Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

Broad Band contests a familiar origin myth: a small group of male geniuses invented the internet in laboratories, military institutions, and Silicon Valley garages, after which it naturally spread into society. Claire L. Evans moves from nineteenth-century Ada Lovelace to 1990s web designers and cyberfeminists, showing that women were not late arrivals to technology. They participated throughout the formation of computing, programming languages, network addressing, protocols, databases, and online communities. What disappeared was not only a list of names but a way of recognizing contribution.

“Computer” once commonly named a person who performed calculations, and programming was initially treated as low-status work adjacent to clerical repetition and typing; women therefore did much of it. As software acquired prestige and profit, programming was increasingly rewritten as a masculine profession. Through Lovelace, wartime computing, Grace Hopper, and others, Evans traces an artificial split between conceptual invention and daily execution. Women performed the work that made machines usable, legible, and repeatable, then vanished from histories organized around hardware and commanding figures.

The internet was not a single invention switched on at one moment. Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler and the Network Information Center maintained host directories, names, and user assistance for the early network, making it findable before search engines. Engineers including Radia Perlman helped solve how networks could connect, remain stable, and grow. Infrastructure work rarely produces one heroic event, but it determines whether a system continues to function. The title “Broad Band” evokes both bandwidth and a dispersed band of women whose work crossed fields while remaining hard to see.

Evans also expands “making the internet” beyond code to community. Stacy Horn ran the ECHO bulletin board from her New York apartment, creating a place where users did not only receive information but made relationships, argued over norms, and maintained a social world. Early online life was never automatically open or equal: harassment, identity play, governance, and unequal access to equipment were already present. Yet women hosts, artists, and community builders treated networks as social environments rather than transmission systems measured only by engineering performance. That relational labor became essential to platform culture without often counting as invention.

The book’s path through hypertext experiments, network art, and 1990s cyberfeminism recovers digital futures different from today’s concentrated platforms. Women and queer creators treated embodiment, identity, and virtual space as relations that might be recomposed. They explored the freedoms of anonymity and connection while watching old power enter new media. This history does not prove that women naturally make gentler technology. It proves that technical direction has always been contested: infrastructure design, ownership, and community rules are political choices.

The portrait format makes Broad Band accessible, but it can also become a history of forgotten heroines. Restoring names and credit is necessary; simply admitting exceptional women to the old hall of innovation can still undervalue teams, administration, maintenance, manufacturing, and global supply chains. The book is weighted toward U.S. and Anglophone networks, with uneven space for Black, Indigenous, and Global South women or for class and colonial structures. Public funding, military research, and collective standards also made the internet. No one group of pioneers created it alone.

For FemRes readers, the book teaches us to look for verbs pushed into the background of technical history: organize, translate, document, answer, connect, host, moderate, and maintain. Who makes a system not merely demonstrable but continuously usable? Who loses the status of inventor through job titles, pay scales, and archives? Read with histories of computing labor, Black technology studies, and research on platform care. Broad Band should not only restore women’s names; it should help redistribute credit, resources, and decision-making toward those who maintain a shared technical world.