Durack, K. T. (1997). Gender, technology, and the history of technical communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 6(3), (pp. 249-260). https://doi.org/10.1207/s15427625tcq0603pass:[_]2

In Katherine T. Durack’s (1997) article “Gender, Technology, and the History of Technical Communication,” she assessed the common agreement that “scientific inquiry and technological innovation have been primarily the work of men, the contributions of women have consequently been subsumed, lost, or overlooked” (p. 250). Durack traced the history of technical writing by examining the association of technology and the workplace with men, the separation of the public and private spheres, how women were at a disadvantage, how writing in the household wasn’t recognized as workplace writing, and the goal of social action. Durack’s purpose was to challenge and enlighten “why we deem certain artifacts technology, their attendant activities work, their place of conduct the workplace, and therefore find reason to include associated writings within the corpus history of technical writing” (p. 258). Durack’s intended audience was feminist historians and scholars researching the history of women inventors in technical settings. Durack emphasized the apparent omission of women within the history of technical communication with thought-provoking evidence and researched support, but the bias tone of the essay seemed to aim more towards blaming the “historians who wrote them” rather than searching for a resolution for the greater good of the academic subject (p. 250).