Cyberspace meets domestic space: Personal computers, women's work, and the gendered territories of the family home

Abstract

During the early 1990s, marketing discourse in key US magazines attached a newly invented “feminine”; identity to the personal computer, fuelling a second great wave of home adoption. These public fantasies, which attempted to ease the machine into the pre‐gendered spaces of the American family home, drew upon a slate of postfeminist appeals, emphasizing the PC's value in women's work‐both income‐producing and family‐centered. This three‐part paper traces how Utopian expectations for a postfeminist work tool and recommendations about where to place it on the domestic map ultimately collided with the gendered constraints built into the pre‐established territories of the US home. The first part of the paper documents the addition of postfeminist work applications to a formerly masculinized technology; the second part reviews the marketing appeals that extolled the PC's potential to help a woman produce income, manage her household, and provide educational advantages to her children, all at once; the final part uncovers how these hopeful dreams were deconstructed by a second stream of discourse that failed to situated the PC comfortably within the domestic sphere, signalling fundamental vacillations about the micropolitics of homebound feminism.