Gender and Technology in the Making

by Cynthia Cockburn, Susan Ormrod

This innovative book demonstrates the making of gender and technology as comparable social processes, one helping shape the other. The authors take as an example the microwave oven, a recent innovation in domestic technology that neatly encapsulates the technology//gender relation. In the microwave, masculine engineering encounters an age old woman′s cooking. The authors show how the microwave begins as a state-of-the-art masculine technology, is translated in the retail trade into a `family′ commodity, one of a range of domestic white goods, and eventually settles into the kitchen alongside other humble feminine appliances; unlike the old cooker, however, the microwave retains just a whiff of aftershave. The au

200 pages, Paperback

First published December 7, 1993