His and Hers: Gender, Consumption, and Technology (review)

Cultural notions of what is appropriate for men and women influence production and consumption. Some goods and technologies are seen as His, others as Hers: thus, for example, domestic appliances are typically assigned to women, power tools typically to men. Scholars have relied for a long time on the concept of separate spheres reflecting clearly drawn boundaries between male and female, work and home, private and public. This concept has recently come under scrutiny. Historians of technology such as Nina Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, and Arwen Mohun argued in a special issue of Technology and Culture (“Gender Analysis and the History of Technology,” January 1997) that the rigid dichotomies should be dissolved. The historical relationship between technology, consumption, and gender offers ample evidence of the shortcomings of the separate spheres model. But historians of technology have only recently begun to examine the intersection between these three categories. One of the principal aims of His and Hers is to contribute to this discussion by giving it a theoretical framework augmented by detailed case studies. The book seeks not only to scrutinize the rigid dichotomies of the separate spheres, but to “explore the history of consumption by synthesizing discrete historical literature on consumer culture, gender, and the history of technology” (p. 1).

Steven Lubar contrasts the old research agenda with this new approach in an instructive historiographic and thematic overview. Lubar summarizes the ways in which scholars have linked gender to the production and consumption of goods and services since the mid-nineteenth century. The history of consumption has been assigned to women, and the history of production has been assigned to men. By looking at both spheres simultaneously, however, one can see that the lines are harder to draw than they at first seem to be. According to Lubar, the historians’ aim should be “to revisit the history of production and consumption with gender as the analytic tool” (p. 20).

While the book’s individual chapters cover a wide range of topics and historical periods, they all share the theoretical assumptions outlined in the introduction and Lubar’s article. These can be summarized by four primary themes. First, all the contributors emphasize the interdependency of production and consumption. The case studies demonstrate that the spheres intersect and influence each other. Gail Cooper, for example, addresses the “complex story about the links between production and consumption” in the candy industry from 1890 to 1930, presenting this narrative as an example of the symbiotic relationship between mass production and mass consumption. Regina Lee Blaszczyk shows how glasswork managers led their firms “through the quagmire of the gendered marketplace by straddling the spheres of production and consumption” (p. 141).

Second, many chapters focus on what Ruth Schwartz Cowan called the “consumption junction,” that is, the boundary between production and consumption at which technologies are diffused. Glasswork managers, for example, relied on the input of consumer intermediaries such as product designers, advertising executives, retailers, and home economists, as Blaszczyk shows in her essay. James C. Williams examines the agents of diffusion in the electric power industry by tracing the techniques used in selling domestic appliances. After failing to identify women as the target group at first, the electric industry began to include women in its marketing efforts. In this case, women’s committees helped to professionalize the role of women within industry and to involve them by propagating the electric message to all women. The influence of consumers or mediators varied considerably, however. Cooper describes how female candy consumers used their economic power to improve women’s working conditions. On the other hand, however, as Joy Parr shows, the Consumers League in postwar Canada abandoned its attempt to specify the form of household equipment before it was manufactured.

Third, all the contributors make use of gender as an analytic tool. One can distinguish various ways that gender has influenced the development of technology. Gender has...