Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age
493
Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age
493eBook
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Overview
From sexist jokes about women drivers to such empowering icons as Amelia Earhart and Rosie the Riveter, representations of the relationship between women and modern technology in popular culture have been both demeaning and celebratory. Depictions of women as timid and fearful creatures baffled by machinery have alternated with images of them as being fully capable of technological mastery and control—and of lending sex appeal to machines as products.
In Women and the Machine, historian Julie Wosk maps the contradictory ways in which women’s interactions with—and understanding of—machinery has been defined in Western popular culture since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Drawing on both visual and literary sources, Wosk illuminates popular gender stereotypes that have burdened women throughout modern history while underscoring their advances in what was long considered the domain of men. Illustrated with more than 150 images, Women and the Machine reveals women rejoicing in their new liberties and technical skill even as they confront society’s ambivalence about these developments, along with male fantasies and fears.
“Engaging and entertaining . . . Using illustrations, cartoons and photographs from the past three centuries, Wosk delineates shifts in social acceptance of women’s relationship to technology . . . her work is complex, comprehensive and highly readable.” —Publishers Weekly
“Art historian Wosk analyzes the overt and covert messages in depictions of women and machines in an array of fiction and, more impressively, in some 150 visual images.” —Booklist
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780801877810 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/27/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 493 |
| File size: | 25 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
FRAMING IMAGES
of Women and Machines
In 1891 America's Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper entertained readers with a revealing photograph representing a woman from the country's colonial history — a woman in a white ruffled cap sleeping quietly at her spinning wheel. With her head gently resting on the rim of the wheel, the woman looks weary but at one with her machine, content with her domestic role and her duties in the home.
But this romanticized and restful view gave absolutely no hint of a world already feeling the impact of tumultuous industrial and technological change or the changes that were already occurring in women's lives. By the 1890s women were operating machines in factories and mills, using typewriters in offices, and trying out electrical appliances in the home. During that decade women's imaginations were also being captured by new safety bicycles as well as newly invented steam and electric automobiles, vehicles that offered the possibility of increased mobility and a chance to test the limits of the pull toward home.
Women were clearly breaking new ground. Not content to just operate their machines, a few pioneering women would soon be teaching other women to service and repair their own automobiles. In a telling illustration from her early instruction manual for female automobilists, The Woman and the Car, the English motorist Dorothy Levitt lifts the lid on mechanical mysteries as she peers under the hood of her car to drain the crankcase to change the oil.
American andEuropean artists and writers, advertisers, and photographers skillfully charted the impact of these new technologies on women's lives, and their images often revealed conflicting attitudes about the dramatic social changes that were taking place, as well as deeply embedded cultural attitudes about women themselves.
Though stories and images made it clear that women could competently handle machines, there were also signs of an ongoing cultural ambivalence about women engaged in this new world of technological change. Images championing women's achievements often coexisted with biting satires mocking women's new skills. As contemporary magazines and newspapers celebrated the sight of women bicyclists and automobilists, other images, usually created by men, demonstrated that the unfamiliar sight of women riding bicycles and driving automobiles could be profoundly unsettling. Women bicyclists and early women drivers, like later women pilots, seemed to threaten established cultural conventions that considered technology primarily the province of men and fundamentally foreign to women's ways. To many, women who operated these new machines challenged deeply felt convictions that women's proper place was in the home.
Women driving their new automobiles were clearly on the move, and artists and magazine illustrators countered with images of women grounded — women sitting forlornly next to flat tires, women dispirited and made miserable by all things mechanical. In a world of fast-paced technological changes, in which women seemed to be moving too far too fast, these views of grounded women, again created by men, suggest a cultural longing to represent women as safely stationary and grounded by the familiar, widespread cultural beliefs about their paltry abilities and appropriately circumscribed roles.
The conflicting views of women in a fast-changing technological world and the persistent ways of viewing women themselves were often particularly vivid in three types of images: images of women and machines that incorporated popular cultural stereotypes and archetypes, including grounded women, goddesses, sirens, and runaway maids; images of women as consumers of new household machines; and images of women industrial workers up to World War I.
