Arwen Mohun

Versatile Tools: Gender Analysis and the History of Technology

This volume introduces a new generation of historical scholarship. Historians of technology have long encouraged each other to find ways to broaden studies of technology: to incorporate womens experience as well as mens; to maintain historical understandings of context and contingency; to resist narrowing studies of technology to the machine shop or the drafting table. These articles pursue the implications of such prescriptions, making use of recent theoretical literature on gender to explore connections between technology and culture in ways not fully possible before. Following such paths of inquiry makes clear this projects formidable scope. Gender ideologies play a central role in human interactions with technology, and technology in Western culture is crucial to the ways male and female identities are formed, gender structures defined, and gender ideologies constructed. Despite the pervasive importance of both gender and technology as parts of the human experience, scholars have only begun to explore their historical interrelationships. Seeking to facilitate a richer conversation about these issues, we address this introduction, and the historiographical essay following, to both historians of technology and scholars studying gender.

Laundrymen Construct Their World: Gender and the Transformation of a Domestic Task to an Industrial Process

La blanchisserie est en regle generale un travail reserve aux femmes. Cependant, depuis la fin du XIX e siecle, de nombreux hommes entrent dans le commerce de la blanchisserie en controlant son industrialisation

Conclusion: governing risks in Britain and beyond

In the conclusion, Mohun, Le Roux, Crook and Esbester draw together the key themes of the volume, demonstrating how risk and risk-related problems are a valuable means of rethinking how Britons have been governed. The conclusion also suggests avenues for further exploration. Central to this are the links made to nations and practices beyond Britain, drawing from and differing to the British experience, and which require further detailed examination. The relationships between governing risk, industrial capitalism and the rise of the modern liberal state are particularly significant in opening up areas for comparative and transnational research. The chapter therefore sets an agenda for future work on Britain and more widely.

Vulnerability in Technological Cultures: New Directions in Research and Governance ed. by Anique Hommels, Jessica Mesman, and Wiebe E. Bijker (review)

Mohun reviews Vulnerability in Technological Cultures: New Directions in Research and Governance edited by Anique Hommels, Jessica Mesman, and Wiebe E. Bijker

A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars

Illustrations. Introduction. Part 1 The rise of modern commercial culture, 1890-1930: Producers and consumers technology and tradition. Part 2 The response of the cultivated elites: The reassertion of cultural hierarchy regaining authority - approaches to cultural reform technology and the quest for aesthetic tradition. Part 3 The 1930s - towards a common culture: Sight and sound - studies in convergence literature - the strategies and paradoxes of cultural dissent. Works cited. Index.