Christine von Oertzen's Science, Gender, and Internationalism: Women's Academic Networks, 1917-1955 and Amy Sue Bix's Girls Coming to Tech! A History of American Engineering Education for Women are antipodal in their tone, narrative emphases, and historical purview, while sharing certain overlaps. Both books are interested in how women created intellectual and public spaces for themselves under patriarchal systems that refused them admission and equal opportunity. However, each draws on different aspects of women's life writing, personal and business correspondences, and ephemera produced by professional and social organizations, to foreground stories of female resilience, economic and political superstructures, and the ethics and decisions surrounding alliance formation. Von Oertzen's book is centered on the development of the university women's (academic) networks in the period following the First World War up to the postwar reconstruction of the 1950s in continental Europe and the United Kingdom, as well as on how scholarly minded women (whether in the universities or outside them) were able to weather tough political and economic climates by drawing on transnational support for one another. Conversely, Bix focuses on how engineering became more open to women because of a labor shortage in the United States during the Second World War, and the women's continuous trajectory in the profession even as the postwar years pressured them to return to the hearth.
