Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945 (review)

Feminists have long argued that the culture of technology is profoundly gendered. Men’s monopoly of technology remains a key source of their power and is integral to the constitution of male gender identity. The engineering profession has been pivotal to this gendering process, continuing even now to exclude and marginalize women despite decades of campaigning for equal access. In this pioneering and fascinating cultural history, Ruth Oldenziel demonstrates precisely how technology was made masculine and how technological change and gender relations have shaped each other. The term “technology” acquired its current meaning relatively recently, and engineers’ appropriation of it is a recent development as well. It was only after a century-long contest that engineers came to be seen as the sole bearers of technology. During and through this process the word took on its modern meaning. Whereas the earlier concept of the useful arts had included needlework as well as metalwork, spinning as well as mining, by the 1930s this had been supplanted by the idea of technology as applied science. Oldenziel draws on an impressive range of sources, from engineering journals to autobiographies and modernist art, to trace how machines became the markers of technology and the measure of men. Capturing the complex interweaving of intellectual constructs and material practices, her book provides an exemplary study of the relationship between technology and culture. In a beautifully written narrative, Oldenziel reveals the presence of women throughout the history of engineering. Over the course of the nineteenth century, women activists targeted an array of male institutions that increasingly represented technology as a male preserve. An intriguing example was the Woman’s Pavilion set up at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 to demonstrate women’s skills and display their prod-