I wish I was surprised I hadn't heard this fascinating story about 1. sewing 2. Black women 3. working class women But we're constantly told their stories and skills aren't important. Bras are incredible pieces of engineering. It's no wonder the skills translated.
many years ago i was on a panel to talk to kids at a church about my job. They were all Black. I got my start by networking with the wife of someone in my field, because we both knew how to sew afterwards, multiple mothers came up to me to say they never knew sewing was a marketable skill
Kendra I very much want you to see the little joke that I made. https://bsky.app/profile/very-simple.com/post/3l6q3hnoacx2m
You might like this story about the history of the Navajo and semiconductors interesting if you haven't come across it before: www.righto.com/2024/08/pent...
Hurrying through the National Gallery of Art five minutes before closing, I passed a Navajo weaving with a complex abstract pattern. Suddenl...
The fiber arts get shat on a lot. And they're really really really technical.
The computers were also built by women. The Apollo missions were run with core rope memory. You ran thin wires through openings, which the computer read as a 1 or a 0. Women in textile factories were the fastest and most accurate at making them. They'd weave the wiring into the correct pattern.
AND!!! A lot of the techniques used, both for patterning and sewing? THEY WERE DEVELOPED FOR BRAS!!!
This is so exciting! In the course I’m teaching this semester, I discuss bras as an example of objects that we don’t think about as examples of technologies because of our assumptions - and it’s going to be awesome to extend that line of thought to how bra tech was crucial for space exploration!