Review of: Cynthia Cockburn and Susan Ormrod, Gender & Technology in the Making, London: Sage, 1993; and Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology, Cambridge: Polity, 1991
The view that science and technology are socially shaped is a commonplace in SSTS: what is not yet commonplace (except amongst feminists) is the centrality of gender relations in that account. Yet that mapping of the mutual shaping of gender and technology over the last decade has fostered a beautifully written, theoretically sophisticated and often witty literature among which Gender and Technology in the Making by Cynthia Cockburn and Susan Ormrod and Judith Wajcman’s Feminism Confronts Technology will have pride of place. While those with an intellectual and political commitment to the analysis of gender relations and technology will read both these books with pleasure and immediately put them on their reading lists, they should also be immensely helpful tho those still all too many men in SST to enable them to overcome their gender phobia, a disorder typically demonstrated by an inability to cite, let alone draw on, manifestly relevant feminist research studies.
Thus Wacjman provides an indispensable overview of feminist critiques of technology indicating its linkages to and differences from feminist science theory, followed by chapters on technology in production, reproduction, the home and in the built environment. Cockburn and Ormrod offer a nuanced case study of the microwave - a technology which has always fascinated and repelled me as I could never see what it could do in my house other than heat up those many cups of coffee I absent-mindedly abandon to chill. Overview and case- study complement each other, the former even tempered and synthetic, the latter a mistress class in what can be achieved to build sociological theory by focussing on a single artifact.
Wajcman’s take on technology subtly unfolds throught the book. Thus in the production chapter her core argument is that far from technology changing the social it enters preexisting social relations of class, race and gender. Yet this is much more than a restatement of much sociology of employment which considers new technology often from a ‘use and abuse’ model, thus failing to address the politics in the technology itself. Wacjman reminds us of Langdon Winner’s example of Robert Moses the master public works builder for New York who for half a century systematically built low hanging overpasses on Long Island to exclude buses and therefore working class people, especially from racial minorities, from access to Jones Beach. She only gently chides him for missing out on the gender implications of anti-bus planning.
She documents the development of feminist research from a ‘women and technology approach’, with its often strongly expressed hostility to new technology as inexorably worsening women’s health and position to the current focus on the relationship between gender stereotyping of jobs and the shaping of technology. What I particularly like is the way in which she does not abandon the achievements of earlier work - for example she does not let go of the importance of the link between domestic responsibilities and employment - while she directs attention to the new. She gently but solidly criticises, both the time budget studies which focus on house work and ‘forgets’ people work and shopping and also the weakness of those labour process arguments which suggested that as mechanisation removed heavy labour, the sexual division of labour would lose its grip. She shows how particular technologies come to be preferred above others, steadily resisting both technological inevitabilism and technological determinism. Like Cockburn’s Brothers she is blunt about the historic role of organised male labor in shutting women out from technological skills and thus the chance of a decent wage. Unlike Cockburn and Ormrod her account criticisably - given that it is written subsequent to the immense political and theoretical challenged issued by black feminisim in the eighties - misses out on ‘race’ in the social shaping of technology.
Wajcman’s origin stories of the appliances of science dryly notes that far from being designed specifically for domestic use, many domestic technologies originated in the commercial or even military sectors, the automatic washing machine, the electric cooker and the microwave - developed for cooking in submarines- and are then transferred, with little other than superficial styling to the domestic. Her commentary on deliberately noisy (i.e., powerful) vacuum cleaners, over-elaborate stoves and washing machines, and the proliferation of electric motors in the home (12 to 20 in a US kitchen) is deliciously sardonic. In no way are these appliances of sciences dedicated to sustaining everyday life.
