The female enigmas of Bletchley Park in the 1940s should encourage those of tomorrow

Initially the men in charge had assumed that women were incapable of operating the Bombe cryptoanalysis machines and later the Colossus code-breaking computers – until a group of Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) were brought in.

Can someone, anyone, explain to me why those 'men in charge' might have assumed this?

See, Teague, in another thread, said this:

Teague wrote:Only in the mid of an idiot would one see women as a different, lower cast version of human beings and treat them with contempt.

and this:

Teague wrote:

Rachel Bronwyn wrote:A lot of really smart people throughout history have thought of women (and various other social groups) as less human than men. It's really not a matter of intelligence so much as it is one of culture.

Nope I'm going with a lack of intellect. If you can't work things out for yourself and need society to tell you what to think, you're not thinking about things yourself and working them out, ergo, an idiot.

Then I told him

Doubtdispelled wrote:You still have a lot to learn yet, young padawan.

So, is this a good example to give him, of men who cannot themselves be described as 'idiots' or people lacking in intellect, yet who still consider women to be 'less than' any man?

Freud had some interesting ideas about wimmin.
http://psychology.about.com/od/sigmundf ... _women.htm

I wrote a short A-Level paper on Freud and how his family life may have affected/supported his work. My tutor said it was incomprehensible and incoherent, but gave me a Pass because I feigned protest well, stood up and read it out aloud. It was bollocks, to be sure.

Men have more muscles and viewing men as more powerful might have misled people to make unjustified extrapolations that women are not just 'inferior' in physical strength but also in intelligence. Obviously this is wrong, but in the absence of rigorous experiments people often make dubious extrapolations. Not just men, many women also make these mistakes.

Doubtdispelled wrote:Can someone, anyone, explain to me why those 'men in charge' might have assumed this?

Did they? This seems like a pretty general and bald assertion. Really, some actual quote from a letter would be a lot better. Sure, it fits in well with what we like to think the Bad Old Days™, but people say a lot of stuff.

In those days, computers were mostly women and had traditionally been so for about a half century. That is, a computer was a person whose job it was to compute the results of calculations, either by hand or by machine (most of which were mechanical), and it was a traditionally female profession.

I don't know what attitudes The Men in Charge™ had, and as I say, I'd like to see some actual evidence (silly skeptic), but generally, women were considered good at that kind of thing at that time. So it would have been a very unusual attitude. Sure, there was sexism, but people at the time wouldn't generally have regarded a woman as unfit for being a computer any more than a librarian or telephone operator.

That's like saying saying anyone who ever held racist beliefs was intellectually inferior to those who didn't. Lots of the most influential thinkers in our history perceived black people as less human then white people and owned them.

All you have to be is in a culture where its acceptable and doesn't personally challenge you and you probably will hold bigoted views.

Too bad the article from which the allegation of prejudice is drawn, in not annotated in any way. The author simply states it as though it is a fact.

I have run across many such claims about the past. Some were true, and some were modern assumptions based on political opinions that had passed from unsupported claim, into myth, and had become confused with actual facts. I have also witnessed incidents where a prejudice WAS in effect, but was misidentified.

I am myself skeptical that the claimed prejudice did occur, since the women were all hired and directly put to the tasks they performed. Had the men all assumed they couldn't cut it, they would have had to work their way into the situation gradually, and there would have been a notable moment when the proportion of women at the facility shifted. This has not been shown to have occurred.

Doubtdispelled wrote:So, is this a good example to give him, of men who cannot themselves be described as 'idiots' or people lacking in intellect, yet who still consider women to be 'less than' any man?

I kind of sympathetic with Teague's viewpoint here in that idiocy isn't just a one dimensional concept, where to be an idiot you must be irredeemably stupid in all fields.

I think the very fact that some men are very learned and intellectually gifted in a particular field, can give them the impression of being able to speak with intellectual authority on any issue. They don't realise their cultural and social views are idiotic, because "I'm a super intelligent scientist person, I'm clearly not an idiotic, therefore my views on women cannot be informed by any idiocy on my part."

But yeah, they're still idiots.

epepke wrote:

Doubtdispelled wrote:Can someone, anyone, explain to me why those 'men in charge' might have assumed this?

Did they? This seems like a pretty general and bald assertion. Really, some actual quote from a letter would be a lot better.

How about straight from the horse's mouth? It's there in the video which is included in the article.

Sendraks wrote:

Doubtdispelled wrote:So, is this a good example to give him, of men who cannot themselves be described as 'idiots' or people lacking in intellect, yet who still consider women to be 'less than' any man?

