“Like everybody else, I had bought the story that computing had emerged from the worst, most obvious kinds of masculine desire and patriarchal organizations. When I found that a
Victorian teenage girl (Ada Lovelace) had effectively invented the first computer, or
certainly written the first computer software, it was obviously an amazing discovery. It
immediately seemed to me that this fact in itself completely changed the whole picture.
“To then learn that she did this partly by noticing the possibilities of the Jacquard loom, the
most advanced automated machine at that time, gave the history of computing a relation to
weaving, one of the most denigrated, neglected, and also very female practices. Weaving
hasn't been considered an art or a science, but some kind of in-between practice that has
never been given much credit. So not only did we now have a young female figure at the
beginning of the history of computing, but also a connection that could be traced back to the
most basic kinds of weaving. Weaving then began to emerge as, perhaps, the most basic
kind of technology.
“Later I found a wonderful Freud quote, which is very famous but usually used in completely
different contexts, where he talks about women never having made any contribution to the
history of discoveries and inventions, and then he adds, ‘except for weaving.’ He obviously
means that to compound the idea of being completely irrelevant, as again denigrated, like
“oh, all they ever did was weaving.” For me this picture then began to emerge that if
weaving was so crucial to the whole history of technology, and specifically to the history of
the computer, then Freud had, in so many words, said, ‘women didn't do anything—oh, but
by the way, they were there at the beginning of the history of technology.’ It was a beautiful
way of turning the whole thing around.
“Now obviously there is a limit to how far you can take this kind of new mythology, a limit to
how practically or even theoretically useful it can be, but it seemed to me very important to tell that story. I felt that almost the only obstacle to women getting involved with the technology was somehow this deep-seated conviction that the whole history of it, the whole significance of it, was peculiarly male. All the other problems weren't really the issue—it was cheap and actually easy. The only real issue seemed to be a much deeper sort of psychological block that there wasn't a sense of an alternative story. I think I've probably been proved right about this in that so many people have said to me that it has been inspiring to have that alternative picture, to feel that you're joining in with a very different kind of history than the usual post-war shiny image that we have of computers.”
