Ruth Schwartz Cowan

The "Industrial Revolution" in the home: household technology and social change in the 20th century.

When we think about the interaction between technology and society, we tend to think in fairly grandiose terms: massive computers invading the workplace, railroad tracks cutting through vast wildernesses, armies of woman and children toiling in the mills. These grand visions have blinded us to an important and rather peculiar technological revolution which has been going on right under our noses: the technological revolution in the home. This revolution has transformed the conduct of our daily lives, but in somewhat unexpected ways. The industrialization of the home was a process very different from the industrialization of other means of production, and the impact of that process was neither what we have been led to believe it was nor what students of the other industrial revolutions would have been led to predict.

From Virginia Dare to Virginia Slims: Women and Technology in American Life

When this topic-women and technology in American life-was first proposed to me as an appropriate subject for a bicentennial retrospective, I was puzzled by it. Was the female experience of technological change significantly different from the male experience? Did the introduction of the railroads, or the invention of the Bessemer process, or the diffusion of the reaper have a differential impact on the male and female segments of the population? A careful reading of most of the available histories of American technology (or of Western technology in general, for that matter) would not lead one to suspect that important differences had existed. Was my topic perhaps a nonsubject? I mulled over the matter for several months and eventually came to the conclusion that the absence of a female perspective in the available histories of technology was a function of the historians who wrote them and not of historical reality. There are at least four significant senses in which the relation between women and technology has diverged from that between men and technology. I shall consider each of them in turn and ask the reader to understand

Descartes's Legacy: A Theme Issue on Biomedical and Behavioral Technology

Rend Descartes was surely very far from Ellen Kochs mind when she telephoned me, sometime in the winter of 1989, but her call set in motion a sequence of events that I think would have made the dour French philosopher smile. Ellen, who was then a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, had conceived the idea of organizing a session on the history of medical technology for the upcoming SHOT meeting in Sacramento. She had succeeded in enlisting three young scholars working in the field; would I be willing to comment on their papers? I recall responding enthusiastically. A year or so earlier I had begun the research on what I hope will someday be a history of prenatal diagnosis-the technological systems by which fetal conditions can be diagnosed in utero-and at the time of Ellens call I was feeling somewhat overwhelmed by my material. When I began the research I had assumed that, because of the controversy surrounding recombinant DNA, the spectacular and often speculative growth of the biotechnology industry, and the recent explosive rise in technologyrelated health care costs, there would be a vast literature out there on the history of medical technology-and that that literature would help me to find organizing principles for my work. By the winter of 1989, however, I had discovered that although there were, as I expected, dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of scholarly studies of the economics and sociology of medical technology, very few of those studies were either organized historically or informed by the kinds of questions historians are most likely to ask. The history of medical technology, I was coming to realize, was something of an unplowed field in need of a bit of turning: a few seedlings had been started, but none had yet reached-how shall I put it?--paradigmatic fruition.

Looking Back in Order to Move Forward: John McDermott, "Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals"

When the organizers of SHOT’s fiftieth anniversary celebration asked me to write something for the NSF workshop at George Mason University, I decided to take seriously the motto that they had chosen in honor of the occasion: “looking back; looking beyond.”What might I learn, I wondered, about the maturity of our field and its prospects for the future, if I were to re-read an essay that was once part of our communal canon, but is no longer, an essay that had played a crucial role, many years ago, in my own intellectual development, but had, in recent times, fallen into obscurity.

More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave

* An Introduction: Housework and Its Tools * Housewifery: Household Work and Household Tools under Pre-Industrial Conditions * The Invention of Housework: The Early Stages of Industrialization * Twentieth-Century Changes in Household Technology * The Roads Not Taken: Alternative Social and Technical Approaches to Housework * Household Technology and Household Work between 1900 and 1940 * The Postwar Years * Postscript: Less Work for Mother

Baby's First Picture: Ultrasound and the Politics of Fetal Subjects (review)