She is more enthusiastic about the politics of Finnrage (Feminist Network of International Resistance to the new Reproductive Technologies and Genetic Engineering) than I am, although I share her and Finnrage’s analysis of the politics in these technologies. I don’t think that just saying ‘no’ on behalf of the whole of womanhood constitutes an adequate political response any more than saying ‘no’ to Moses’s underpasses. The challenge of these new technosciences is that they appear to the individual woman as a matter of personal choice; thus for many, particularly in the North, the challenge comes from a consumer, not a state imposed eugenics. In this situation effective resistance (rather than publicising the dangers for which Finnrage must be given all credit) is necessarily complex and requires active engagement in the social shaping of technology at many levels. For a feminist sociologist such as Frances Price, the painful documentation of women’s experience of multiple-births following superovulatory drugs is one level which helps strengthen that social shaping in favour of women.
Wajcman is at her most pleasurably subversive when she discusses the possibility of alternative outcomes both in terms of technologies and women’s use of technology. No longer is there even a hint of a fixed technology entering settled existing social relations, but those relations are seen to shape/subvert the technology, as in the case of women using the telephone for sociability so that after long resistance to gossip the industry grudgingly accepted that the phone was more than a mere rational aid to business and domestic management. As I read this I began to wonder if those fragmentary accounts of women using teletext systems for gossip offer some hope against the propsect of pale males surfing the superhighway. Drawing on Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s pioneering analysis of the trajectory of particular domestic technologies Wajcman indicates how the success of the water closet, the electric refrigerator foreclosed other technologies which would have altered both the patterns of household expenditure and municipal services, and, I would add, use very much less energy. She also describes what for me has always been a utopian day dream - the self-cleaning house successfully constructed by Frances Gabe. Why haven’t more men who dominate engineering and architectural development produced such an obvious aid to everyday living? What is most heartening in the book is her stady insistence that the technologies that we have are neither the best nor the only possible technologies. Even in her concluding chapter where she scrutinises and largely sustains the argument that contemporary western technology is masculine - that Thatcherian view of the eighties as TINA (There Is No Alternative) is always, and at the same moment, simply wrong.
Cockburn and Ormrod also point the reader to the curiosities of the STS canon, how hugely socially important technologies not least the baby’s bottle with all its good and bad implications have been simply ignored in the classical histories of technology. Babies’ bottles and the like, they suggest, are best thought of as little technologies where as STS History has been largely about upper case\upper gender Technology. Like Louise Walden with her pioneering study of the sewing machine, they take a particular (lower case) technological artifact, its history, its production, its selling and its use, to disentangle the making of both gender and technology. The book is threaded with photographs taken by Cockburn, making no sociological claims for their analytic capacity but modestly suggesting they may add a parallel narrative with resonance in the text.
Sharing the general concern of feminists that domestic technology is designed by men but used by women they hone in on the microwave, delicately poised between the ‘brown’ and ‘white’ technological artifacts of contemporary domestic culture. While both brown and white are designed by men engineers and do not have radically different levels of technological sophistication, all the technophilia is directed towards the ‘brown’ sold by men to men. The selling exchange is couched in mutual technobabble and the accolade is reserved for those goods which are state of the art. White goods, those freezers, fridges and cookers, have little status wihin this technophiliac culture and are therefore sold often by women to women and to heterosexual partners shopping together. Joint decision making in domestic shopping is acutely observed: “He’ll make the decision but she’ll make him make the decision. The questions are asked by the woman, the decision is made by the man.”
They tell the story of the downward mobility of the microwave as it slid from state of the art gadgetry to equipment routinely used both by the woman shop assistant and her female customer. Only when men shop alone buying the microwave as a gift for their partners do they briefly restore the microwave to its former glory as they buy the most spohisticated ovens - so sophisticated that they are often found intimidating by their recipients.
When it comes to use the microwave is seen as a means to heat fast ( that cup of coffee again) rather than doing ‘real’ cooking (just my feeling!). Despite the efforts of the women Home Economists in the industry haute cuisine cooking with the microwave has largely not taken on. Instead the microwave took its place reflecting and supporting the fragmentation of eating. The account of one woman remains with me. She made endless plates of different food so that family members, particularly children, could zap their plate and eat when and what they liked. No wonder, as she observed, when it came to feeding herself she just threw in a potato. The ritual of families eating together becomes increasingly difficult to sustain with Sunday lunch the last battle ground.
