Soft technology empirically prove and key to the liberation of women

Women's past contributions to technology have been largely ignored until recently (see especially Trescott, 1979; Stanley, 1979). In seeking to redress the balance and reveal women and inventions hidden from history, feminist scholarship can do what is being done in other fields, such as in history generally, in the social and natural sciences, in the arts and literature. 7 But as in the fields undergoing transformation through feminist scholarship, a feminist perspective on technological history shall do more than fill in another piece of women's missing past. For a feminist perspective asks why. Why have women's contributions to technology been obscured? Recent scholarship (especially Tanner and Zihlman, 1976; Zihtman, 1978) indicates that early tools for gathering, preparing food, caring for children were devised by women, and that living patterns and social organization in which such toolinvention and use took place were female-centered. Why, then, has there been a consistent bias in the literature to value tools for hunting and combat over those for field and hearth, and to assign to men the dominant role in establishing modes of living and social organization? We must also consider changes over time. Has there been any pattern to women's inventions? What is significant about reinterpreting the effects of technology on women's labor, both industrial and domestic (see Trescott, 1979; Rothschild, 1981; Hacker, 1979)? How has women's role in technological development correlated with changes in living patterns, modes of production, and a society's dominant cultural values (see al-Hibri, 1981)? Questions inevitably emerge about what is significant technology, s In what ways does the gender dimension affect how technology has been defined and what kinds of technology have been produced and used? Has there been a female technology, and, if so, has it been feminist as well? Much the same approach can be taken in examining present-day societies developmentally and culturally different from our own. Women's traditional association with crafts can be a particularly fruitful area (Heresies, 1978). Are such crafts industrial arts, or tourist baubles? Why? The effects of modernization need also to be further explored (Boserup, 1970; Siens, 1977; Youssef, 1974). Turning to the current feminist movement, we find ideas and models for an alternative technological future in both research and experience. This is so because of contemporary feminism's commitment to sharing and egalitarian values, and to the personal as political. Thus feminists seek to break down the false separation between theory and practice, to move back and forth between the worlds of ideas and experience, and never to lose sight of the human dimension. Modern technological society, regardless of econo-political ideology, is almost exclusively controlled by men and male values that ignore or reject such feminist concerns. Therefore, we must look for a feminist perspective on technology in these very strengths of the feminist movement. We can seek ideas and models for an alternative technological future in such areas of feminist concern as home and family, medicine and health care, feminist organizations, education, the world of work, the ecology movement. What are the dimensions of such an inquiry? Focus on home and family has been important, not only because it is women's traditional sphere, but also because it--particularly the modern nuclear family--has been seen as the root of women's oppression. Feminist analysis and experimentation have increasingly looked to alternative ways of organizing sexual relationships, reproduction, and childrearing. In the areas of sex and reproduction, we have, for example, Firestone's (1970) proposals to de-biologize women by freeing them completely, through technology, from childbearing-- including creating humans artificially and making it possible for men to bear children. The freer sexuality and alternative households she proposes then become technically possible. Social scientists such as Bernard (1973, 1974), Keller (1971), Binstock (1972), Francoeur (1972), and Giele (1978) have predicted less radical changes in family structure and 8 Personal communication with Autumn Stanley, December 1979. A Feminist Perspective on Technology and the Future 69 motherhood. These include the acceptance of a variety of marriage patterns and of single status--including single motherhood--and the future decline of the mother role as other roles become available to women (see also Tripp, 1974). Experiments in new family arrangements had roots as well in the 1960s counterculture. Sociologist Patrick Conover views the alternate culture as resting on feminine values. He writes, '... I am prone to simplify the cultural issue by arguing that the creators of alternate culture have rejected the values of their fathers and "discovered" the values of their mothers recast in different words so as not to affront their male egos' (Conover, 1973; p. 114). That he assumes the creators of the alternate culture are male, while recognizing the importance of female values and the psycho-social difficulties for males to adopt those values, again illustrates the tenacity of the male-supremacist model. The persistence of such thinking also helps to explain why such experiments, although professedly feminist in their goals, often remained sexist in practice. All-female communities, both lesbian and not, have given us a still further range of alternative living patterns. The idea of such communities, in both fact and imagination, is increasingly studied and reported on (see, for example, Quest, 1978; Country Women; Auerbach, 1978; Gilman, 1979). A feminist perspective on sexual relationships, childbearing, and childrearing can have explicit as well as implicit effects for technology. Whether it be technologies of birth control and reproduction, or social invention arising from theories and experiments in family living patterns, organizing human knowledge in these areas for the future needs to be done in light of the ideals of the half of the human race intimately involved in these technologies, but traditionally as receiver or victim---not as shaper. Men, and the male-supremacist model, continue to control the research priorities in such areas as population control, reproduction, and family law (Gordon, 1977; Rose and Hanmer, 1976; Rothschild, 1981). Ethical concerns over genetic engineering need to reflect an even stronger feminist perspective. All areas of science, especially medicine, have been gaining new feminist attention. A critical eye is cast on the masculine nature of science and the scientific world, and projections of what a feminist science would be like are beginning to emerge (lmpact of Science on Society, 1975; Hubbard, et al., 1979; Harding, 1979; Keller, 1980; Signs, 1978; Reed, 1978; Haraway, 1978). Demonstrating how women become objects, and even victims, of medical research, microbiologist Rita Arditti outlines what a feminist perspective in science and medicine would mean. 'It [a feminist perspective] would involve the conversion from an exploitative value-free technology to a commitment to a humane technology: to preventive medicine~ fair distribution of material goods and educational opportunities .... Scientific research that would finally take the interests of women into consideration will only be developed and carried out in a life-oriented society in which sexism does not exist anymore and in which feminist priorities are the priorities of the whole culture' (Arditti, 1974; p. 31).