In memory of my father Szloma Wajcman 1905- /978 • U D Y J WAJCMAN The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania ' Copyright © Judy Wajcman 1991 First published 199 l in the United States by The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1 Suite C, 820 North University Drive, I University Park, PA 16802 All rights reserved ISBN 0-271 -00801-6 (cloth) ISBN 0-271 - 00802 - 4 (paper) library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Wajcman, Judy. Feminism confronts technology/Judy Wajcman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-271-00801-6 (cloth): $25.00. - ISBN 0-271-00802-4 (paper): $11.95 1. Technology-Social aspects. 2. Feminist criticism. I. Title. HM22 l .W 35 l99 l 306.4'6-dc20 91-18539 CIP It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper for the first printing of all clothbound books. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences- Permanence of Paper for Printing Library Materials, ANSI 239, 48-1984 Printed in Great Britain 31143007460224 306.46 Wajcman, Jt..tdy . Feminism confronts technology Contents Acknowledgements VI Preface viii 1 Feminist Critiques of Science and Technology 1 2 The Technology of Production: Making a Job of Gender 27 3 Reproductive Technology: Delivered into Men's Hands 4 Domestic Technology: Labour-saving or Enslaving? 81 5 The Built Environment: Women's Place, Gendered Space 110 6 Technology as Masculine Culture 137 Conclusion 162 Bibliography 168 Index 181 Acknowledgements In acknowledging the help I received in producing this book, I must begin with Jenny Earle. She not only read and expertly edited every chapter, but discussed with me all the ideas, intellectual and political. I am indebted to her for constant support and encouragement throughout the entire process. I started out intending to write an article - it was Donald MacKenzie who suggested I might as well write a book. I have often cursed him since! Now it is finished I can thank him for his suggestion and for initially fostering my interest in this area. He and Tony Giddens have seen the book through from beginning to end, promptly reading its many drafts and exhorting me to continue through despon dency and ill-humour. I am grateful to them both and relieved that our friendships have survived. Cynthia Cockburn also read many drafts and her belief in the project was likewise very important to me. The research and writing for the most part took place while I was a visitor at the Department of Applied Economics at Cambridge University. As in the past, this was an excellent workplace for me. I would like to thank Bob Blackburn, who arranged my visit, Ken Prandy, Jeremy Edwards, Lucia Hanmer and Kath Wilson all of whom made me welcome and were a continuing source of encouragement. While in Cambridge, I was most fortunate to live in a household with Ros Morpeth and Loi Sullivan. They were both extremely generous to me, from patiently engaging about the ideas in the book to fixing my bicycle! In particular, I am grateful to Ros for her warm hospitality and unswerving friendship. I am indebted to many other friends in Cambridge, London and Edinburgh and I would par ticularly like to mention Karen Greenwood, Lynn Jamieson, Archie Onslow, Mary Ryan and Michelle Stan worth. For their helpful comments on particular chapters and for inspiring me with their own work, I must thank Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Sandra Harding, Maureen McNeil and others associated with the UK Gender and Information Technology Network. The last stages of the manuscript were Acknowledgements vii completed when I returned to Australia and I would like to thank Pauline Garde, Richard Gillespie, Carol Johnson, Belinda Probert, Stuart Rosewarne and especially Michael Bittman for helping me with the final draft. I had the benefit of a small research grant from the University of New South Wales and the Australian Research Council. I am grateful to Alex Heron, Karen Hughes, Jocelyn Pixley, Alison Tilson and especially Mandy Wharton for their exemplary, if all too brief, research assistance. This is by no means an exhaustive list of contributors to my thinking and writing on gender and technology. A project with as broad a sweep as this, extending over an intensive two-year period, has of course involved me in numerous conversations particularly with other feminists working in the area. Feeling part of a collective feminist endeavour has sustained me and I hope the end product usefully con tributes to this ongoing work. Preface Over the last two decades feminists have identified men's monopoly of technology as an important source of their power; women's lack of technological skills as an important element in our dependence on men. From Women in Manual Trades, set up in the early 1970s to train women in traditionally male skills, to the Women and Com puting courses of the 1980s, feminist groups and campaigns have attempted to break men's grip on technical expertise and to win greater autonomy and technical competence for women. In the same period, women's efforts to control their own fertility have extended from abortion and contraception to mobilizing around the new reproduc tive technologies. With dramatic advances in biotechnology and the prospect of genetic engineering, women's bodies have in some respects become increasingly vulnerable to exploitation. These and other political struggles around technology, and the dif ficulties they continue to confront, have opened up an exciting new field in feminist scholarship. To date however, most contributions to the debate on gender and technology have been of a somewhat specialist character, focused on a particular type of technology. This book represents an attempt at a more coherent