went on.” Budianta’s tone is more studied, academic, as she points out that the minimization of women’s writing in literary history has always been a reflection of women’s value in wider society. As such, “…there is no such thing as a golden age for women writers. They rise and then they fall.” In contrast to male authors, the status of women’s writing is never permanent, but requires effort to maintain.
Another issue brought up by both Le Guin and Budianta is the underrepresentation of women in the structures which manage the literary field. The older, more established Western publishing industry is deeply male-dominated. Le Guin points out that though nearly half of American fiction has been written by women, power still lies with the male editors, publishers and critics. Using concrete examples of literary prizes, she points out that “…writing in both poetry and fiction, is about fifty-fifty men and women, but prizes, grants, and awards are nowhere near fifty-fifty.” In much the same way, Budianta laments the dominance of men in Indonesian editorship and academia. Where she does diverge from Le Guin, is her focus on culture as the root of this gender bias. Budianta points out that traditionally, the activities of Indonesian women were restricted to the private sphere, while literature was governed by men – those who could engage in public life, in the workplace, in politics. In this way, men became the gatekeepers of the book as a medium.
With the problems exposed, Le Guin moves on to explore several key feminist responses to the literary tradition. Speaking primarily of women writers of the 21st century, like Virginia Woolf and herself, Le Guin outlines two early approaches: those who imitate men’s writing to become more canonical, to those who passionately defend l’écriture feminine. Of her own generation she says: “We’re learning how to write as women. A lot of us feel that we've found our voices.” (p. 197) For them, the challenge now has less to do with the formation of a women’s tradition, but with inserting this writing into the mainstream. The situation is different for Indonesian women’s writing, however. In her interview, Budianta spends some time speaking of a new crop of Indonesian women writers who are exploring female sexuality and experience for the first time. In 2016, Indonesian women are only beginning to make the transition from object to subject. In this way, the state of feminist literary critique in Indonesia today is perhaps more similar to that of 1970s America.
Another point of difference between American and Indonesian literature is the state of documentation of women’s writing. While Le Guin provides several examples of how feminists have uncovered and promoted women writers over the last fifteen years, Budianta notes that there are many blind spots in Indonesian literary history. Much of the country’s more informal writing ephemera have never been archived, and the first novel by a female author to be included in the National Library was only written in 1930. Budianta asserts that “It is now our task as literary critics to document and question these practices and attitudes.” That there are more successful women authors in Indonesia than before, and more women in academia, are encouraging developments.
To round up her analysis of the current position of Indonesian women writers, Budianta also mentions the country’s political climate. Having spent most of the last 50 years under a dictatorship, one of the things which makes Indonesia’s literary history so distinct to America’s is its experience with censorship. During Soeharto’s presidency, censorship was mostly focussed on restricting political and ideological language. Coming out from under this media environment, Indonesia experienced a period of significant growth and prosperity. However, in the last ten years, new forces are coming into play: that of religious extremism and social censorship. Budianta notes that today, there is a tension between the more progressive urban population and the more conservative majority. The obstacles that face Western writers are more subtle. In America, Le Guin is certain that things are changing, but it’s not so much about who is writing and what is being written as much as who is reading. It’s about fighting the assumption that “If it's about men everybody wants it; if it's about women it's only for women.”
In conclusion, though they speak from different times and of different cultures, Le Guin and Budianta are both feminists challenging a male-dominated literary tradition. They both speak of the rising status of women authors in literary tradition, and the feminist work needed to maintain this trend towards diversity and equality. Ultimately, what is clear is that the Western context is more developed in both directions – in that it has a more established male-dominated canon but also a stronger tradition of feminist criticism. For Indonesian writers, history presents less resistance. The key challenge instead, lies in overcoming contemporary political and religious censorship.
References:
Walsh, W., Le Guin, U. (1995) I am a woman writer; I am a western writer: an interview with Ursula Le Guin. Kenyon Review 17(3/4).
Wijaksana M. (2016) Melani Budianta: Merekam Perempuan Penulis Dalam Sejarah Kesusastraan. [Online] Available at: http://www.jurnalperempuan.org/9/post/2016/03/melani-budianta-merekam-perempuan-penulis-dalam-sejarah-kesusastraan.html (Accessed 02/12/18).
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