Gonna Be an Engineer

Former student (and really cool person) Michelle Willard posted this Peggy Seeger song "Gonna Be an Engineer" on my Facebook wall: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCRRe72mwwY&feature=youtu.be. It made me think of an article from the old magazine Literary Digest that I talk about in my book. "A Girl Engineer in Kansas City," published in 1923, tells the story of Miss Clare Nicolet, whose four and a half years of college "left the native feminine qualities undisturbed in their development" so that she is at home among "big turbines" and "uses waste as deftly as a powder puff" ("A Girl Engineer in Kansas City," Literary Digest, 7 July 1923, p. 29).

I talk about the article as an example of the "exception" pattern in media representation of women's employment. In this pattern, women who do jobs considered "masculine" such as engineering are described in terms that make them seem odd for their sex, even if the article praises their accomplishments. Readers are reassured of the woman's femininity, despite her "odd" choice of employment. Since most of us don't want to be seen as odd, the overall effect is to reinforce status quo gender norms. It's like tokenism, but the "exception" pattern crosses class boundaries (female doctors and female plumbers have both been portrayed as "exceptions") and it always carries the reassurance of femininity.

I'd like to think we're past all this (sometimes I wonder what's really in my younger female students' heads about gender and careers). After all, Peggy Seeger isn't young, and in some ways her lyrics about having a profession being the opposite of motherhood (and being a "lady") seem dated. But the thing is, I hadn't heard of her until Michelle posted this YouTube clip. It's kind of like Virginia Woolf's essay in A Room of One's Own about Judith Shakespeare, William's hypothetical sister, who was his intellectual equal and "as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was," but who wasn't sent to school and had no chance to write her plays. Peggy Seeger is Pete's sister, and clearly she has had a chance to write and sing, but without the media fanfare of her famous brother (too bad; I like her voice). I think that's how it is with a lot of women's accomplishments. If they haven't even been held up as "exceptions" (read "oddities") they're invisible. And if they're invisible, it's hard for them to be role models for the next generation and we have this constant sense of starting over.

After all, Peggy Seeger was born a decade after Miss Clare Nicolet earned her engineering degree, yet this song was written in the 1970s--as if women in engineering was a new idea.