Name the Man Who Invented COBOL : MOTHERS OF INVENTION FROM THE BRA TO THE BOMB Forgotten Women and Their Unforgettable Ideas<i> by Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek (William Morrow: $17.45; 256 pp., illustrated) </i>

“If the commonly held image of a woman inventor is a housewife who comes up with a better butter mold, that stereotype is effectively demolished by the long list of (female) pure scientists whose research has led to major technological advances,” state the authors of this beguiling book about women inventors and discoverers. But “Mothers of Invention” reveals just as much interest in the homely butter mold maker--and the ingenious currency counterfeiter and the zany designer of a “self-cleaning house”--as in the Nobel laureate physicist. It is the wide spectrum of female humanity and ability in this book that makes it an especially valuable addition to the growing popular library on the accomplishments and work lives of women.

Like most stereotypes, the butter-mold one expresses some blameless truths: Inventive people of either gender are indeed likely to make innovations in those areas of work or knowledge with which they’re most familiar. And nothing has been more familiar to women than the responsibility for family and household, with all its fundamental demands (as in butter) and its formal ones (as in mold). What is destructive about the stereotype is that it distracts us from the infinite other truths of women’s experience and ingenuity--truths which have been zealously suppressed by the men commanding so many of our institutions and the very record of our social and technological development.

As recently as 1984, for example, “the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Washington, boasted a total of 52 inductees; none was a woman. William Coolidge, the inventor of the vacuum tube, is mentioned . . . but not Marie Curie, who invented what we now call the ‘Geiger’ counter and discovered radioactivity. Enrico Fermi makes the grade for building the first atomic reactor . . . but not Lise Meitner, who first created--and named--nuclear fission,” and so on. This sort of delayed or omitted recognition, as well as all manner of other manly opposition and obstruction, has been a burden borne by almost every female innovator we meet in these pages. Frequently, resistance to a woman’s discovery has been great in direct proportion to its importance, and doubtless attributable to the general human trait of inertia, rather than sexism. As Grace Murray Hopper, the Navy rear admiral, computer wizard, and developer of the COBOL program, has said of her struggles for acceptance: “You don’t run against logic--you run against people who can’t change their minds.”

Still, the special and excruciating trial of women as innovators has been what the authors call the belief that “women simply didn’t have enough of the gray matter to fill out a white lab coat,” or any other emblem of a male-dominated profession or industry. It’s a kindred belief to the old idea that when Nature parceled out creative force among the sexes, it gave women the power of motherhood and men the power of ideas--a notion implicit in the very proverb from which this book takes its title, I might add. If necessity is the mother of invention, then it is necessity, not invention, that is uniquely and thus restrictively female.

Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek--a journalist/scriptwriter team who usually write about or for rock music and movies--address this subject with an openness and freshness that is unusual in an epoch of sex-role warfare. They are not bent on oversimplifying either the female inventor’s mission or its social contexts. Reading through the hundred some occupational/personal biographies (and numerous shorter entries) they have compiled on engineers, naturalists, secretaries, machinists, movie stars, medical doctors, chemists, cooks, and more, one sees that a great number of these women received critical encouragement at one time or another from men: a host of male parents, teachers, collaborators, and enthusiastic helping hands. Moreover, the authors’ attention to cultural and economic factors in discovery and to the wide range of personalities that harbor inventiveness give “Mothers of Invention” a cumulative weight greater than its fast-read format or its light-handed, humorous style initially promise.

There is the expected pattern of a man seizing or being crowned with the credit for what has been first and foremost a woman’s contribution. Yankee Eli Whitney is credited with the cotton gin that Georgia planter Elizabeth Littlefield Greene actually conceived, planned and financed. Nettie Stevens who in 1905 “identified the X and Y chromosomes and pinpointed their role” in embryo sex determination has been eclipsed by her former colleague Edmund B. Wilson who made the same findings, but years later. Cambridge astronomy professor Antony Hewish received a 1974 Nobel Prize “for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars” (pulsating stars), which invisible bodies were actually detected first by his 24-year-old female student Jocelyn Bell.

Almost as predictable, but at once happier and more mysterious, is the pattern of influence exerted by fathers on inventive daughters. Hypatia of Alexandria was born in AD 370 to a mathematician/astronomer father who started her on the studies that led to her definitive 13- volume treatise on algebra. Elizabeth Lucas Pinckney’s father gave her, at age 17, the management of his entire South Carolina plantation where in five years, by 1744, she established an indigo crop and processing method that became the mainstay of the region’s economy. Kate Gleason began her working life as a teen-age helper in her father’s machine shop and went on to triumph as a machinist/designer and (somewhat regrettably) the producer of the first low-cost, mass-manufactured tract housing, in 1921. Even “the greatest woman scientist of all time” Marie Curie served as a child lab assistant to her chemistry professor father.

The great number of such relationships invite us to wonder if these fathers gave the essential gifts of time, trust, and learning more easily to daughters than they might have to equally able sons, boys who could have been perceived as potentially threatening rivals. In any case, while necessity has often been the mother of invention, opportunity has been provided many women inventors by their fathers. And the universal trait of virtually all Vare and Ptacek’s chosen subjects--the largest pattern of all here--is these women’s sensitivity to very specific opportunity, and persistence in pursuing in.

In a recent book advocating methods of much-needed innovation for American business and industry, the eminent analyst Peter Drucker emphasized that “successful innovators are not risk-focused but opportunity-focused.” And a book such as “Mothers of Invention,” besides being of general historical interest, may be a source of inspiration to the legion of women and men whose creative powers are vigorously discouraged by the kind of “productive work” and “opportunity” offered by many 1980s corporate employers. But be warned: The world has not wholly turned.

Even so enlightened an observer as Drucker remains mannishly obtuse about the personal factors that make innovation happen. Naming several exemplary women innovators of the 1930s and ‘40s--including Helen Taussig who “developed the first successful surgery of the living heart--he insists that these “very proud women . . . saw themselves not as women but as individuals . . . not as ‘representative’ but as exceptional.”

Vare and Ptacek’s researches show, however, that Taussig endured years of “representative” discrimination: She was denied degrees, proper training, and internship at several universities, simply because she was female. In fact, it was her determination to “break the barriers” of sex discrimination that “cemented her resolve to enter the medical profession.”

For inventive women such as Taussig, passion has often been the sole opportunity--and it has had to be an adequate one.