Women and Technology: An Annotated Bibliography by Cynthia Gay Bindocci

Abstract

technologyand culture Book Reviews 891 about the history of technology, it will probably eventually wind up on the shelves of most serious scholars in the field. John Magney Dr. Magney, an assistant professor in the Department of Technical Resource Manage­ ment at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, teaches courses in labor relations and data analysis. He is doing research on concerns with quality and productivity in modem management ideology. Women and Technology: An Annotated Bibliography. By Cynthia Gay Bindocci. New York: Garland, 1993. Pp. xiv+229; illustrations, indexes. $39.00. In the introduction to Women and Technology: An AnnotatedBibliography, Cynthia Gay Bindocci explains that this small volume originated in a discussion among people attending a WITH (Women in Technological History) meeting at the 1985 SHOT conference, where the participants complained about the dearth of published bibliographies on women and technology. This work, while far from exhaustive, is a good first step toward addressing that need. Bindocci has compiled the bibliography using suggestions given to her by other scholars and through a search of a limited number of sources, most significandy Dissertation Abstracts, a number of journals “sensitive to research on women,” and Technology and Culture. The majority of the entries are historical in nature, with a concentration on America in the last century. The remainder are largely sociological or anthropological. The author has also included a few secondary sources on Europe and a much-needed category on women in developing nations. All entries are in English. The resulting 570 books, articles, and dissertations are annotated with descriptions ranging from a sentence to a half-page. Many annotations very usefully summarize the thesis of the work in question in a sentence or two. Descriptions of edited volumes give lists of individual contributors and titles ofarticles. The descriptions ofworks I am familiar with varied in accuracy. In a number of cases, dissertations and articles were noted without the titles of monographs that have superseded them. Bindocci cannot be faulted for not having added some recently published books because of the need to meet publication deadlines, but readers would be well advised to check for the book before ordering the dissertation. In her introduction, Bindocci notes the difficulty of creating analyti­ cal categories for this kind of bibliography. The problem is complicated by the nebulous boundaries of both tbe history of technology and women’s history. The result here is both a sometimes idiosyncratic categorization and a heavy emphasis on certain categories. Women and work is by far the largest category. One could in fact argue that this is largely a bibliography of women’s work divided into categories such as “Clerical,” “Household Technology,” “Industrial Work,” and “Labor 892 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Organization.” Other smaller categories include forty-three entries under “Reproductive Technology,” the aforementioned survey of women and technology in developing nations, and a curious emphasis on women airplane pilots. To begin each category, Bindocci has chosen a number of marvelous archival photographs, mosdy of American women in the interwar period. Compiling a substantial bibliography such as this one can be a thankless task. Therefore those of us who work on subjects relating to women and technology owe Cynthia Bindocci a debt ofgratitude for the time and effort she has spent to aid our scholarship. Arwen Mohun Dr. Mohun is assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware. The Staircase, vol. 1: History and Theories; vol. 2: Studies ofHazards, Falls, and SaferDesign. Byjohn Templer. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. Pp. xiv+185; xvi+200; illustrations, tables, glossary, appendix, bibliog­ raphy, index. $27.50; $32.50; $55.00 the set. As the understated main title of this two-volume set suggests, The Staircasejoins that emerging family of exhaustive studies devoted to all possible aspects, historical and technological, of a single object type. So far we have seen The Pencil (Henry Petroski, 1989), TheAmerican Railroad Passenger Car (John H. White, 1982) and Freight Car (White, 1993), and Zipper (Robert Friedel, 1994). By their nature, such worthy studies court the danger of being labeled (usually incorrectly) as narrow exercises in connoisseurship, or worse, antiquarianism, with all the overtones of noncontextual wallowing in one’s favorite obsession. Collector groups have long produced great tomes...