A documentary titled The Computers: The Remarkable Story of the ENIAC Programmers, tells a story of women who developed America’s first electronic computer to automate ballistic computations during World War II. In the film, the six programmers share their stories about their hard work alongside over two hundred other women, both civilian and military, who were doing the computations before the machine came to replace them. Why, despite the massive contribution, the programmers were not introduced to the public when ENIAC was released in 1946? This week, I look at the historical paradox where women were celebrated during the war as breaking into the ”male” territories of science, technology and engineering, yet at the same time, no one heard much about their contribution in the early days of computer science.
Technology and society scholar Jennifer Light resolves this paradox in the following way: women were performing “male” roles but were not seen by mass media as professionals, regardless of experience and complexity of their jobs. They thus never received any credit for innovation or invention. The job of a programmer, perceived in recent years as masculine work, Light explains, originated as feminized clerical labour. Before the war, women with college degrees in mathematics could only get jobs as school teachers. The war has changed this situation - they could now choose from up to 25 positions to start immediately. More women in the jobs market did not mean more equality with men, though. The term “computer” was used to refer to human beings until approximately 1945, after which moment there was a split to the “machine” and the “operator” - something that we now call computer programmer. Hardware design was a man’s job, and all things software, a woman’s. The software in the time of ENIAC was seen by the status classification as the secondary role, which did not score as high as the hard work of actually building the mainframe as an artefact and getting it to work. New media scholar Wendy Chun points out, during the work on ENIAC computer, male analysts of higher military ranks would speak the commands to female operators who would then had the task to interpret the commands for the machine. The operator’s work, however, proved to be more complex than any merely clerical task, and largely overlapped with the hardware design. As one the ENIAC programmers, Kay McNulty recalled, “somebody gave us a whole stack of blueprints, and these were the wiring diagrams for all the panels, and they said 'Here, figure out how the machine works and then figure out how to program it.’”
“Somebody gave us a whole stack of blueprints, and these were the wiring diagrams for all the panels, and they said ‘Here, figure out how the machine works and then figure out how to program it.’”
Thus, female operators would know the mainframe back and forth, replace burnt out vacuum tubes, short connections and fix other “nonclerical” bugs. You may have heard about punchcards, pieces of stiff paper that can be used to contain digital data. The cards were produced using many different types of machines that you had to know how to wire too - such as sorters, readers, tabulators or reproducers. The “operators” were compiling the code before there existed any real compilers, command line or graphical user interface, which made the women of ENIAC, Chun continues, the software.
In the 1950s the status of women’s work continued to erode - in the ENIAC project, female operators were never referred to as anything more than "[John] Holberton's group" or as "ENIAC girls”. The lack of recognition assured that these individuals never had a chance for career advancement. Chun, however, argues that extra care should be taken of not putting singular personalities such as Grace Murray Hopper, the admiral and inventor of COBOL and the “ENIAC girls” into one category. In fact, as a mathematician, Hopper, if anything, was advocating the elimination of the work of programmers altogether. In her 1952 paper titled The Education of a Computer, she proposed a concept of fully automatic programming. It explained the vision of a higher-level programming language that could compile code directly from mathematics. "The programmer may return to being a mathematician," Hopper wrote. "He is supplied with a catalogue of subroutines. No longer does he need to have available formulas or tables of elementary functions. He does not even need to know the particular instruction code used by the computer. He needs only to be able to use the catalogue to supply information to the computer about his problem” (Hopper, 1952:244).
Source: Hopper, Grace Murray, and Remington Rand Corp. 1952. “The Education Of A Computer”: 244
Conclusion
“ENIAC girls“ were the base of the mid-century programming hierarchy, and thus were destined to become obsolete despite their talent and the utmost revolutionary nature of the jobs they performed. That’s the historical logic that affected both women and men time and time again throughout industrial age. While the particularities of gender attitudes during World War II are perhaps ancient history now, there is a quite clear trend that persists to this day. It’s a trend of putting ideology and society than technical competencies of either men or women. Or, as an historian of technology Nina Lerman summarises, “gender plays a role in defining which activities can readily be labelled 'technological’”.
References
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2011. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Hopper, Grace Murray, and Remington Rand Corp. 1952. “The Education Of A Computer”.
Nina Lerman, "'Preparing for the Duties and Practical Business of Life': Technological Knowledge and Social Structure in Mid-19th-century Philadelphia," Technology and Culture 38 (1997): 36
Light, Jennifer S. 1999. “When Computers Were Women.” Technology and Culture 40(3): 455–83.
