Making Technology Masculine
Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945
Distributed for Amsterdam University Press
271 pages
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illustrated
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6-1/4 x 9-1/2
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© 1999
To say that technology is male comes as no surprise, but the claim that its history is a short one strikes a new note. Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945 maps the historical process through which men laid claims to technology as their exclusive terrain. It also explores how women contested this ascendancy of the male discourse and engineered alternative plots. From the moral gymnasium of the shop floor to the staging grounds of World's Fairs, engineers, inventors, social scientists, activists, and novelists emplotted and questioned technology as our modern male myth. Oldenziel recounts the history of technology - both as intellectual construct and material practice - by analyzing these struggles. Drawing on a broad range of sources, she explains why male machines rather than female fabrics have become the modern markers of technology. She shows how technology developed as a narrative production of modern manliness, allowing women little room for negotiation
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Unsettled Discourses
From the Useful Arts to Applied Science
Female Fabrics versus Manly Machines
Veblen Amalgamating, Engineers, Machines, and Technology
Technology-as-Keyword on Display
2. From Elite Profession to Mass Occupation
'Shopfloor Culture' and the Workplace as Moral Gymnasium
'School Culture' and the Domestication of Outsiders
Revitalizing Male Authority Through Professionalization
Broken Paternal Promises of Promotion
Making Technology a Mask for Disunity
3. Bargaining for the Fraternity
Carving Out a Space Between Labor and Capital
Writing a World Without Workers
Building the Engineering Family Without Women
Appropriating the Worker's Body
(Re)Making the History of Engineering
4. (De)Constructing Male Professional Bridges
Scribbling Men Design Engineers
Kipling and Martha's Manliness
Women Engineer Alternative Plots
Burning Professional Bridges
Modernist Moment: Machines, Sex, and War
5. Women Reweaving Borrowed Identities
Surrogate Sons and the Inside Job
School Culture and the Strategy of Over-Qualification
Foot Soldiers of Bureaucracy
Facing Male Professionalism
Divide and Conquer
Organizing at Last
"Woman Power" and Daughters of Martha: Failed Allegories
Epilogue
Gender, Technology, and Man the Maker
Notes
Bibliography
Primary
Secondary
Index
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