Throughout the course of this class, we have examined various technologies and sciences and how gender relates to them, both in their development and their current status. Much of the tech we have looked at is coded masculinely and women are interlopers. There are areas, however, that are stereotypically feminine. Within medicine and medicinal technology there are whole disciplines that are considered “softer” and for women practitioners, such as physiotherapy, genetic counselling, and nursing. There are also technologies, such as vibrators and birth control that are placed firmly in the feminine sphere. So where does this gendering come from? Most authors do not answer this question directly, but as they discuss the gendered nature of the discipline or technology they describe, an origin of gendering can be located. When reviewing larger fields, opportunity for women to enter those spheres is a significant reason for gendering, along with the social expectations those fields cater to. When looking at birth control and vibrators, those authors find the origin of gendering comes from lack of knowledge of the female body which is then resisted by women looking to reclaim control over their body. All origins concern themselves with the gender expectations each field and technology have, but the first four authors find these expectations to be the reason for opportunities for women to enter larger fields, while the last two authors find that gender expectations first gendered the technologies male or neutral until the feminist movement reclaimed them as they reclaimed control of their body.
Genetic counselling began as a peripheral task for physician-geneticists and “’Pretty Pioneering-Spirited People’: Genetic Counsellors, Gender Culture, and the Professional Evolution of a Feminised Health Field, 1947-1980” by Devon Stillwell follows its transformation into a field of medicine dominated by women. Genetic counselling became known as a combination of hard and soft sciences, and the counsellors were seen as the mediator between the doctor and the patient. After WWII, hereditary clinics began opening up in the USA, but all of them were led by men who performed counselling as part of their job, but were not focused on that aspect. At the time, the popular opinion was that genetic counsellors should be medically trained, which served to exclude women, who would have great difficulties in obtaining PhDs. The first program that trained women to be genetic counsellors was established in 1969 and for many years these programs were populated by “women who had been science majors, had stopped and had a family, and then were coming back” (Stillwell 179). Eventually, many of these programs became an attempt for gender equality in clinical genetics, which ties in well to genetic counsellor’s strong relationship with feminism and reproductive rights. In some ways, genetic counselling became radically feminist and sought to empower other women, mainly because most of the counsellors were women.
Once in the field, the counsellors experienced professional gatekeeping and were generally looked down upon by physician-geneticists. They were described as secretaries and “genetic counsellors clearly encountered specific gendered expectations about women’s health work upon entering the system of a genetics profession, a system that valued their ability to provide sympathy greatly above their scientific aptitudes” (Stillwell 184). Still, these women were able to create a niche within a very male dominated field, if only because of the expectations society has for women and their professions.
This article presents a very well rounded and insightful understanding of why genetic counselling is populated predominantly by women: “counsellors’ entrance into the field from feminist impulses and scientific backgrounds, but also from expectations of women as natural carers well-suited to advising other women about pregnancy and reproduction” (Stillwell 180). Women are expected to have a “human” component in their work, characterized by sympathy and direct interaction with others. Still, because of these assumptions, women were able to break into the field of genetics and make a place for themselves. The author of this article pinpoints these expectations and the push to get women into science as the main reasons genetic counselling became gendered. Women have always been expected to be counsellors, so women with experience in the sciences would be a logical demographic for genetic counsellors.
In “The Business of Ethics: Gender, Medicine, and the Professional Codification of the American Physiotherapy Association, 1918-1935,” author Beth Linker looks at the origins of physiotherapy and why the code of ethics their organization created works so hard to be construed masculinely. Much of the article focuses on how physiotherapists, in the name of professional survival, worked hard to push back against feminine stereotypes of caregivers and therapists. Physiotherapy went through many rebrands in an effort to be viewed in a more professional light and were one of the first organizations to create their own code of ethics. This code of ethics avoided any sentimentality, and even left out any mentions of patient care, in an attempt to adopt masculine rhetoric and avoid the caretaker stereotype. Yet there was still pushback, with (male) doctors advocating that no woman can be a medical professional. Physiotherapists remained subordinate to physicians and often tried to appease them with promises of only working by their referral. They worked harder than any other group in order to “overcompensate for the gender make-up of their field” (Linker 349).
Physiotherapy became a female dominated field after WWII and “the wartime effort to ‘reconstruct’ maimed soldiers provided these women with a unique chance to move from an exclusively female sphere of education other women and children to a medical arena where they largely interacted with men as both their superiors and patients” (Linker 325). In order to be taken seriously, physiotherapists tried to defeminize and desexualize their image, reaction against nineteenth century ideals of womanhood.
