I find it hilarious that by just having fellow women exist it is somehow political... You do realize the overwhelming majority of computers in WWII were women right?
I find it really amusing when people tell on themselves like this. A similar thing happens when piles of people start decrying a newly announced movie for being "woke" when literally the only information we have about it is a promotional poster showing a non white/non male main character.
Newsflash - if people that don't look like you simply /existing/ is "too woke" you might just be a massive bigot.
There are at least hundreds of mostly all masculine dude war movies. As said films are about just regular dudes in war, and historical, is there any appropriate gender outrage?
A person can simply superimpose a whole separate identity and preference agenda to the storyline, which - if non-historical - may be all characters from one writer, whose paintings at least aren't at all obligated to be representative samples.
I recall that most war movies I seen tend to have women in the resistance movements, especially the french one. The only place where there are only men is those that were drafted since the military draft only forced men to go to war.
For shots focusing on the factories, again women tend to be featured. With most young men was drafted into the military front, and much of the civil industry being diverted to produce war material, women was critical to fill in the need for workers. Top Secret Rosies seem to be illustrating that fact.
One major demographic that old war movies tend to not show is children. When half the work group is drafted, and the other half is diverted to do both the civil and the war production (and everything else in private life), children were not just playing in the fairground or studying in school. It is however not very nice to illustrate child labor, so old and new war films tend to avoid that.
> Children in the military, History of children in the military, Impact of war on children, Paris Principles (Free Children from War Conference),
Children in emergencies and conflicts,
Children's rights,
Stress in early childhood
Invoking "wokeism" doesn't help to make your case. If anything it weakens it. Documentaries and books do not need to be total in their coverage, they have limited space (in the literal sense and the temporal sense) in which to convey information. Consider something like this as adding to the larger body of documentation on the history of math and computing and the role of women in both. Because that's what it does, it adds, not subtracts. It doesn't erase anything that existed prior to it or since, it doesn't erase the (very well documented) role of men in these efforts.
> It doesn't erase anything, it just excludes historic contributions to one gender.
If a documentary covers a specific topic it makes sense that it wouldn't cover another topic. The Cancer documentary isn't somehow woke for not being about AIDS. I don't see anything weird about a documentary that is about women computing in WWII not being about male computing in WWII. I'd totally agree with you if the documentary was claiming to cover computing in WWII generally and then only covered women, but that's not what's happening here.
But the documentary doesn't claim to be about human computer contributors. It claims to be about women specifically. It's super weird to critique a historical documentary for being focused in its scope. Should we also critique "Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m.", a documentary about a specific uprising in a specific extermination camp? Is Wings of Defeat, which is specifically about kamikaze pilots, woke because it's not about all pilots?
Despite being a fan of history and WWII, with female veterans in the family I'd never heard of these folks, ever. Not one peep. Apparently it was secret or something?! Came across the doc on Kanopy at random and it looked like a good one to watch with a young person.
If you'd have seen it you'd know it is ~0% woke. All the people interviewed are not even boomers, they're the "greatest generation" simply telling their stories.
Because then they'd have to make a movie about female scientists in WWII and the Manhattan project and how male scientists were happy to work with them and make use of them. The computers were not significant contributors -- they were replaceable people doing menial calculations.
Was a period in transition to electric computers where mostly women programmed those calculations. My grandmother worked with that, programming numerical methods in the era when programs was written on punched tape, and later on using punched cards made things so much easier since you could split the program into parts instead of each program being a long paper strip. At least that was what she said.
I think it quickly shifted to men once programming the computers got easier with digital storage and displays and keyboards.
My grandmother retired around that time, was replaced by 2 guys. Most of the women might still have been there, but with how the amount of computers and people working with them increased the share of women working in the field quickly shrank.
There were a lot of women who did the equivalent of modern excel work back then though. My uncle said the company took all the secretaries and spent 2 weeks getting all the numbers in order to make the yearly report, and how he convinced them to buy a computer and he used it to get it done in a day, was in the 70's. I'd guess that transformation involved the female computers at many companies, but the programming to get that done is very simple so you don't need dedicated programmers and I wouldn't call the people working on that programmers, my uncle was a business guy and not a computer wiz he just bought a computer and followed the manual.
> my uncle was a business guy and not a computer wiz he just bought a computer and followed the manual.
Uh… that describes my early training pretty well. Once Google and then StackOverflow came on the scene, replace “manual” with “searching the Internet” and it still applies.
