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

Abstract

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