Grounded Women and Runaway Maids
Early on, women's expected place in the technological order was reflected in images like the nineteenth-century lithograph Elopement Extraordinary, in which a husband travels with his new bride on a fanciful steam-powered rocket to the moon. In this conventional view of proper gender roles the man steers while the woman rides behind as a passenger. (Many years later, this same idea reappeared in a 1950 automobile advertisement showing a happy housewife riding behind her husband on a rocket, a promotion for the "Rocket" Oldsmobile.)
In the 1860s a new type of image was beginning to appear; in it, women ride off on their own transportation machines and leave their husbands and their household duties behind. In 1869 the American printmakers Currier & Ives published their satirical lithograph The Age of Iron: Man As He Expects to Be, which prophesied a future in which women would ride away from their proper roles in the home. Several fashionably dressed women prepare to depart in their horse-drawn, iron-wheeled carriage, leaving their harried husbands behind to sew, do the washing, and mind the children; a woman sits on the carriage, holding the horse's reins.
This comic image of dislocation in which men and women reverse their social roles, so lighthearted on the surface, reflects the anxieties that often lurked beneath the nineteenth century's pride in technological progress, the gnawing fear that new technologies would lead to explosive changes and disruptive times. In the Age of Steam fast-paced changes in transportation and invention were marked by a sense of speed and dislocation. Railroad systems were altering the travel landscape in America and Europe, and trains were often greeted with both excitement and fears about railway mishaps, boiler explosions, and the dangers of traveling at what were then considered excessive speeds, as shown in British artist Hugh Hughes's satirical etching The Pleasures of the Rail-Road, subtitled Shewing the Inconvenience of a Blow up (1831), which depicts the chaotic scene after a train's steam boiler explodes. Currier & Ives's lithographs later in the century celebrated new steamships but also presented fearsome images of frightening boiler explosions on board.
The Age of Iron also revealed the not-so-funny fear that dramatic social and technological changes would lead to equally dramatic disruptions in the domestic sphere, taking women away from their socially sanctioned roles in the home. Images of role reversal were a source of humor but also revealed signs of anxiety at the prospect that women might take on a new identity. In these views husbands often appear as helpless observers, no longer gazing at a woman as an object of love and desire but seeing her instead as a baffling figure readying herself for a new role.
Men's sense of women's shifting roles in the second half of the nineteenth century was also heightened by women's active rallying for their political and social rights in America and Europe. Centuries earlier, the artists Titian and Velázquez had painted images of a voluptuous Venus who not only looks at her reflection in a mirror but also becomes an object of the admiring artist's gaze. But in nineteenth-century photographs and advertising women began to see their image reflected in new ways. In a stereographic image of role reversal titled Women's Rights: The Rehearsal, Venus has become a woman in a flounced dress who looks at her reflection in a mirror as she rehearses, perhaps, a suffrage speech. Her husband, with sleeves rolled up and arms immersed in a washtub, looks up in wonder at his soon-to-be-enfranchised wife.
Like the Currier & Ives print and even Women's Rights, stereographic images during the bicycling craze of the 1890s suggested men's fears that women would soon abandon their household tasks and leave home. Spoofing the idea of women's newfound mobility and independence, comic stereographs presented role-reversal scenes in which formidable "New Women" rode off on their new bicycles, leaving their beleaguered husbands behind to do the family chores. Stereographs were two virtually identical photographs placed side by side on a piece of heavy card stock; this produced a three-dimensional image when seen through a special stereoscopic viewer. The comic images, like the one in Women's Rights, were often staged scenes created by photographic companies, with models posing in theatrical roles. In one of these comic scenarios spoofing women cyclists a woman dressed in plaid knickers stands with her bicycle in the living room while her husband washes clothes in a tub. "Don't get the clothes too blue!" she instructs him audaciously as she gets ready for a ride.
During the late nineteenth century female writers urged women to take solitary bicycle rides, and though American etiquette books advised proper middle-class women not to go on these rides unchaperoned lest they run into mechanical trouble or stray too far from social conventions, women did indeed go riding alone. Photographers' images of strapping women ready to ride off and leave their husbands behind suggested not only men's fears that women might become too independent but also the anxiety that women would abandon any sense of ladylike decorum and propriety.
