784 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE sex and power of the workers who perform it” (p. 5). Whether “the gender division oflabor was transferred from one country to another along with the technology” (p. 52), as in Dutch cotton spinning mills, or became gendered in the first factory and then generalized as the industry spread, women’s work was termed unskilled and paid less. Why didn’t the women protest? A number ofreasons emerge: they “had developed no way to contest the lower evaluation oftheirjobs” (p. 30) ; class and family claims kept them loyal to the union ideol ogy; the Victorian separation ofjobs as suitable for one sex or the other held sway. Hints that preindustrial work was less divided by gender suggest the importance of studying women’s role before the 19th century. The authors of this collection offer us trenchant lan guage and pointed questions to link the history of women in work and technology in every era. Daryl M. Hafter Dr. Hafter, professor of history at Eastern Michigan University and a Dibner Fel low in 1996-97, is the author of European Women and Preindustrial Craft (Blooming ton: Indiana University Press, 1995). ManufacturingInequality: GenderDivision in theFrench and British Metal working Industries, 1914-1939. By Laura Lee Downs. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv+329; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 (cloth). The “munitionette,” smiling, trousered, lunch bucket in hand, is one of the enduring images of women’s contribution to the First World War. Although she was much touted for her patriotism during the war, after the Armistice her transgression into the privileged do mains of male industrial labor made her the symbol of a world turned upside down. Did women feel a new sense of liberation? Did high wages and skilledjobs spoil women with high expectations? A generation ago, historians often accepted these perceptions of em powerment as fact. More recently historians have variously inter preted the meaning ofthese perceptions without specifying the com plexities ofchange and continuity in women’s lives. In Manufacturing Inequality, Laura Lee Downs brings a new clarity to these questions through her study ofwomen workers in the metalworking industries of France and England during the war and the immediate postwar decades. Downs develops a cogent analytical framework for understanding the persistence of gender inequality. Between 1914 and 1918, em ployers in the metal trades ofboth countries “rationalized” produc tion to meet the rising demands for weapons at a time when the traditionally male labor force had left for the front. Downs argues that the influx ofwomen into metalworking (beginning in the spring TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 785 of 1915) was not simply an expedience to salve wartime emergency shortages. Rather, employers seized the moment to reconfigure the production process by shifting capital investment away from skilled labor to machinery. They accomplished this change by subdividing crucial production tasks that were previously the domains of skilled craftwork into smaller, repetitive gestures performed by less experi enced workers aided by newly designed task-specific machines. The new rationalized factory substituted managerial and technical con trol for the self-regulation and coordination of skilled craftsmen. This new productive order, however, required forms oflabor disci pline that could not be generated from principles of efficiency alone. Such notions as could be derived from classical political econ omy were woefully inadequate, employers found, for binding indi vidual workers to the rigors of the new disciplinary regime. To this end, employers drew on ideas of sexual difference. The language of gender distinguished between qualities and capacities, ranked these distinctions, and linked them to supposedly immutable substances. Gender hierarchy offered employers the means to think about how diverse human materials can be shaped into labor power and molded into specific productive activities. It is refreshing to note that neither maternity nor domesticity nor women’s sexuality was a central referent in the specific qualities at tributed to feminine labor. Gender distinctions in this case traveled in technical idioms. Femaleness meant dexterity and speed, the ca pacity to perform detailed repetitive work within a scientifically or dered work process. Maleness occupied two opposing poles: brute strength at one end and intellectual mastery at the other...