DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS?

(With Apologies to Langdon Winner)

Deborah Rutzen

Bloomfield Hills, MI

In a paper she gave before the Society for the History of Technology in 1976, Ruth Schwartz Cowan made the following observation:

For the better part of its cultural life, the United States has been idealized as the land of practicality, the land of know-how, the land of Yankee ingenuity...If practicality and know-how and willingness to get your hands dirty down there with the least of them are signatures of the true American, then we have been systematically training slightly more than half of our population to be un-American. I speak, of course, of women. While we socialize our men to aspire to feats of mastery, we socialize our women to aspire to feats of submission. Men are hard, women are soft. Men are meant to conquer nature; women are meant to commune with it. Men are rational, women irrational; men are practical, women impractical. Boys play with blocks, girls play with dolls. Men build; women inhabit. Men are active; women are passive. Men are good at mathematics; women are good at literature. If something is broken, daddy will fix it. If feelings are hurt, mommy will salve them. We have trained our women to opt out of the technological order as much as we have trained our men to opt into it.

In her remarks she identified three other areas of special concern for a feminist history of technology: technology's influence on women's activities as bearers and rearers of children; technology's relationship to the segregated and often exploitative world of women's employment; and technology's role in the women's place, the home. The purpose and function of my project was to take these categories identified by Cowan, and to develop materials which would reflect these dilemmas, helping both boys and girls to come to an understanding of what it has meant to be female in an increasingly technological world, and to understand why, for women, technical literacy has been slow in evolving.

These materials will be used by eight members of the History- Social Science Department, many of whom lack knowledge relating to the female life experience. To facilitate their understanding of women's history, I prepared an annotated bibliography of key works and journal articles relating to women's studies. Divided into roughly four time periods: Pre-Industrial to 1790; Early-Industrial to 1850, with its development of the doctrine of separate spheres and the Cult of True Womanhood; Industrial to 1920; and Twentieth Century, with the shift from production to consumerism, the citations include most areas relating to women and labor force participation (nativist and immigrant), the history of the family, social attitudes about women, and a history of household technology. Copies of key journal articles relating to each topic will be given to the faculty with the annotated bibliography.

In addition to the uniquely feminist journals Signs, Women's Studies, and Feminist Studies, which publishes the biennial papers given at The Berkshire Conference on women's history, American Quarterly, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Urban History, Labor History, and The William and Mary Quarterly are publishing an increasing number of articles related to the female experience, while articles specifically associated with technology usually appear in Technology and Culture.

Rather than develop a separate unit, "Women and Work," the goal of the student directed materials was to integrate them into the general outline of the course. I have classified these materials according to the type of student interaction involved: experiential; interpretation of primary documents; archival work.

Experiential: These activities partly reflect the availability of Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum; The Rouge Plant, the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Kingswood-Cranbrook's unique relationship to the history of hand crafts in America. While some activities will reflect a uniquely female experience, these will be contrasted with general work experience, so that students may see ways in which female work differed from male as well as recognize ways in which they shared common perspectives. Jacquard looms, grist mills and the history of household technology are reflected in the collection which Henry Ford put together at Greenfield Village (in addition to the largest collection of antique cars in the nation). Specific units will reflect the development of weaving, automobile production, household technology, and union attitudes about the assembly line (as reflected in Rivera's work).

What is important for students to see in the development of household technology is that women's work differed from men's in that men's work was completely industrialized over time, and women's work was not. Following historic time, students should see that in the pre-industrial period, each work process required the involvement of both sexes. At the same time, even a basic technological system such as cooking required contact between the household and the outside market economy. (In Maryland, in the 18th Century, when a simple wooden house cost 4-5 pounds and a bed cost about one fourth of that or one pound, two cast iron pots for cooking would also have cost about one pound.) Walking through such a work process as cooking, laundering, or cleaning, should help students see the division of labor and at the same time the interdependence of labor which existed between men and women. This interdependence is important because to study the industrialization of the household is to study a decline in those jobs performed by men, without a decline in jobs performed by women. This discussion would then lead to the development of the Doctrine of Separate Sphere's or the Cult of Domesticity in the 1830's, the decline of domestic service in the first decade of the twentieth century, and women as consumer in the twentieth century.

Interpretation of Primary Documents: Diary excerpts, philosophical tracts about women's work, data charts and tables, etc. which correspond to the historical time frames have been gathered and will be given to the American Studies faculty to use in their course. These materials will give students experience in data interpretation and graph and chart reading, skills necessary for completion of the Social Science Research Project, a central data gathering project linked to the American Studies curriculum.

From the 1820's on, the development of ladies magazines provides an excellent source for students to interpret attitudes about women. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, in an article, "The 'Industrial Revolution" in the 20th Century" Technology and Culture 17 (January, 1976): 1-23. Reprinted in Martha Moore Trescott, Dynamos and Virgins Revisited: Women and Technological Change in History, 1979, indicates how comparison and analysis of advertisements from such magazines as Godey's Lady's Book (1828-1892), Ladies Home Journal (1883-present), and Harper's Bazaar (1867-1929), can be used by students to interpret societal attitudes about women, and about woman's work process. In a similar way, cookbooks, and advice manuals, such as those written by Lydia Maria Child, Catherine Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, are invaluable historical sources.

Archival Research: In an article: "Auto Workers and Their Work, 1900-1933," Labor History 22 (Spring, 1981): 213-236, Joyce Shaw Peterson has identified some of the key archival materials in the Detroit area relating to the history of the automobile worker. In addition to the Wayne State University Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, the Oral History Section of the Ford Motor Company Archives, the UAW Oral History Collection, and the Michigan Historical Collections will be excellent sources for students to use, giving them the opportunity to use an archive for research, as well as having them collect data about automobile workers which can then be compared to the female worker of the 19th century.