At the end of the century, when American men and women went on unchaperoned bicycle rides in town and country, social critics fretted about opportunities for unsupervised romance. They worried, too, that women and men would take sexual liberties, a theme that occurred often in tales about technologies like the telephone and the telegraph, which offered new opportunities for courtship and flirtation.
Artists also portrayed railroad cars as places for intimacy where men and women could feel free to engage in flirtation, courtship, and kissing, though these artists were usually amused rather than horrified at the idea. The British artist Abraham Solomon's painting First Class: The Meeting ... and at First Meeting Loved (1854), depicting a young man and woman sitting in a first-class train carriage, quietly flirting in adjoining seats while the young woman's father sleeps in the corner, caused a controversy. The painting was criticized in the Art Journal and Punch for being too suggestive, and the artist appeased the critics by creating another version of his painting the following year. In The Return, the young female passenger smiles at her young male admirer, but her father, now fully awake, sits between the couple and talks to the earnest young man.
Concerns about women's flaunting social codes also appeared in nineteenth-century stories about the railroad: male observers saw trains as a place for virtuous women as well as for women who abandoned any sense of propriety. During his visit to America in 1842, Charles Dickens traveled on a railroad to Lowell, Massachusetts, and noted approvingly that American trains had separate cars for women. He observed that "any lady may travel alone from one end of the United States to the other, and be certain of the most courteous and considerate treatment everywhere." Yet Samuel Breck, in a diary of his railway travels published in America during the 1830s, complained that trains bred a loss of ladylike behavior and that women were apt to abandon their sense of decorum and gentility when they elbowed their way through crowds. In a century in which male satirists enjoyed twitting the carefully crafted facades of fastidious, fashionable women, Hugh Hughes's Pleasures of the Rail-Road lampooned unladylike behavior after an explosion, showing a woman with her skirt raised moving roughshod over the body of a fallen male passenger as she scrambles to exit the door.
Other artists portrayed women as reckless or inept, as in the Baltimore artist William G. Stewart's illustration When Woman Drives, of 1915, which shows a woman happily at the wheel, blithely unaware that her driving is terrifying her four male passengers.
Artists, advertisers, and writers also framed their images of women and machines in conventional ways, falling back on old assumptions about women as naive and cowering creatures who were baffled by the workings of both science and technology or only capable of handling simple machines. A Ranch & Lang automobile advertisement in 1910 insisted that "the most delicate woman — a 12-year-old child" could handle its machine with total ease.
Women themselves were ambivalent about their own abilities and worried that by being mechanically expert they might compromise their femininity. It was better, they sometimes felt, not to give up, or at least not to seem to give up, their reliance on men. Helen Bullitt Lowry, writing in the American magazine Motor in 1923, encouraged women to be independent drivers but also to feign helplessness if their automobiles needed repair: "We don't improve our popularity one sou by waxing efficient," she told her woman readers, adding pragmatically, "When trouble befalls you, assume an ignorance even if you haven't it. That's technique." Through mock helplessness the shrewd woman could easily receive aid from nearby men. As Lowry added, with what was probably unintended sexual suggestiveness, "A dozen male counselors have raised the lid and poked in the vitals of my engine."
These dueling images of women as competent and incompetent, shy as well as assertive about their own technical abilities, independent as well as dependent on men, often suggested the difficulty of shaking off a long history of deep-rooted social attitudes about men's and women's inherent technical abilities. Men had long been portrayed as strong and technically able, women as frail and technically incompetent, or at least unsuited to engaging in complex technical operations. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century industrial settings women were considered machine tenders, while men did the repairs. In a world of social conventions that relegated women to domestic settings, women were frequently denied training in mechanical skills, and their jobs were defined as unskilled and unmechanical. Not surprisingly, women often absorbed a conception of themselves as mechanically incompetent as part of their gender identity.
Historically, the rare woman who demonstrated and relished her special technical ability sometimes felt defensive about her mechanical skills. In her remarkable Handbook on Turning (1842), on the use of a lathe for decorative work, first published in London and reprinted in America, the anonymous author, whom scholars identify as Mrs. Gascoigne, revealed some of the tensions experienced by the unconventional nineteenth-century woman who countered cultural expectations by demonstrating her mechanical expertise.