I kind of sympathetic with Teague's viewpoint here in that idiocy isn't just a one dimensional concept, where to be an idiot you must be irredeemably stupid in all fields.

I think the very fact that some men are very learned and intellectually gifted in a particular field, can give them the impression of being able to speak with intellectual authority on any issue. They don't realise their cultural and social views are idiotic, because "I'm a super intelligent scientist person, I'm clearly not an idiotic, therefore my views on women cannot be informed by any idiocy on my part."

But yeah, they're still idiots.

Heh, you've just reminded me of the many eminent and influential philosophers whose views on women were quite frankly idiotic.

Sendraks wrote:I kind of sympathetic with Teague's viewpoint here in that idiocy isn't just a one dimensional concept, where to be an idiot you must be irredeemably stupid in all fields.

Well maybe I'm misreading, because it appears to me that the one dimensional approach is precisely his viewpoint and that a lack of intellect must be the prevalent modus operandi.

Teague, where are you?

Rachel Bronwyn wrote:That's like saying saying anyone who ever held racist beliefs was intellectually inferior to those who didn't. Lots of the most influential thinkers in our history perceived black people as less human then white people and owned them.

All you have to be is in a culture where its acceptable and doesn't personally challenge you and you probably will hold bigoted views.

Or even peer group.

It's a big mistake to assume that because you're smart, you're thinking straight.

Exactly.

Even just having racist parents or friends is enough to impart bigotry that you may not recognize in yourself.

I don't disagree with the three of you, but sometimes the hyper-intelligent can fall foul of that special brand of idiocy which is "I'm too smart to have to question my own values system."

I think many people possess that characteristic whether they are super smart or not. As long as they think they are!

Fair point!

Since this is roughly the history of computers, there's the story of Ada Lovelace, often regarded as the first computer programmer. De Morgan, who was apparently massively on the liberal side, wrote to her mother warning her against doing maffs. I won't bother to quote anything. Just read it.

VazScep wrote:Since this is roughly the history of computers, there's the story of Ada Lovelace, often regarded as the first computer programmer. De Morgan, who was apparently massively on the liberal side, wrote to her mother warning her against doing maffs. I won't bother to quote anything. Just read it.

Very nice, Vaz.

Not exactly what he wrote, Vaz. Actually, the 180 degrees opposite of what he wrote. The man was positively endorsing her to do maffs, and saying that her mind was unquestionably fully equal to a mans.

trogs wrote:Not exactly what he wrote, Vaz. Actually, the 180 degrees opposite of what he wrote. The man was positively endorsing her to do maffs, and saying that her mind was unquestionably fully equal to a mans.

Are you sure about that? What then does "the very great tension of mind which they require is beyond the strength of a woman's physical power of application" mean?

Not to mention "of being party to doing mischief if I assisted Lady Lovelace's studies without caution".

I can see that the archaic English manner of expression poses a difficulty in getting to his actual meaning though. I had to read it several times before I got any clarity from it.

But in the end it's clear that what he is saying is that thinking too much will be ultimately damaging for her, and that his encouragement of this will have negative effects which he doesn't want to be responsible for.

If one googles the quote, there are reams of people writing about Ada, generally converging (afaict) on this general take: a) he's saying she can totally do it, and is better than most men b) he's saying that no other woman has been able to handle maffs, unlike Ada c) he's implying that the parents can decide whether to let her do maffs, as he is saying that she definitely can do. The parents didn't disrupt her teaching, of course.

At most that he's very subtly implying that "no other female could take it, maybe she won't hold up?" But even in his comparison with the closest female runner-up, he's clearly saying that Ada is her superior, and “Lady L. has unquestionably as much power as would require all the strength of a man’s constitution to bear the fatigues of thought to which it will unquestionably lead her.”, and going in detail to elaborate that he does not think that Ada will perform poorly, like the runner-up.

I think we should not do the best of our forebears the disservice of portraying them as more bigoted than they deserve, because we take pleasure that kind of narrative. This guy Morgan was giving Ada full intellectual marks, and furthermore predicting that she won't turn her study into a dalliance like the previous females of promise. He's basically putting his name out to vouch for Ada as a serious mind. What more could any man do?

"of being party to doing mischief if I assisted Lady Lovelace's studies without caution".

This is him saying that he has taken the liberty of putting his neck on the line to teach Ada, despite the fact that a less liberal PARENTS than the Lovelaces might come down on him for not being prejudiced enough. He has risked the ire of his employer in order to teach a woman, because he was convinced of the evidence of Ada's ability. If anything, this implies an exceedingly un-bigoted character in Morgan.