Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (review)

It is the subtitle of Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age that best describes its contents. In this book, Julie Wosk enthusiastically gathers a vast image base of vintage prints, photographs, advertisements, posters, and paintings that show women using, holding, ogling, or mystified by some form of machinery. To give order to this universe of images, she organizes the middle chapters around specific technologies: women and the bicycle; women and the automobile; women and aviation. These are the most coherent chapters, in that they follow each specific invention's early history and subsequent chronology and incorporate earlier feminist scholarship on each of these vehicles. Wosk also makes excellent use of primary materials, such as manuals and magazine articles instructing women how to approach and behave toward a new kind of machinery.

The chapters that bookend Women and the Machine are built more loosely around general categories derived from other technologies and historical circumstances. The opening chapters include "Wired for Fashion," which looks at representations of the "technology" of the female undergarment, and "The Electric Eve," about female allegories of electricity and woman using electrical products. At the end of the study, "Women in Wartime" chronicles images of women in factories and industry and is followed by a brief coda, "The Electronic Eve," which looks at digital recalibrations of the female body.

Not only is Wosk's chapter organization image-driven but so, too, is her text. Her analyses are strongest when she weaves the images into a historical narrative that positions women's roles and public perceptions of them within the development of the technology under scrutiny. They are at their weakest when the texts are paragraph-by-paragraph descriptions of sequences of images—including discussions of pictures that are neither reproduced in the book nor noted as to where the reader can find them. One feels in these instances the presence of the publisher clamping down on the total number of images and the text never having been reworked or edited accordingly. Frustratingly, the dozens of black-and-white images are not numbered, nor is there the customary list of illustrations and their sources. But this typifies the structure of this book, in which almost no image is discussed or referred to beyond its first mention when the picture is nearby.

In that the illustrations are all public-sphere images—not private snapshots but photographs, illustrations, and paintings created by professional image makers and widely circulated—they often transparently display broader cultural attitudes toward their subjects. That is what attracts Wosk, who collected these images for what they can tell us about cultural responses to women mastering particular machines or technologies. She gives each and every image a read, if only for a sentence or two. Personally, I found this approach episodic and frustrating. So tied is Wosk to reading individual images as if they were singular artifacts about a particular technology that she does not do the more difficult work of reading and categorizing them across chapters and discourses. This results in a book that lacks any overarching cultural narrative but offers instead lots of mininarratives, each based on one of her image sets. So representations of women and cars have no crossovers or intersections with those of women and airplanes, or women and sewing machines. Furthermore, because Wosk is determined to find contradiction, ambivalence, paradox, and equivocation (these are her favorite words) in the individual images, there is rarely a cultural depiction that does not represent its own contradiction. One consequence of this Derridian approach is that it never becomes clear to the reader whether some technologies were perceived by Americans as more woman-friendly than others, or whether there were general constraints women had to face no matter what the individual technology or machine, or...