Women are only recently appearing as actors in global histories of technology, yet they have long been inventors and creative innovators in a wide range of fields, from domestic textile production and technologies for household maintenance to industrial manufacture. In this tutorial we will explore the global history of technology with women at the center. Initially, scholars located women in relation to specifically gendered objects such as reproductive technologies like the birth control pill and tools for "women's work" such as the washing machine. Yet, women have also made "masculine" technological work such as engineering and computer programming their own. Few individual women are credited for their inventions, and one of our challenges will be to locate women's creative production of technological tools and processes in diverse societies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. What constitutes women's technology, even women's work, is an unstable category that we will unpack in this class. Moving beyond the domestic space and the family, women's technological work contended with new and emerging state projects related to the economy and politics. Women found their technological identities entangled with discourses of state building and increasingly, after the end of the Cold War, with narratives about international development. These histories of the state overlapped with the domestic, and, over the course of the semester, we will engage with women's global technological stories in relation to big questions about the family, sexuality, and gender and labor. In turn, these same histories will allow us to unpack the ways in which women have engaged with state and international discourses on the economy and development. |