Amy Bix

Amy Sue Bix is an American professor of history, specializing in the history of science, technology and medicine. She has received several awards, including the 2015 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize.

Quotes

• Through the 1980s and early 1990s, the course of American health research was increasingly shaped by politically-aggressive activism for two particular diseases, breast cancer and AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome). Even as national stakes rose, both in dollars spent and growing demands on the medical system, breast cancer and AIDS advocates made government policy-making for research ever more public and controversial. Through skillful cultivation of political strength, interest groups transformed individual health problems into collective demands, winning notable policy influence in federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Activists directly challenged fundamental principles of both government and medical systems, fighting to affect distribution of research funds and questioning well-established scientific methods and professional values. In the contest for decision-making power, those players achieved remarkable success in influencing and infiltrating (some critics said, undermining) both the politics and science of medical research. Between 1990 and 1995, federal appropriations for breast cancer study rose from $90 million to $465 million, while in that same period, NIH AIDS research rose from $743.53 million to $1,338 billion.
  • (January 1997) "Diseases Chasing Money and Power: Breast Cancer and AIDS Activism Challenging Authority". Journal of Policy History 9 (Special Issue 1: Health Care Policy in Contemporary America): 5–32. DOI:10.1017/S0898030600005807.

• Engineering education in the United States has had a gendered history, one that until relatively recently prevented women from finding a place in the predominantly male technical world. For decades, Americans treated the professional study of technology as men's territory (Bix 2000b; Ogilvie 1986l Rossiter 1982, 1995). Until World War II and beyond, many leading engineering schools, including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology, and California Institute of Technology, remained closed to women. The few women admitted to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) struggled against a hostile intellectual and social environment. Women studying or working in engineering were popularly perceived as oddities at best, outcasts at worst, defying traditional gender norms. As late as the 1960s, women still made up less than 1 percent of students studying engineering in the United States, and critics either dismissed or ridiculed interest in the profession. Throughout the last half of the 20th century, activists fought to change that situation, to win acknowledgment of women's ability to become engineers.
  • Layne, Margaret E., ed (2009). "Chapter 2. From "Engineeresses" to "Girl Engineers" to "Good Engineers": A History of Women's U.S. Engineering Education (reprint of original 2004 article by Amy Sue Bix in National Women's Studies Association Journal)". Women in Engineering: Pioneers and Trailblazers. Reston, Virginia: American Society of Civil Engineers. pp. 11–34.  (quote from p. 12)

• During the colonial era of American life, "dame schools" offered young girls elementary literacy, while boarding schools taught wealthier girls to raise their matrimonial prospects by becoming proficient in attractive arts, including embroidery, drawing and painting, music, dancing, and French. But by the Revolutionary and early national periods, influential figures such as Judith Sargent Murray, Abigail Adams, and Benjamin Rush argued for extending young women's education beyond such "ornamental" skills as a political and social asset to the country.
  • Girls coming to tech!: A history of American engineering education for women. MIT Press. 2014. p. 5. ISBN 9780262320276. 

Quotes about Amy Bix

• Amy Bix's fine book, carefully researched and gracefully written, surveys the extent of everyday hardship during the Great Depression. She concentrates on the debates over technological unemployment in the United States, debates that were "entwined with particular musings about the meaning of American history, the western frontier, and a sense of national destiny" (p. 8). She convincingly describes the lives and emotions of employed and unemployed Americans. She also summarizes some of the social research conducted during the depression years.
  • Ester Fano, (July 2001) "Book Review: Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America's Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929-1981 by Amy Sue Bix". Technology and Culture 42 (3): 583-585. DOI:10.1353/tech.2001.0107.

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Amy Bix on Wikipedia