The microwave took its place in that range of domestic technology which entered promising ease, indeed much of it did reduce hard physical drudgery. Boiling sheets in a fire lit copper, loading in the buckets of water and pullingout the scaliding dripping sheets with wooden tongs was dangerous and heavy work. But because shopping has become a major time user, the microwave has joined those white goods which have not been part of the charges within, rather than the diminution of, the hours spent on domestic chores.
One of the most attractive features of the Ormrod and Cockburn study is the way that a theme is opened up early then returned to and played with deeper insistence on theoretical implication. Thus early on there is an interesting discussion of the relationship between the Home Economists and the Engineers in the industry: the latter saw the former as `only cooking’, the former saw themselves as working very hard an in scientific way but as under recognised and undervalued by their colleagues and by their companies. This differential and gendered fault line ran between different competences through the history of the microwave. Not only did the engineers make divisions, but in the shop the men do the technological talk, at home male partners wired on the plugs even when the women used to them selves when they were single, heterosexual relations not for the first time draining women’s technological skills away. Yet before the study reproduces this wall to wall certainty that men do know more technically, the researchers draw back and acknowledge that some women are aware that their husbands are bluffing. Complexity and reflexivity, often demonstrated through a nice eye for the comic, are always present.
They are intensely sensitive to the diversity of people’s life styles and to the abundant evidence of resistance to gendering. This is tenderly brought out in accounts of individual women and men, such as the attention given to Ken, a man who in his respectful liking for the world of white goods and women revels his deep resistance to the world of gender.
But it is the theoretical reading of this complex contradictory world of the microwave that is most compelling. They argue that technology relations, that is the social relations within and connecting the sites in which technology is socially constructed, are also relations of gender and race. (I have not discussed this in the space of a short review but the account of the relationship between the Japanese and the British as collaborators in microwave innovation is going to be a must not least for those teaching industrial studies.) The point they make, and it has to be said again and again, not least in contexts peopled by one sex, for masculinity shapes the way men relate to one another and femininity shapes the way women relate to each other: gender and gendering are not contingent on mixed company. And there is a strong take home message for those STS researchers who have stayed this far with the review, for often they are men describing the activities of other men.
Cockburn and Ormrod fruitfully draw on Sandra Harding’s distinction between given and chosen gender identity: the given are the subjective identities lived and experienced by individuals, the chosen are selected from among the myriad projected identities generated by culture. Holding all these identities together rendering them coherent is seen as a personal and richly creative activity. This gives them a way of responding to the theoretical attractions of the fragmented identity of postmodernism without giving up on the sense of self. The self- identities of the men are about agency and being valued for that, for women their sense of self-identity is about nurturance an being valued for that.
At the same time they suggest that technology is also split into two. There is Capital - T - Technology where both the making and using of the equipment, tools etc., is masculine, and lower case technology where men engineer the technology but women use it. Despite a new diversity in heterosexual life styles they show how gender relations reverberate through every stage of the natural history of the microwave, from its engineering design to its use in family and household life. Yet perhaps because culturally there is a greater awareness, most restiveness about gender and technology which the study reflects, despite the unrelenting analysis of the long and deforming fingers of gender, Cockburn and Ormrod share the concluding optimism of Wacjman.
They insist that for women to control our own lives, we have to know more about how things work. They also observe that girls could acquire this effortlessly if home and school were not such bastions of masculine culture. Nonetheless, they see an advantage stemming from women’s feminine gendering in that it renders them relatively immune from the dangers of Technophilia, to which men as a gender all too easily succumb. This immunity is a potential resource in the struggle to get technology to sustain rather than overwhelm everyday life. Gender struggles (while not the only social struggles) are, in a highly technological society, also technological struggles.