834 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE showing how enlightened planners and corporate muscle could fix it. The GM Futurama’s mockup of the superhighway-threaded city of 1960; the vast Democracity diorama inside the Perisphere theme center; the American City Planning Institute’s vision of suburban greenbelt paradises in the film The City; the elaborate color scheme of the fairgrounds themselves: all portrayed an orderly, gleaming future in a confident tone that was part civics lesson, part clever advertising. In the end, even Handler gives in to the fair’s authoritative voice. (What happens to the couple after he proposes, I won’t give away.) That voice, Gelernter argues, was the root of the fair’s power and lasting influence. As he notes, the late 1930s was a time of charis matic leaders—FDR and Fiorello La Guardia, to name just two who figure in the story—and of implicit trust in authority. In the case of the fair, this trust may have been well placed, since, as Gelernter also points out, the material utopia the fair projected has largely come into being. It’s when Gelernter tries to attribute the disunity and leaderlessness of modern American social and political life to the very fact that our technological dreams have been fulfilled, leaving us nothing to look forward to, that his normally lucid narrative gives way to fuzzy nostalgia. Hattie’s hope and optimism have their place, but so does Handler’s skepticism. The fair was a nice place to visit— and, through Gelernter’s meaty book, revisit—but you probably wouldn’t want to live there. Wade Roush Dr. Roush covers social and ethical aspects of science, Boston-area science news, and developmental biology for the journal Science. He received a doctoral degree in the history of technology from the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. The First Industrial Woman. By Deborah Valenze. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp. xi+251; illustrations, tables, notes, bib liography, index. $39.95 (cloth) $16.95 (paper). Why was women’s work—considered necessary and virtuous be fore the Industrial Revolution—regarded as amateurish and prob lematic afterward? Deborah Valenze has written a brilliant commen tary on this puzzle; her book will take a key place in the crucial debates defining women’s role in modern industrialization. Following the gendered analyses of Maxine Berg, John Rule, and Sonya O. Rose, among others, Valenze grounds her argument in a comprehensive and subtle portrayal of women’s work before mod ern industrialization. Guided by the populationist assumptions of mercantilism, the agricultural era expected women to work and prized their industrial and reproductive capacities. Women’s tradi tional obligation to put food on the table for their childrenjustified TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 835 their specialization in dairy production, spinning, and other textile work. Their customary world legitimized use of the village commons and wastelands, and post-harvest gleaning from farms of wealthy neighbors. Valenze’s statistics document the economic contribution that women workers made to their families and to the national economy. By the 1770s, new ideologies combined with new technology to discredit the role and the work of poor women. Whereas Adam Smith and other writers had celebrated fecundity for female craftworkers , Malthus blamed unemployed poor women for causing too high a birthrate. As agricultural capitalism promoted experimenta tion on enclosed land, “an intensified notion of private property that promoted individual interests against those of the larger com munity” (p. 35) discredited the practice of leaving corners of fields and wastelands for the poor to harvest. This cut poor women’s in come by as much as 20 percent, while at the same time transforma tion of farms into single-crop producers made it harder for poor women to participate in harvesting. While ideas of rational farming rather than new technology initiated the agricultural changes, the subsequent introduction of new machines like Tull’s horse-drawn drill for hoeing shrank women’s chances for farm work. As female earning power declined and poor taxes increased, a vicious circle ofblame-the-victim emerged. Poor women were castigated for being dependent and inefficient; being thus labeled, farm...