936 Book Reviews—Labor and Technology TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Gender at Work: The Dynamics ofJob Segregation by Sex during World War II. By Ruth Milkman. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp· xv+ 213; illustrations, tables, notes, index. $32.50 (cloth); $8.95 (paper). Ruth Milkman’s Gender at Work offers a fresh perspective on two major historical questions: what effect World War II had on women’s labor force participation and why and how occupational sex segre gation has persisted through changing conditions. In a focused study of two major industries, Milkman develops a complex argument about the construction and maintenance of job segregation through three turbulent decades that might have been expected to transform the sexual division of labor. Milkman chooses the auto industry, capital intensive and heavily male, and the electrical industry, labor intensive and more female, and traces the economic, political, and social factors responsible for shaping the sexual division of labor in each. Using her case studies, she argues that industry structure is critical in determining the sexual division of labor. The nature of each industry in its formative years established patterns of sex-segregated employment that remained strikingly stable through both the Depression and wartime mobili zation. Not that women continued to do the same jobs during the wartime emergency; women did move into “men’s jobs.” But a sexual division of labor, if redefined, remained. At the end of the war, the prewar patterns were reestablished, primarily, Milkman argues, be cause management wanted it that way. Labor’s fear for “men’s jobs” and “men’s wages” facilitated management’s successful efforts to min imize the permanent influence of wartime changes. Throughout, Milkman makes excellent use of union and govern ment archives and interviews to weave a complex tale in which gov ernment, management, unions, male workers, and female workers all play a role in creating, challenging, or maintaining the patterns ofjob segregation by sex. What she calls the idiom of sex-typing (the specific content of sex labeling) changes dramatically in different circum stances, but sex-typing itself remains. In one of her most dramatic ex amples, the management of a Westinghouse plant in 1939 hired young men fresh out ofhigh school on “women’sjobs” andjustified the “wom en’s rate” of pay on the grounds that it considered the young men “in every way as girls” (p. 44). In this case of the “girls without skirts,” as the union sarcastically referred to them, even such substitution of male labor for female actually reinforced existing occupational sex-typing. Technology played a role in all of this, but not, according to Milk man, a very central one. Management strategies for controlling the labor force take center stage. Change is possible because management has to respond not only to economic exigencies such as war but to worker protest as well. Thus the model that emerges from Milkman’s work is a complex one that takes account of a variety of factors. Technology and culture Book Reviews—Labor and Technology 937 This is a careful and sophisticated study. It may not provide defin itive answers to the questions of what effect the war had on women (Milkman says it was a watershed in terms of female labor force par ticipation, but it clearly was not in terms of the sexual division of labor) or why job segregation takes a particular shape at a particular time (why “girls without skirts” in one plant but not another?), but Milkman has done a marvelous job of tracing the persistence of sex segregation in rapidly changing economic circumstances. Leila J. Rupp Dr. Rupp teaches history at Ohio State University. She is the author of Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939—1945 and the coauthor, with Verta Taylor, of Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s. Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change. By Cynthia Cockburn . Dover, N.H.: Pluto Press, 1986. Pp. 264; notes, index. $8.95 (paper). This is a book researched and written at several levels. It does not, in my view, warrant its title, for it does not deal with technology in general or, except in a...