Current “hard technology” perpetuates masculine values that lead to inevitable destruction---the alternative creates a “soft technology” society that ends exploitive tech

Mention technology and what word images spring to mind? Science, invention, machines. Skill, ingenuity: homo faber. But femina fabera? 1 Hardly. Trapped for most of her history by biology into the private sphere of home, family, and locality, and barred from the necessary training and education especially scientific and mathematic (Osen, 1974~; Mozans, 1975)--woman has been kept outside the mainstream of recorded technological development. Historically, she has been seen as contributing little or nothing to technology. At most, woman has been viewed as being acted upon by technological change--as in accounts of how the industrial revolution brought women out of the home and into the paid workforce (Baker, 1964)--or else as user of technology devised by others, e.g. the 'happy housewife' and her so-called labor-saving devices. Only recently has feminist scholarship begun to shatter the prevailing myths about the effects of technology on women's lives. New studies of the seventies have begun to show the ways women have contributed to methods of farming and industry, to social invention, to forms of political and social organization [footnotes omitted] What is the significance of a 'feminist perspective' for technology? What is such a perspective, and what can it mean for the future? A feminist perspective means, above all, a certain set of values. Sexist society, in systematically subordinating more than one-half of its population, is both exploitative and anti-humanistic. Feminism, in seeking to have women realize themselves as independent, autonomous human beings, must necessarily reject social systems and their ideologies that exploit and dominate. Feminism means creating a society in which a set of values can be brought to prevail that can end such systems of dominance. At the broadest level, then, a feminist perspective is humanistic, life-oriented, nonexploitative. Taking a feminist perspective toward technology serves two important functions. It enables us to gain greater insight into the values and assumptions which underlie our technology's creation and use. 4 Second, a feminist perspective can direct us toward a humanistic technology for the future. The assumption that our technology is ~value-free' and that values enter only with its use has been refuted on other than strictly feminist grounds (Marcuse, 1964; Ellul, 1964; Ferkiss, 1969; McDermott, 1969; Leiss, 1974; Muller, 1970; Noble, 1977). A feminist perspective strengthens the case. If we describe technology as knowledge organized and systematized for productive purposes, fulfilling the goals and ideals of a particular culture (Gendron, 1977; Pacey, 1976; Firestone, 1970), we begin to see how the creation of technology, not just its use, grows out of and cannot be separated from a mindset which in turn reflects a set of values. As Kuhn (1970) has clearly demonstrated, the development of scientific knowledge--which forms the building blocks for most of our modem technology--is in itself subject to prevailing societal norms and values. Therefore, how and for what productive purposes that knowledge shall be shaped is not a random choice, but subject to what the scientific, technological, and political community will support. Since the institutional forces of corporate wealth, of the military, university, and political establishments combine today to set the priorities for technological development, as well as use, we are guaranteed that ideals reflecting the values of these powerful institutional forces shall be perpetuated in our technology. 5 These ideals coalesce into the technological ideal, that of 'rational efficiency'--Ellul's (1964) 'technique'. And as Ferldss (1974) compellingly shows, when that ideal is carried forth under the impetus of a liberal political economy, technology in the name of progress exploits all it touches: human beings, nature, the universe. It is anti-humanistic, anti-ecological. It wastes, it conquers, it destroys. Our Western concept of technology--as all-powerful and all-conquering--is distinctively and distinctly male. With the exception of the physio-genital, gender attributes, like technology, are cultural products. ~ As such, they reflect what is valued in a society. Being aggressive, independent, strong, objective, rational, analytical, unemotional, is considered not only male, but superior. Such qualities make fortunes and build empires. Being passive, dependent, weak, subjective, intuitive, empathic, emotional, may be revered in song and story, but at best such 'female' qualities merely support; they do not conquer or win. So-called male attributes are the valued attributes. And on such valuing rides power. Male values rule in our society. To state, then, that our technology is male is to show how powerful a hold the values of conquest and dominance have on our technological perspective, rooted as they are in a belief 4 A Feminist Perspective on Technology and the Future 67 in the rightness and supremacy of the male worldview (Reuther, 1975; al-Hibri, 1980; Gray, 1979; Ruth, 1978). Those who are in positions of power (who are mostly men), and who thus control the course of technological development, have had bred into them since birth--and continuously reinforced by societal institutions--that the male and the male way of doing things are superior. We are locked into an anti-ecological, anti-humanistic, exploitative technology not solely because of political, economic, scientific, and philosophical beliefs, but because such beliefs and the systems they underpin are powerfully supported by the dominant system of male values. What would happen if these values were shifted? What would happen if our technology became nurturant, life-supporting, sensitive, empathic, intuitive? Science writer Robin Clarke (as quoted in Milton, 1974) describes our 'hard technology society' as alienated, destructive, fragmented, centralized, elitist. By contrast, his 'soft' technology community would be integrated with life, culture, and nature, and would be decentralized, egalitarian, and democratic (Milton, 1974; p. 268). Ferkiss (1969) looks toward a technology and a society which is holistic, natural, and immanent. Bookchin (1971) writes of a 'liberatory technology'; there are the terms alternative, passive, and appropriate technology (Schumacher, 1973; Dickson, 1975); we have Illich's (1973) 'convivial' tools. The hard technology society correlates with values and attributes called male, while the soft technology and holistic community is compatible with so-called female attributes and feminist values. A feminist perspective on technology means seeking to discover and further define feminist values and finding ways to implement them in our technology. It means attempting to project an alternative set of technological values, and to discover ideas and models for a future humanistic, 'soft technology' society. Women's role in technological development has been neglected partially because homo faber has been seen literally by our historians as male. 7 Man does, woman is: the latter does not invent, innovate. But her role has also been neglected because underlying these accounts is the Western cultural perspective that homofaber's purpose in inventing tools is to make bigger, better, more efficient tools each time. Homo faber's ideal is progress. We can read about those technologies which appear to contribute to the 'advance' or 'progress' of productive processes, but learn little of those organizational processes or forms that may have pursued other social, economic, political, or cultural ideals, or of those societies in which Western-styled progress is not the ideal. A feminist perspective that seeks to find women's role in technological development would not be culture- or ideology-bound in this way. In other words, the feminist perspective is freer to explore alternative ideals, to establish new categories and frameworks for technology and its development. How do we find such categories and frameworks? The sources of ideas and models for a feminist 'soft technology' future are threefold. First, we need to uncover women's role in technological development in the past, and also in present societies culturally and developmentally different from our own. Second, we must look to the theory and experience of the current feminist movement. And third, we must look at feminist projections for the future.