Why a Rhetorical Approach?

Historical beginnings

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852) is widely believed to have written the first computer algorithm.1 The deep foundations of modern computing technology are most visible, however, in the work of "human computers," women mathematicians who toiled solving complex formulas and routine equations in businesses, government agencies and academia at the end of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th. 2 Their work was taken up after the Second World War by early computer programming experts, such as Grace Hopper at Harvard and her women counterparts (the ENIAC Six) at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Their work in the business machine and defense industries in turn became the base for a third generation of women computer experts such as Jude Milhon (Community Memory, San Francisco), Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler (NIC), and Radia Perlman (Digital Equipment Corporation).3

Male voices start to dominate the narrative

In the 1960’s and early 1970’s, digital computing was still a relatively “genderless” technological field. 4 But government agencies and major corporations—which were operating within a patriarchal and male-oriented ideological framework—continued to envision their workforces as predominantly male. As Nathan Ensmenger observes in The Computer Boys Take Over:

bias toward male programmers was not so much deliberate as it was convenient—a combination of laziness, ambiguity, and traditional male privilege. 5

Additionally, there was little consensus on what combinations of expertise were needed to become an effective programmer. Corporate personnel departments, looking for some surety in their hiring practices adopted psychological tests as part of their screening process. Once again, they did not often think to offer these tests to women candidates 6

As computer programming became an even larger part of corporate activities and costs began to rise, managers began to view programs and programmers as contributing to a “software crisis”. The solution, purportedly, was twofold. First, better methods for managing programmers within existing business structures—hierarchical and male--had to be devised. Additionally, computer programming itself had to be redefined to more closely mirror corporate professional standards. 7 As the computer historian Janet Abbate notes

The assumption that programming would be improved by making it more like engineering was based on the cultural linking of engineering with masculinity and, by extension, with prestige and authority 8 .

While there are a number of approaches to interpreting this history, one critical element they have in common is that women’s narratives of success in the computer programming field were lost –drowned out in one conference room after another full of men trying to fit software development into corporate hierarchies and processes. As computer technology grew and became a corporate sector in its own right, participation by women continued to diminish.9

Feminist rhetorics of technology as an historical lens

Recovering silenced women’s voices and experiences is one of several goals of feminist rhetorical historiography. The process of recovery is not merely a way of filling in historical ellipses, however. Historical recovery is also a starting point for envisioning new ways to speak to the present and the future. 10 Remapping present discourses and how we analyze them has the potential to transform an approach to computer technology that dead-ends in dystopian cyberlibertarianism 11 or simply reiterates the same old hierarchies of patriarchy and misogyny.12

This transformation is part of what Martin (2022) refers to, when he discusses the rhetorical "'negotiation' of past and future"13 in public speech. For feminist rhetors this is of particular relevance. Current patriarchal discourses threaten women’s participation in computing technology, both as inventors/developers and as everyday users. 14 Lane (2015) observes it is currently a matter of “how contemporary feminist rhetoric might be bolstered, enhanced, and girded against erasure”15 in the digital sphere.

There is a bitter irony in digital spaces such as Twitter or Facebook being used against women in violent or threatening ways. These spaces were, as Davis remarks, originally based on feminist rhetorical practices such as "dialogic collaboration, social intervention through widespread proliferation, and multivocality."16 Colonization and subversion of these spaces by patriarchal discourses and misogynistic actors emphasizes how poorly such assertions of hierarchy match with the narratives that made open online environments possible in the first place.

In her thoughts towards a feminist rhetoric of technology, Koerber (2000) observes that rhetoric is, itself, a technology for making meaning. She further advises feminist rhetors to transform it into a tool that is "capable of making sense of the aspects of technology that concern feminist scholars most".17 To do, she recommends focusing on the technologies most associated with women's lives, the technologies that build, rebuild, or deconstruct gendered relationships as well as those that persist in the institutions and customs that form part of everyday life. 18

Koerber proposes a sophisticated and complimentary feminist approach to the rhetoric of technology. The need for such and approach is best summed up, however, by Lane:

The historical exhumation work has begun, but it is the application and consciousness-raising of how voice, gender, and subversion of existing structures might begin to sculpt alternative histories, experiences, and applications of silenced voices.19

It is hoped that the brief case studies on this site will contribute to this beginning.

• 1Evans, 2018
• 2Evans, ibid; Abbate, 2012; Holt, 2016
• 3Evans, 2018
• 4Abbate, 2012; Chang, 2018
• 5Ensmenger, 2010, p.79
• 6Ensmenger, 2010
• 7Ensmenger, 2010; Abbate 2012
• 8Abbate, ibid. p.111
• 9Abbate 2012, Chang, 2018
• 10Enoch & Bessette, 2010; Ryan, 2010
• 11Adam, 2001; Enoch & Bessette, ibid
• 12Heron, Belford & Coker, 2014
• 13 Martin, 2022, p170
• 14Koerber, 2000; Lane 2015
• 15Lane, ibid.
• 16Davis, 2019. p.133
• 17Koerber, 2000, p. 63
• 18ibid.
• 19Lane, 2015