Perceptions About Women in Science and Engineering History
Heidi Reeder Communication Seung Youn Chyung Organizational Performance & Workplace Learning Lynn Lubamersky History Pat Pyke STEM Station Cheryl Schrader Chancellor, Missouri S&T Leslie Madsen-Brooks History Janelle Brown EXPLORE Magazine Thanks to Boise State University College of Social Sciences and Public Affairs for funding. BACKGROUND: For at least forty years, women’s history scholars have investigated who is responsible for advances in science and technology. Their findings have dismantled assumptions that have excluded women’s scientific contributions. While the role of women in the history of science has been recovered, it is uncertain whether this information has made its way into the classroom and into cultural consciousness.
Outstanding Women in Mechanical Engineering
The article aims to sensitise teachers to their perception of engineers and scientists. It also highlights the life and achievements of one outstanding woman mechanical engineer, namely Ilene J. Busch-Vishniac, and summarises the achievements of other outstanding women in mechanical engineering. Teachers can use the examples of these outstanding female engineers as role models to inspire their students.
Implementing the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act: Competing Priorities and Resource Constraint Evident in the South West of England before 1948
Mental deficiency policy and practice remain controversial topics within the wider history of institutional and community care. While recent studies have highlighted emerging programmes of community care against a backdrop of fierce eugenic debates, this article focuses on the management of difficult cases within the mental deficiency sector. The Royal Western Counties Institution at Starcross, near Exeter, Devon, is used as a case study to draw attention to a serious conflict between new priorities for mental deficiency work following the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act and older traditions at one of the original five English voluntary idiot asylums. Controversial policies for selecting patients on the basis of class, gender, and grade of mental deficiency underline the importance ofboth continuity and change between nineteenth- and twentieth-century models of care. The often-difficult relationship that existed between the institution and the local authorities that financed it is explored in terms of guiding principles as well as exceptional cases. The control of women patients, especially their marriage and motherhood, emerges as a key concern for mental deficiency activists, but their care highlights diverging interests and real conflict over the management of mental deficiency as a legal, medical, social, moral, and eugenic problem.