approach, bringing together under one theoretical framework a number of different sites of technology. It is my intention both to explicate and to extend the newly emerging feminist analysis. Turning to social science debates about technology we find a pre occupation with the impact of technological change on society. Many commentators, for example, claim we are in the midst of a microelec tronic revolution, which will cause a radically new form of society to emerge. Regardless of their theoretical or political perspectives, women rarely enter their field of vision. Feminists have worked to put women and gender relations back into this frame, highlighting the differential effects of technological change on women and men. Although still largely concerned with 'effects', feminists also point beyond the relations of paid production to a recognition that Preface ix technology impinges on every aspect of our public and private lives. While I will be engaging with these issues, I also intend to take the analysis into less charted waters. The technological determinism implicit in much of both the sociological and feminist literature on the impact of technology has recently been subjected to criticism. The new sociology of technology has turned the focus around to examine the social factors that shape technological changes. Rather than only looking at the effects of tech nology on society, it also looks at the effects of society on technology. The Social Shaping of Technology ( 1985), which I co-edited with Donald MacKenzie, was part of this project. As an edited collection, that book was to some extent deficient in its treatment of gender issues, reflecting the state of knowledge at that time. This book is motivated by a desire to redress the balance, exploring in more depth women's relationship to and experience of technology. Rather than providing a comprehensive review of the now burgeoning literature in this area, I have selected research which can best exemplify the cen trality of gender relations to the social shaping approach. I have not attempted to encompass here all forms of technology. I have not, for example, dealt with the technologies of surveillance and political control, nor with energy technology. Various aspects of information and communication technologies have also been excluded. I have chosen to concentrate on advanced industrial societies, and the book has few references to the major issues con cerning technology in the Third World. There is now an extensive literature on how technology transfer to the Third World has a power ful tendency to reinforce male dominance.' In the end, the sheer scope of the topic prohibited its inclusion. The book begins with an overview of feminist theories of science and technology. In this first chapter, I argue that the feminist critique of science cannot simply be translated into a feminist perspective on technology. Although useful parallels can be drawn, technology needs to be understood as more than applied science. The following chapters have a less abstract focus and are organized around substantive areas of technology. Each chapter begins by looking at the impact of tech nological change on sexual divisions and goes on to develop the argu ment that technology itself is gendered. 2 Chapter 2 assesses the impact of production technologies on sexual divisions in the sphere of paid work. It then looks at the extent to which these divisions, and gender relations in the workplace, them selves profoundly affect the direction and pace of technological change. x Preface Perhaps it is the new technologies of human biological reproduction that have been most vigorously contested, both intellectually and politically, by feminists in recent years. Chapter 3 explores the argu ments, placing them in the wider context of the growing supremacy of technology in Western medicine. There is now a substantial body of feminist writing on domestic technologies and their bearing on housework. Chapter 4 examines this research in conjunction with more mainstream (malestream) socio logical theories regarding the impact of technologies on the 'post industrial' home. Chapter 5 deals with the built environment. The first section con siders the design of houses and their urban location. I argue that sexual divisions are literally built into houses and indeed into the whole structure of the urban system. The last section scrutinises trans port technology and demonstrates how women in particular have been disadvantaged by the design of cities around the automobile. Picking up on issues from the previous four chapters, chapter 6 presents an analysis of technology as a masculine culture. I argue that the close affinity between technology and the dominant ideology of masculinity itself shapes the production and use of particular techno logies. The correspondingly tenuous nature of women's relationship to this technical culture is the subject of the second part of the chapter. In the conclusion, I hope to convince the reader that a recognition of the profoundly gendered character of technology need not lead to political pessimism or total rejection of existing technologies. The argument that women's relationship to technology is a contradictory one, combined with the realization that technology is itself a social construct, opens up fresh possibilities for feminist scholarship and action. NOTES 1 For an introduction to this literature, see McNeil's (1987, pp. 227-9) bibliography on 'Development, The "Third World" and Technology'. See also Ahmed (1985). 2 Throughout this book I use the term 'sex' and 'gender' interchangeably. This is symptomatic of the blurred boundaries that mark the distinction between what is construed as 'natural' and what is construed as 'social'.