Before World War I, women did not often use machine tools. The small number of women who did use turning lathes were often wealthy women, such as England's Lady Gertrude Crawford and Russia's Catherine the Great, who used these machine tools in the service of art to create decorative objects such as snuffboxes and vases. Mrs. Gascoigne wished to encourage other women to use the lathe to imitate beautiful designs in wood and ivory, but she felt that it was necessary to reassure them that they could be competent without losing their femininity. "Why should not our fair countrywomen participate in this amusement? Do they fear it is too masculine and laborious for a female hand?" she asked her readers. She encouraged them to try using a lathe, asking, "What occupation can be more interesting or elegant than ornamenting wood or ivory in delicate and intricate patterns."
Mrs. Gascoigne's book reveals some of the contradictions found in books written by women about machines: she draws on gender stereotypes about women's delicate touch while affirming women's special abilities and sense of self. She writes, for example, that "the taper fingers of the fair sex are far better suited than a man's heavier hand, to produce the requisite lightness and clearness of effect." Yet transcending the stereotypical image of female delicacy, the book's frontispiece includes an oval drawing labeled "The Author" showing a determined-looking Mrs. Gascoigne, who eyes the reader through her spectacles, an uncommon woman engaged in the world of machines. The dual view presented in Mrs. Gascoigne's book — invoking cultural stereotypes about women's delicacy even as she offers them encouraging words — reflects the mixed cultural signals women both imparted and received about their own technical abilities.
From the very beginnings of the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century artists often presented women as half interested, half afraid in the presence of science and technology. In the paintings of the eighteenth-century British artist Joseph Wright of Derby, men are engaged in mastering the mysteries of scientific experimentation, while women look on, fascinated yet fearful. Wright sometimes presented women as squeamish about new developments in science and technology, reflecting and reinforcing popular assumptions that they were timid about all things scientific and mechanical. In his 1768 painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (plate 5), a family witnesses a scientific demonstration in which air is pumped from a glass receiver, causing a white cockatoo to begin dying. The moonlit night is tense with risk as air is about to be reintroduced so that the bird will live. The young women present at the experiment react with stereotypical female sensitivity. Anxious about the plight of the bird, they need reassurance from a kindly gentleman.
In paintings of iron-forge scenes — a theme given a mythic cast in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European paintings of Venus and Vulcan, with Vulcan working at the forge — muscular men work, while women are often simply attractive observers. In Joseph Wright's painting The Iron Forge, of 1772, women watch warily or turn away. Reflecting Wright's own interest in science and technology, the forge is equipped with a water-powered tilt hammer, modern machinery for its day. Yet in the darkened space of the forge none of the females look with interest at the scene: the wife stands with her back turned to the heat, and one of her daughters clings to her waist, twisting away as she gazes outward.
In art, as in actuality, forge scenes were largely a masculine domain, though women did engage in nail-making. In a very rare image, a medieval French Book of Hours dating from 1450-60 includes a small painting of a woman standing before a forge and using an anvil to create nails for Jesus's cross. Before the early decades of the twentieth century the very rare woman artist who even tackled the subject of forge scenes or technology itself was considered an anomaly. In 1900, perhaps signaling a new era, the French artist Angèle Delasalle created her own painting of an iron forge.
Delasalle's work had been largely confined to conventional academic subjects — landscapes, portraits, and historical scenes — but her painting A Forge, of four workmen laboring in a smoky forge, was accepted for exhibition in the French Salon of 1900, where it was greeted with surprise. In his catalog for the exhibit, Henri Frantz wrote that in her forge painting Delasalle was a maverick in her choice of subject and style. Frantz, who clearly had gendered notions about men's and women's art, praised her for her "vigorous" work: "Mademoiselle Angèle Delasalle's work is anything but feminine," he wrote, and he commended her for seeking "new fields for her studies while so many women-painters are contented with insipidly weak and finikin subjects."