The author believes this rebellion emerged because “during the rise of the new laboratory medicine at the turn of the twentieth century, the organized medical profession began to resist the ’soft side’ of medicine, conflating it with sentimentality, sympathy, caring, and all-around irrational feminine behavior. Sentimentality hindered the practice of ‘hard’ science, for it undermined the possibility of creating a clear separation between subject and object, healer and patient” (Linker 343). This field was full of women because they were the ones available to help the returning soldiers and then because the medical profession began to see Physiotherapy as “soft medicine” and the men who had the opportunity to get medical degrees wanted nothing to do with it.
Nursing has long been considered a softer side of medicine as well. One woman who capitalized on that was Florence Nightingale, as Mary Poovey dissects in “A Housewifely Woman: The Social Deconstruction of Florence Nightingale.” Though Nightingale proved the capability of women nurses, she used representations of domestic ideals that continue to be attached to women and nursing. Poovey claims Nightingale’s own writings and the publicity around her “capitalized on the contradiction inherent in the domestic ideal in order to make even more radical claims for women than contemporary feminists did” (Poovey 166). Nightingale was an upper-class woman, untrained in nursing, but she volunteered to administer nurses in the East, and before long go the reputation of a self-denying caretaker. Though she was known to be a tough-minded administrator, Nightingale made sure she was still seen to have feminine qualities such as sentimentality and sympathy. And Nightingale did not champion the common woman, as she considered most nurses and midwives to be low class and scorned them. Indeed, Nightingale was against professionalizing nursing, believing it should remain a way for wealthy women to showcase their feminine altruism.
Poovey helpfully sums up how she believes nursing became gendered, writing that “working in favor of feminizing nursing, however, was an even more compelling set of factors: the increasing economic and social pressure on unmarried women of all but the highest classes to work, the reluctance of the medical profession to countenance an organization of male medical attendants that might eventually infiltrate the medical hierarchy, and the availability – at least in Nightingale’s writings on the subject – of a representation of nursing as subordinate to, but also wholly different from, medical practice” (Poovey 175). The combination of these factors led to women overtaking nursing, first as charity work for rich women, and then as paid labor as more women joined the workforce.
Cynthia Toman chooses not to focus on “extraordinary women” but rather the everyday work of nurses in “’Body Work’: Nurses and the Delegation of Medical Technology at the Ottawa Civic Hospital, 1947-1972,” and describes women who wanted to partake in medicine had to carve out a niche for themselves. Toman explores the relationship between predominantly male physicians and predominantly female nurses, arguing that “the rapid transfer of medical technology from physicians to nurses during the mid-twentieth-century shifted the division of labor related to ‘body work’ in hospitals, with gender as the primary mediating variable that shaped both the work and the workers” (Toman 157). As germ theory was introduced, nurses increasingly became associated with domestic service and cleaning. Attempts to give nurses more responsibilities were contested both by higher authorities (men) and the nurses themselves, who found it to be a professional and workload issue. Still, nurses were delegated more and more tasks due to the lack of physicians, and it is this delegation that Toman pinpoints as the crux of gender inequality at this point in time. The article claims delegation “reinforced patriarchal relationships between nurses and physicians,” and that “once a procedure became identified as ‘nurses’ work,’ it remained nurses’ work” (Toman 164). Delegation allowed doctors to retain their superior position and reduced nurses’ ability to assert and negotiate their positions and roles.
Toman also finds that the professionalization of nursing added to the gendering of the trade. She writes that hospitals “evolved from charities to publicly-administered agencies. Governance of hospitals shifted away from the control of lady superintendents and lay leaders, to hospital boards made up of male trustees and physicians” (Toman 165). In order to solidify nursing as a woman’s profession, physicians separated the science from the skills and “medical technologies associated with direct body contact, manual dexterity, repetitive motions or a need for meticulous attention to detail were transferred to nurses – a process that socially constructed these technologies as ‘women’s work’” (Toman 168). As men were put in charge of nursing and it became more professional, more gendered expectations were put onto nurses, ensuring that the field would remain female dominated.
“Making Room For Rubbers: gender, technology, and birth control before the pill” by Andrea Tone examines the gender dynamics surrounding birth control before the invention of the birth control pill, which relegated birth control to the female domain. Tone argues that while much of the history of birth control focuses on women, this methodology embraces the separate sphere paradigm and ignores the responsibilities and achievements of men. Condoms began as animal intestines, which were found in tanneries and meat processing, so men had the most immediate access to them, which continued as the bootleg rubber trade grew (Tone 54, 59). Tone presents letters which establish that determining birth control within a marriage was an equal venture between husband and wife and this equality was changed with the introduction of the pill (Tone 63). Margaret Sanger campaigned for the pill because “no woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body” while condoms put birth control into the hands of men (Tone 66). The article points toward the gendering of birth control being constructed by women who wanted to make it an all-female space and erase the role of men. The history of this subject has added to this separation of spheres, and Tone claims that with a more inclusive history will “inspire Americans of child-bearing age with the hope that when the next contraceptive revolution occurs, men will be given even more opportunities to assume the risks and responsibilities of pregnancy prevention” (Tone 73). While birth control started out as a male or even neutral gendered technology, in an effort to support female liberation, it has become a technology for women, creating new issues in regards to sexism and policing female sexuality.