Baby’s First Picture is an exercise in cultural studies of technology. The author is an anthropologist; her book is an ethnography of maternal ultrasound practice in Montreal, focusing on the pregnant patients and on the technicians who take the sonograms. Lisa Mitchell is a cultural constructivist; she wants to know how cultural contexts lead people to see and understand the very odd pictures that ultrasonography creates in (what she presumes will be) very different ways, ways that will vary depending, as she explains in her introductory remarks, on “medical knowledge, reproductive pasts, the technology of ultrasound, and cultural frameworks of meaning” (p. 11). Mitchell interviewed forty-eight pregnant women and quotes extensively from four of the interviews. She also interviewed sonographers and reports, in considerable detail, on the interactions she observed between sonographers and patients during ultrasound scans. Appropriate attention is paid to the social context in which the scans occurred; we learn a good deal about the history of obstetric ultrasound, about medical and political controversies concerning the routinization of ultrasound, about reproductive politics in Canada, about the structure of the Canadian health system, and about the particular demography of Montreal. Without using excess jargon, Mitchell explicates the postmodern complexities of “seeing,” complexities which are nowhere better exemplified than in the process of learning to “construct” an image of the fetus from consecutive sonographic cross sections. She also details feminist objections to ultrasound: the continuing medicalization of pregnancy and the inevitable privileging of the fetus, which, presumably, diminishes women’s rights. Overall, despite what she says in her prefatory remarks, Mitchell did not find very much variation in women’s experiences of ultrasound. Although she does not provide as much information about her interviewees as she ought to (we do not learn anything at all about the women’s religious backgrounds, for example), Mitchell concludes that most of them expected to “see” their babies during the examination, were “looking forward” to the T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E

The Culture of Technology

The Culture of Technology examines our often conflicting attitudes toward nuclear weapons, biological technologies, pollution, Third World development, automation, social medicine, and industrial decline. It disputes the common idea that technology is value-free and shows that its development and use are conditioned by many factors-political and cultural as well as economic and scientific. Many examples from a variety of cultures are presented. These range from the impact of snowmobiles in North America to the use of water pumps in rural India, and from homemade toys in Africa to electricity generation in Britain-all showing how the complex interaction of many influences in every community affects technological practice.Arnold Pacey, who lives near Oxford, England, has a degree in physics and has lectured on both the history of technology and technology policy, with a particular focus on the development of technologies appropriate to Third World needs. He is the author of The Maze of Ingenuity (MIT Press paperback).

The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities

Long before Betty Friedan wrote about the problem that had no name in The Feminine Mystique, a group of American feminists whose leaders included Melusina Fay Peirce, Mary Livermore, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman campaigned against womens isolation in the home and confinement to domestic life as the basic cause of their unequal position in society.The Grand Domestic Revolution reveals the innovative plans and visionary strategies of these persistent women, who developed the theory and practice of what Hayden calls material feminism in pursuit of economic independence and social equality. The material feminists ambitious goals of socialized housework and child care meant revolutionizing the American home and creating community services. They raised fundamental questions about the relationship of men, women, and children in industrial society. Hayden analyzes the utopian and pragmatic sources of the feminists programs for domestic reorganization and the conflicts over class, race, and gender they encountered.This history of a little-known intellectual tradition challenging patriarchal notions of womens place and womens work offers a new interpretation of the history of American feminism and a new interpretation of the history of American housing and urban design. Hayden shows how the material feminists political ideology led them to design physical space to create housewives cooperatives, kitchenless houses, day-care centers, public kitchens, and community dining halls. In their insistence that women be paid for domestic labor, the material feminists won the support of many suffragists and of novelists such as Edward Bellamy and William Dean Howells, who helped popularize their cause. Ebenezer Howard, Rudolph Schindler, and Lewis Mumford were among the many progressive architects and planners who promoted the reorganization of housing and neighborhoods around the needs of employed women.In reevaluating these early feminist plans for the environmental and economic transformation of American society and in recording the vigorous and many-sided arguments that evolved around the issues they raised, Hayden brings to light basic economic and spacial contradictions which outdated forms of housing and inadequate community services still create for American women and for their families.

The eugenics movement.

Some historians believe that a knowledge of the past is useful for avoiding blunders in the present. Historians of science who are of this inclination have a number of paradigm cases at their disposal and, not surprisingly, pne of those cases-the eugenics mqovement-has been subjected to increasing scrutiny in the last few years. SearlWsTyolume (actually it is little more than a loWg essay) is only one of a number of bpks and articles that have appeared fcently on eugenics; it is neither the best no the worst of the lot but is, as they say, a useful addition to the literature. The eugenics movement was an attempt to bring the prjrcip es of the new science of genetics to b& pn the formation of public policy. Thempovement was international in scope but was particularIY prominent in the United States and Great Britain between 1900 and 1930 and in Germany for several unfortunate years beyond that. Despite national differences in emphasis and tone the underlying prnciples ofeugenics were everywhere the same: heredity is a stronger determinant of human characteristics than environment; the improvement of society is dependent upon the improvement of the race; the improvement of the race cannot be accomplished without following the laws of genetics; thus the breeding habits ofuman beings are proper matters for governmental scrutiny and the laws of the state should be based upon the laws of genetics. Professional biologists were prominent in the eugenics movements irrall three countries; indeed, according to Searle (and others) it was the presence of these experts that made eugenic policies increasingly attractive to the public. The eugenists met with varying degrees of success. Ip all three countries specific items of, legislation were passed-sterilization laws, immigration restriction acts, institutionalization of the feeble-minded, inducements to