Exploring the Archives
Resources on Gender and Computing
The following article is the third in a series highlighting materials in the CBI collections. The topics in this series have been chosen both for their historical significance as well as to call attention to materials/collections that may not be known to the research community.
Women had active roles in both pre-World War II human computing and the construction and programming of early electronic digital computers. Although they have continued to have important roles in the computing professions over the past half-century, they have encountered numerous obstacles. Even as women’s participation in other scientific and technical fields in the U.S. substantially increased in recent decades, it has declined in computing education and computing professions.
While a few historians and other scholars have published important work on this topic, academics have only begun to scratch the surface in understanding the important and varied roles of women in computer and software history, and the gendered nature and dynamics of IT education and work. This is the motivation behind CBI’s upcoming workshop-conference “History, Computing, Gender” to be held May 30-31, 2008 (see related article).
Overall, fewer archival resources exist to study the history of computing and gender than many topics in the history of computing. Nevertheless, the Charles Babbage Institute has numerous rich collections in this area. Some of these resources are described in this article. They include personal papers of pioneering women in computing (Gertrude Blanch, Frances E. Holberton, and Margaret Fox), organizational records of groups seeking to advance the position and experience of women in computing professions (Association of Women and Computing), CBI oral histories with women, and large corporate collections that contain material related to the gendered environments of computer corporations.
First, I’ll discuss some of CBI’s personal papers of pioneering women in computing. Gertrude Blanch completed a Ph.D. in algebraic geometry at Cornell University in 1935. She went on to become a prominent mathematician and computer specialist. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Blanch served as technical director of the Work Projects Adminstration’s Mathematical Tables Project. This project employed 450 human computers by the early 1940s, and in 1942 it became part of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). After the war Blanch worked at the National Bureau of Standards on various aspects of computation and numerical analysis and was one of the founders of ACM. In 1954 she was appointed senior mathematician at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where she worked until retiring in 1967. She published more than 30 technical papers in her career.
CBI’s Gertrude Blanch Papers, 1932-1996, include personal and professional correspondence, published and unpublished writings, research notes, biographical materials, photographs, and other resources. This small but important collection was a major source in David Alan Grier’s engaging and insightful book, When Computers Were Human (Princeton University Press, 2005).
Frances “Betty” Holberton joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in the late 1940s, one of the first two U.S. firms in the electronic digital computer field. She continued with the firm after it was acquired by Remington Rand Corporation in 1950 and became one of the leading figures in programming language development for Remington Rand.
CBI’s Frances E. Holberton Papers, 1950s-1980s, include correspondence, reports, notes, and publications related to the development and standardization of FORTRAN, COBOL, and ASCII. The records also contain extensive documentation on the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company and its early products (BINAC and UNIVAC), as well material on the NBS Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC).
Margaret Fox, a graduate of Wisconsin State College (1940), was a naval electronics engineer during World War II. In the early 1950s she joined the technical staff of the NBS Electronic Computer Laboratory, and subsequently, the Research Information Center and Advisory Service on Information Processing (RICASIP). From 1966 to 1975 Fox was the chief of the Office of Computer Information in the NBS Institute for Computer Science and Technology. She was a longtime member of ACM and the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS), serving as the first secretary of the latter organization.
CBI’s Margaret Fox Papers, 1935-1976, contain professional correspondence; records of boards, councils, and committees; various NBS reports; organizational charts and personnel lists; extensive project reports on early digital computers and applications; transcripts of talks; articles; project proposals; Naval Ordnance Laboratory records; and photographs.
In addition to personal papers, CBI also has records of organizations focused on issues of gender and computing, most prominently the Association for Women in Computing (AWC). AWC was founded in December 1978 in Washington, D.C., and incorporated in Maryland early the following year. At its founding, it had 15 charter members and quickly grew to support efforts at both the national and local levels. The AWC’s goals were to promote communication among women in the field of computing and software, expand educational and professional development opportunities for women, maintain a speakers bureau, and give awards honoring the accomplishments of women in IT. AWC published a national newsletter, “Source,” as well as supported local newsletters of AWC chapters in many major U.S. cities. AWC had a national annual conference, had a presence on the programs of ACM and NCC annual conferences, and was a member of American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS).
CBI’s Association for Women in Computing Records, 1978-1991, includes correspondence of officers, administrative records, committee meeting minutes, conference programs, “Source” (incomplete run), contextual materials on founding documents, and some local newsletters. In addition to these national records, CBI also has a separate collection containing the records of the Association for Women in Computing’s local organization in the Twin Cities.
CBI has nearly 400 oral histories with pioneering computer scientists and prominent figures in the computer, software, and networking industries. The vast majority of these interview transcripts are with men. However, there are a small number of oral histories with women, including the most downloaded oral history in the CBI database—a group oral history from the 1990 Univac Conference (CBI Oral History 200). Among the participants are Jean Sammet, Florence K. Koons, Frances E. Holberton, Jean Bartik, and Dorothy Armstrong. CBI has additional oral histories with Norma Anderson, Alice Burks, Margaret Fox, Laura Gould, Madge Griswold, Frances Holberton, Luanne Johnson, Margaret Loftus, Ethel Marden, and Adelle Tomash.
While most of the materials mentioned above focus on women’s history of computing, CBI’s collections can also be used to tease out the history of gendered environments within organizations. Here, our two largest corporate collections, Burroughs and Control Data, offer rich possibilities. The range of materials in these collections that could potentially be used to better understand gender and computing include personnel records, correspondence, corporate newsletters/magazines, and photographs.
CBI continues to seek collections to enhance and extend our considerable existing archival resources on the history of gender and computing.