A technology that many may associate with female sexuality is vibrators, the history of which is detailed in “The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction” by Rachel P. Maines. Maines follows the gendering of the vibrator as it starts as a cure to “women’s complaints” as understood by male physicians, until its current usage as an empowering aid to women and their sexuality. The article looks at the long history of men being unable to understand female sexuality, from trying to label women’s genitals using terms for men’s genitals and dubbing the female orgasm a “parapoxym,” which helped create the myth that women cannot orgasm at all. The author claims that because men did not want to acknowledge that their wives and daughters could receive sexual pleasure, so “doctors inherited the task of producing orgasm in women because it was a job nobody else wanted” (Maines 4). These male doctors would stimulate an orgasm in their patients until they too grew tired of having to manually massage the women, and thus the vibrator was born. Vibrators remained a medical instrument until the end of the 1920s, and it was not until the 1960s that they emerged as devices for pleasure, operated by and for women (Maines 20). Maines is claiming that the vibrator was coded masculinely in its conception because of androcentrism and an unwillingness to examine female sexuality in its own right which transformed when women took control of the vibrator market and used it as a tool for pleasure, not medicine.
It makes sense that the two articles which look at the technologies behind birth control and female sexuality find a similar origin of the gendering of these fields. Condoms continue to be a “male technology,” yet the article claims that condoms emerged as a more neutral technology and was more divisively gendered after the introduction of the pill. Vibrators, in a slightly different trajectory, were originally “male” simply because they were invented by men and used by men on women because so little was known about female sexuality, yet now are decidedly female gendered. Birth control as a whole is considered a female realm, and still there is overwhelming societal ignorance in regards to female sexual pleasure.
When looking at larger fields, such as physiotherapy and genetic counselling, opportunity appears to be what the authors pinpoint as the gendering of these fields. Since neither of these medical fields require a PhD, women, who have historically been unable to get medical degrees, have to find other ways to practice medicine. Certain roles which require more interaction with patients and more “soft science” were easy targets, since stereotypes about women allowed them easier access. One could apply this same logic to nursing, yet the two articles on this subject look more at the professionalization of nursing, as well as the emergence of new technology and pressure on women to join the workforce. Opportunity is still a factor, but the transition from charitable work to professional work accounts for the gendering of the nursing profession. Toman, however, also points to the men in charge and delegation culture that developed post-professionalization of nursing as another reason women were relegated to the subordinate role of nurse. Poovey also addresses the self-sacrificing and caretaker aspects of nursing that were very much in line with gender expectations for females. Both Poovey and Toman can agree that the subordinate position of the nurse meant that women could more easily fill that position. Birth control and vibrators became female coded in a very different way than the other medical fields, since these are the first ones that deal with only women as patients. Women have long been understudied and under-researched in medicine, so the introduction of birth control and vibrators as tools for men to use on women or even neutral technology is unsurprising. Only when second wave feminism began to take off and women sought control over their own bodies did these technologies become female coded. All the other fields have gendered origins out of patriarchal expectations, and these two became female coded in a fight against those expectations.
Works Cited
Linker, Beth. “The Business of Ethics: Gender, Medicine, and the Professional Codification of the American Physiotherapy Association, 1918–1935.” Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences 60.3 (2005): 320–354. EBSCOhost. Web.
Maines, Rachel P. The Technology of Orgasm:” Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction. JHU Press, 2001.
Poovey, Mary. “A Housewifely Woman: The Social Construction of Florence Nightingale.” Uneven Developments. Chicago, US: University of Chicago Press, 1988. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 8 May 2016.
Stillwell, Devon. “‘Pretty Pioneering-Spirited People’: Genetic Counsellors, Gender Culture, and the Professional Evolution of a Feminised Health Field, 1947–1980.” Social History of Medicine 28.1 (2015): 172–193. Print.
Toman, Cynthia. “Body Work”: Nurses and the Delegation of Medical Technology at the Ottawa Civic Hospital, 1947-1972.” Scientia Canadensis 29.2 (2006): 155–175. Print.
Tone, Andrea. “Making Room for Rubbers: Gender, Technology, and Birth Control before the Pill.” History and Technology 18.1 (2002): 51–76. Taylor and Francis+NEJM. Web.
