Cynthia Cockburn

The Material of Male Power

A skilled craftsman may be no more than a worker in relation to capital, but seen from within the working class he has been a king among men and lord of his household. As a high earner he preferred to see himself as the sole breadwinner, supporter of wife and children. As artisan he defined the unskilled workman as someone of inferior status, and would scarcely count him a brother and certainly not an equal (Berg, 1979:121). For any socialist movement concerned with unity in the working class, the skilled craftsman is therefore a problem. For anyone concerned with the relationship of class and gender, and with the foundations of male power, skilled men provide a fertile field for study. Compositors in the printing trade are an artisan group that have long defeated the attempts of capital to weaken the tight grip on the labour process from which their strength derives. Now their occupation is undergoing a dramatic technological change initiated by employers. Introduction of the new computerized technology of photocomposition represents an attack on what remains of their control over their occupation and wipes out many of the aspects of the work which have served as criteria by which hot metal composition for printing has been defined as a manual skill and a mans craft. In this paper I look in some detail at the compositors crisis, what has given rise to it and what it may lead to in future. Trying to understand it has led me to ask; questions in the context of socialist-feminist theory. These I discuss first, as preface to an account of key moments in the compositors craft history. I then isolate the themes of skill and technology for further analysis, and conclude with the suggestion that there may be more to male power than patriarchal relations.

Disassembling Gender in the Electronics Age

In the 1980s, feminist scholarship on the changing relation between gender and technology has documented the pervasive influence of new technologies on the lived experiences of women and men at home and abroad. This new literature is part of the emerging interdisciplinary field of science, technology, and society, which draws on the perspectives of engineering, and social sciences, Marxism, and labor studies, as well as feminism. Feminists have researched the impact of new technology on the workplace, the household, reproduction, and the production and acquisition of technological knowledge and values. This review focuses on studies of how changing technologies in unpaid and paid work have affected the experiences and meanings of gender in the First and the Third Worlds. We have been told that computerized and electronic technologies will improve working conditions, ease life in general, and

A Women's Political Party for Yugoslavia: Introduction to the Serbian Feminist Manifesto

In early November, just before the Serbian national elections, a group of women in Belgrade took the bold step of forming a womens political party. Two months later it had five hundred enrolled members, a committee of twenty and a shared leadership of nine. It was also getting a great deal of media attention. The party is called ZEST short for Zenska Stranka, the Womens Party. The word itself, as in English, suggests a positive force or energy. As an acronym it combines other meanings: the Z stands for women, E for ethics, S for solidarity or co-operation, and the T for tolerance. Yugoslavia today is beset by economic crisis and riven by internal dissension. Indeed, civil war is now imminent. What the Womens Party stands for, as much as a platform for women, is a platform for peace. Although their manifesto is clearly by, for and about women and womens rights and freedoms, it is also an intervention for the nonviolent resolution of differences among the Yugoslavian national

‘Democracy without Women Is No Democracy’: Soviet Women Hold their First Autonomous National Conference

In a Russian town called Dubna on the icy banks of the Volga river in late March this year, women organized a conference that many of them feel was a historic event. It brought together more than 170 women in the First Independent Womens Forum of the Soviet Union. Never before had there been a major, publicly advertised, conference on womens issues that was not under the aegis of the official Soviet Womens Committee. In the Soviet Union the official Communist Party position has always been that the simple fact of womens engagement in the paid workforce, combined with a formally stated policy of sex equality, had been enough to solve the woman question. Women themselves perceive a very different reality. Women continue to be grossly under-represented in decision-making positions, to be confined to low-paid, routine and often monstrously heavy and unhealthy work, and to carry with little help from men all the responsibility and labour involved in domestic life. These things have been represented, in the official view, not as systematic oppression but as simple inequalities due to delayed development, wrinkles in the socialist programme that would soon be ironed out.

Gender and Technology in the Making@@@Bringing Technology Home: Gender and Technology in a Changing Europe

Looking for the gender/technology relation sweeping away the dust of tradition - vacuum cleaning as a site of technical and social innovation lets nuke the dinner - discursive practices of gender in the creation of a new cooking process computerization in Greek banking - the gendering of jobs and payment practices women users in the design process of a food robot - innovation in a French domestic appliance company technological flexibility - bringing gender into technology (or was it the other way round?) hopes and disappointments of technological change - a case study in Russian hosiery production bodies, machines and male power women, technology and societal failure in former Yugoslavia a gendered socio-technical construction - the smart house.

Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change

Cynthia Cockburns classic study of masculinity and skill in printing showed newspaper compositors locked in battle with their employers. This new edition adds an Afterword on the final defeat of the men by press owners armed with computer technology and backed by Tatchers anti-union laws. Brothers began as a study on the human impact of technological change. It ended as an exploration in the making and remaking of men, showing how work and technology are used by men in maintaining their control over women. It continues to offer an unparalleled insight into men and trade unionism from a feminist point of view.