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and France women who showed an interest in science and technology were sometimes viewed skeptically by men — reflecting once common, conventional notions of women as scientific naïfs, inherently unsuited to scientific occupations and inquiry because they lacked the necessary intellectual rigor and clarity of mind. The French writer Boudier de Villemert, in L'ami des femmes (The Ladies' Friend) (1759), a book that was reprinted in English in London and America, insisted that although women could profitably study natural philosophy, they were "particularly not to meddle with the abstract sciences and knotty investigations, as such intrusions might cloud their minds." The idea that women might acquire any learning at all seems to have troubled men like Villemert, who insisted that "an increase of literati in petticoats, with their monades and scraps of Greek, is not at all to be desired."
In men's satires, women interested in science often were portrayed as either silly or sexy rather than as serious students of the natural world. Two of the most important astronomical events of the eighteenth century were the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769. Ridiculing women's scientific curiosity, the British artist Robert Sayer in his satirically titled engraving Viewing the Transit of Venus (1793) presents a voluptuous female sitting in a garden who eyes the stars through a portable telescope as a male admirer leers at her lasciviously and a sculpted satyr chortles in the shrubbery nearby.
These satires existed even though, as Londa Schiebinger has so deftly shown, scientific pursuits were accessible to wealthy women in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Though excluded from universities, these women were encouraged to study natural philosophy and were renowned for their achievements in astronomy, mathematics, and physics. Amid cultural conventions that limited women's access to equipment and universities and denied them scientific training, there were women whose intellectual curiosity and rigor enabled them to transcend these limitations.
In artists' illustrations in eighteenth-century European treatises on electricity, women appear as eager participants in electrical experiments, like the women in Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet's Essai sur l'électricité des corps (1746), who create friction by touching their hands to the spinning globe of an electrostatic generator. In England, Mary Shelley was fascinated with scientific developments and galvanic experiments. As she wrote in the introduction to the 1831 edition of her novel Frankenstein, during the summer of 1816 she, her husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron engaged in a ghost-story competition, and she listened while they discussed galvanism and the possibility of reanimating corpses, topics that may have helped shape her description, however vaguely stated, of the monster's creation in the novel.
But though there were women who were intrigued by the changing world of science and technology, women were more apt to be portrayed in the more familiar guise of mythic or allegorical figures representing science and mechanics. The print Urania Coeli (The muse Urania), engraved by Joseph Zucchi after a work by Angelica Kauffmann, presents a striking version of Urania, the muse who presides over astronomy. Wearing a wreath of laurel leaves, Urania holds dividers in her hand as she measures a constellation on an astronomical globe. A century later, the American engineering magazine Cassier's regularly featured a classical muse of the mechanical as a decorative motif.
While women were elevated as muses of science and technology, they were also ridiculed in images that pictured them not only above but also below the fray. In nineteenth-century satires women were often portrayed as charmingly regressive and resistant when it came to scientific and technological change, empty-headed creatures whose romantic temperament was maladapted to the modern age. A cartoon published in Punch in 1892, captioned "Abominations of Modern Science," spoofs a woman clinging to outmoded ways. In a wry reference to Tennyson's medieval heroine in his poem "Mariana," the cartoon depicts Mariana, with her long, flowing hair, gazing in dismay at an incandescent light hanging overhead — a woman pitifully clinging to the past in the face of modern technologies. This mock Mariana returns to the moated grange and "finds to her sorrow, that her room is warmed by hot water pipes and lighted by electricity."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Women and the Machine by Julie Wosk. Copyright © 2001 by Julie Wosk. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Framing Images of Women and Machines
2 Wired for Fashion: Images of Bustles, Corsets, and Crinolines in the Mechanical Age
3 The Electric Eve
4 Women and the Bicycle
5 Women and the Automobile
6 Women and Aviation
7 Women in Wartime: From Rosie the Riveter to Rosie the Housewife
Coda: The Electric Eve and Late-Twentieth-Century-Art
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
An engaging study of the ways women and machines have been represented in art, photography, advertising, and literature.
— Arwen Palmer Mohun, University of Delaware
An engaging study of the ways women and machines have been represented in art, photography, advertising, and literature.—Arwen Palmer Mohun, University of Delaware