Abstract
With the start of the Cold War after World War II, and then the Korean War in 1950, American women were once again asked to contribute to the nation’s defense. The pendulum toward encouragement of women to be engineers and scientists had swung again. The country needs women to be in the workforce and supporting the war effort when the country is at war, but then willing and compliant about being discarded and being replaced at the end of periods of national crisis. In the 1950s, Americans moved to suburbia, women married younger, and the birth rate increased. But when Sputnik launched in 1957, Americans focused again on the need to train a scientific and engineering workforce. Women were willing to engage, but now asked for actions to take place to secure their position in the workforce. After the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women documented discrimination, The Equal Pay Act, the Civil Rights Act – Title VII, and Executive Orders mandating Affirmative Action were put in place. The founding of the National Organization for Women in conjunction with these new laws and orders pointed to the dawning of a new era for women in general and women in science, specifically.
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Notes
- 1.
Edith Green (1910–1987) served as a U.S. Representative from Oregon from 1955–1974. She left a substantial legacy in the U.S. Congress. She impacted almost every education bill enacted during her tenure. Green supported federal aid to education and the anti-poverty programs of the Great Society while resisting expansion of the federal bureaucracy. She was appointed to the Committee on Education and Labor in her freshman term in the House of Representatives where she served until her final term in the House when she took a seat on the Committee on Appropriations. As chair of the Education and Labor subcommittee on higher education, she was responsible for establishing the first federal program for undergraduate scholarships.
- 2.
Physicist Enrico Fermi created the world’s first nuclear reactor. He received the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- 3.
Sir Ernest Rutherford is considered the father of nuclear physics. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.
- 4.
German Max Born would receive the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- 5.
For her dissertation, she had performed the calculations to support the probability of double photon emissions from electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom. Thirty years later, laser technology was able to perform the experiments necessary to prove her theory.
- 6.
Hungarian-American theoretical physicist Edward Teller is considered the father of the hydrogen bomb.
- 7.
Zuckerman reports that Thomas Edison referred to a “bug” in his phonograph as early as 1889. Edison is reported to have defined a bug as “an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble.”
- 8.
In 2011, the Academy of Natural Sciences became affiliated with Drexel University.
- 9.
Phycology is the study of algae.
- 10.
In 1900, German mathematician David Hilbert published 23 problems in mathematics that were unsolved at the time.
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Tietjen, J.S. (2020). Sputnik Signals a New Kind of War. In: Scientific Women. Women in Engineering and Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51445-7_5
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