Digital interventions should foster the connections between feminist rhetoric, the body of feminist histories, and collective ethos, working to sustain connections between feminist rhetoricians and contemporary resources such as digital archiving, blogging, and grassroots organizing while challenging the nomos seeking to limit feminist rhetoric.1
Once again, this site is not a full treatment of its subject matter.
Even so, it is clear that Grace Hopper’s future-oriented and consensus-building work on COBOL produced a startlingly robust and usable programming language, even if it did not satisfy most of her academic peers. Without the concept of code that was relatively easy for the (English-speaking) layman—or laywoman—to learn, and that could run on many different hardware platforms computing simply would not have evolved to today’s level of sophistication.
In addition to foreshadowing the civilian Internet, Resource One and the Community Memory bulletin boards inspired Bay Area tinkerers and hobbyists to experiment with building their own computer terminals and, eventually, their own desktop computers. While retaining much of its open and anti-hierarchical stance, both boards existed primarily to serve the community rather than profit off of it.
My studies for this site may have created the impression that a relatively small number of women were disproportionately responsible for innovations in digital computing. In fact, these are only the ones whom circumstance made the most visible. In light of the current misogyny and male revanchism prevalent in the technology sector, there is a serious need for both novel and old discourses to help us “imagine differently” around computers and computing. A feminist rhetorical lens on history is a starting point from which to reclaim and re-imagine what these machines will mean to our lives in the future.
- 1Lane, 2015
