So this post is mainly cheating. Because I did the reading and wrote the summary more than a year ago. But I have updated it a bit. And I re-read the article.

Outline of readings:

We* can illuminate possible new research directions and gain new insight by paying attention to gender in the history of technology. Gender assumptions may shape technology, but they also shape how we write the history of technology.

1. We have accepted gendered differences without substantiation.
- 19th century idea of “separate spheres”: women as nurturers, emotional, passive, pure, pious; men as rational, aggressive, hard-hearted. Should not only question the ideology, but also ask how that ideology affected the actual behavior of men and women.

2. In studying the history of technology, we have tended to study women as women and men as people. This leads to us having an incomplete history of gender and technology. To study the history of gender and technology we must study both the masculine and the feminine.
- Keep in mind that source materials may not give a completely balanced picture.
- Men and women frequently worked in different locations so in studying how a technology or industry developed you are likely to look at only men or only women instead of comparing both genders.

3. We have tended to view women as passive - reacting to technology, and men as active -shaping it.
- Research has asked “How has technological change affected women?” vs. “How has society shaped technology?” **
- The home and other 'feminine' domains (consumption, nurturance, piety) did shape technology. For example, the type of work that most girls were taught while growing up gave women the skills to be “unskilled workers” in paper mills (and others, I'm sure, but that is what McGaw studied). The ready availability of such labor shaped what types of work could be mechanized and how it was mechanized.

4. Views of what it meant to be "masculine" affected what and how technology developed too.
- For example, machines for factories were not necessarily designed to be particularly safe, probably/possibly because of gender ideology of the time.


* I'm using 'we' here as shorthand for “researchers and scholars in the history of technology.” Not that I consider myself either one of those, but the author is and it was easier to use her terminology.

** I'm going to have to disagree here. Not just because I read Ruth Schwartz Cowan's writings way back when, but also because in all of my undergraduate studies we never limited ourselves to studying how society shaped technology. In fact, the tension between technological determinism (TD) and the social construction of technology (SCOT) was one of the main points of STS 101 and it remained a theme through the entire curriculum. People who write in support of TD (to some degree or another) – Marx, Neil Postman, Langdon Winner, Marshall McLuhan. SCOT advocates – Bruno Latour, Trevor Pinch, Thomas Hughes. Supporter of SCES and IDUAR (which sort of combines the two) – my advisor, Robert McGinn. This discussion can take us off onto a wild tangent, but there you have it. (This could be a difference between looking at the History and Philosophy of Science / History of Technology literature and the Science, Technology and Society / Science and Technology Studies literature. I don't know. I was just confused at her argument.)