Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850 ed. by Judith A. McGaw

Abstract

356 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE girls had done so in 1836. Similarly, among women who were domes­ tic servants or garment workers in Boston, the proportion who were not living with their own families declined between 1860 and 1880. Surprisingly, technological change in these women’s work re­ ceives slight attention. Although a few pictures show women posing at their workplaces, descriptions ofactual work processes are absent. Gender comparisons crop up occasionally but are not a strong theme; nor, in contrast to Women at Work, Dublin’s earlier book about Lowell mill girls, is labor unrest of concern here. Rather, Dub­ lin presents the fruits ofhis research as a test ofthe concept of “fam­ ily economy.” He believes his data show a short-lived period of “eco­ nomic and social independence of early female wage earners” (p. 27). For each woman, it was brief—upon marriage she joined another family economy. For American society, it was brief—in­ creased immigration after the Civil War submerged the “transient Yankee work force” (p. 27) in a permanent workforce of immi­ grants’ daughters whose “work and wages . . . were reintegrated within a patriarchal family wage economy” by 1900 (p. 257). One might differ with Dublin’s interpretation of his data, or wish he had included non-Lowell-type textile mill workers, but one must still applaud this substantial contribution to our basic stock of infor­ mation about working women in 19th-century New England. Carolyn Cooper Dr. Cooper, research affiliate at Yale University, is the author of ShapingInvention: Thomas Blanchard’s Machinery and Patent Management in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1991). She writes about 19th-century woodworking mechanization and the patent system. Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850. Edited by Judith A. McGaw. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Pp. x+482; illustrations, notes, ap­ pendix, index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Until Brooke Hindle began his systematic and imaginative exami­ nation of 18th- and 19th-century American invention and practical technology more than four decades ago, few historians explicitly rec­ ognized that mechanism and culture were two sides of the same tech­ nological coin. This collection of essays dedicated to Hindle makes clear the intricate and intimate connection between technology and material culture, mainly in the Middle Atlantic region during the century and a halfbefore 1850. It also addresses a number ofimpor­ tant but relativelyunexplored questions in the history ofearlyAmeri­ can technology, including fundamental ones concerning the com­ plex and varied nature ofthat technology and how historians should approach it. Ofparticular concern to the volume’s editor,Judith McGaw, is the TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 331 bridging of the technological divide between the craft technology of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and the machine technology identified with the mid-19th-century industrial revolution. This, and the clarification of the roles of gender and the environment in de­ termining the form and consequences of the ways in which early Americans “made and did things,” are the main points of her intro­ duction to the volume and the controlling themes ofmostofits essays. Together these concerns describe what might be called an anthro­ pological approach to the history of technology, and a number of the authors here take it. This approach yields very different (and sometimes refreshing) results from those derived from analysis of patent statistics or the prosopography of inventors. Instead, the an­ thropology oftechnology tells us how people devised techniques and devices and applied them to the prosaic tasks of daily existence. A case in point is one of the more extensive essays, Susan Klepp’s discussion of methods and means of contraception and abortion in and around 18th-century Philadelphia. Also in this vein is Sarah McMahon’s essay on food preservation on New England farms be­ tween 1750 and 1850. McMahon’s focus is the “gender division of labor” (p. 186) and the often ambiguous differentiation between men and women in the work of preparing and putting up food. McGaw’s own piece on agricultural tool ownership in 18th-century Pennsylvania and New Jersey is a report on her current research, based on farmers’ probate inventories. The...