The Silence of Women amid the Sound of machines. Work and Technical-scientific Professions in the run-up decade

On the wave of the “feminine mystique” that swept the public sphere during the Cold War, at the end of the conflict women went “back to the house,” but in a controversial manner compared to what had happened in the aftermath of World War I. Indeed, Western science-oriented society did experience a revival of the dream of “technological progress” capable of triggering “social progress”; but regardless of the scientism campaigns of the so-called “cultural cold war,” that dream was pervaded by tensions that could no longer be positively redirected. Between the mid-1950s and the following decade, photographs of women studying and working seem to highlight interesting contradictions in this area. For a while in those years, it seemed that the creativity that had exploded during the war in technological contexts —such as in electronics—and then applied to work could also revive social relations as well as relations between men and women.