Gender and Technology: A Reader (review)

Reviewed by: Gender and Technology: A Reader Joan Rothschild (bio) Gender and Technology: A Reader. Edited by Nina E. Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, and Arwen P. Mohun. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pp. x+465. $24.95. Despite, and perhaps because of, the rapid growth of literature on gender and technology over the past three decades, classroom instructors are still challenged to find a suitable book of readings to present a coherent segment of this work for students. Filling this gap is the objective of Gender and Technology: A Reader. To the seven articles drawn from the special issue of Technology and Culture on gender analysis and the history of technology published in January 1997, the editors have added several equally fine and representative articles to make up the fourteen chapters in the book. The original historiographic essay, "The Shoulders We Stand On," has been brought up to date to form an important coda to the collection. Since the articles were previously published in refereed journals or distinguished collections and have therefore been vetted as scholarly works, I will not evaluate them on this score. Rather, because its intent is a teaching tool, I will assess the book and its contributions in light of this aim. It focuses on the reciprocal relationship between gender and technology in the specific historic and cultural context of North America from 1850 to 1950, during the heyday of industrial capitalism. The book starts with definitions: technology as "people's ways of making and doing things" (p. 2), and gender as "not only a way to sort people . . . [but] also a way to assign power in particular contexts," which operates at the levels of "identity," "structures and institutions," and "in symbolic and representational ways" (p. 4). Exploring the major theme of "Interrogating Boundaries," the book is divided into four parts: the "Entwined Categories" of parts 1 and 2 on how gender and technology construct each other, and parts 3 and 4 on the "Industrial Junctions" of gender and technology as technological change takes place. Several articles illustrate the ways gender analysis not only questions gender boundaries themselves but also interrogates those of race, class, and ethnicity as these identities and power configurations intersect when humans engage in making, using, and shaping technologies. Focusing on technological knowledge, which demands the integration of the technical and social, Nina Lerman examines the technical education of school children in mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia. She finds not only the split between trades for boys and domestic-oriented subjects for girls but also racial separations within the sexual divisions: colored boys denied technical training and thus apprenticeship opportunities, colored girls slated for domestic service rather than housewifery in their own homes. Rebecca Herzig makes the use of race visible in the interwar period in her study of using x-rays for hair removal, as gendered and class standards prevail for hairless whiteness. For the meatpacking industry in the 1900s, [End Page 908] Roger Horowitz shows that mechanization did not change the prevailing sexual division of labor according to type of work done, and further how black women eventually landed the worst of female-slated jobs. Similarly, Patricia Cooper shows how mechanization changed cigar making from a skilled craft for men to an unskilled job filled by underpaid women, initially mostly white, then predominantly black. In an insightful example of the "consumption junction"—so named by Ruth Schwartz Cowan to focus on the user's role in shaping technological use and design, and thus on agency—Joy Parr's article probes why Canadian women in the 1950s resisted automatic washing machines, so eagerly embraced in the United States, to replace their labor-intensive wringers. Revealing marked differences between the cultures of makers and users, Parr shows that acceptance depended on integrating the machines into the mechanical system of the home—incorporating details such as water sources and plumbing systems—and on other household needs, and also had to conform to users' cultural values. Ronald Kline develops a similar argument about the contrasting ideologies of home economics researchers and farm women in the United States of the 1930s toward accepting so-called laborsaving machinery in the home, while Carolyn Goldstein shows how home...

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