Women and the Machine

Writing from the perspective of an art historian (and a former public relations person for "Playboy"), Julie Wosk examines the role of machines in helping women reconfigure and transform their lives. In this text, she takes her readers through a gallery of fiction and high and low art which depicts women in their association with machines. From sitting at the spinning wheel to typing at the typewriter, to driving automobiles, piloting airplanes, pounding rivets, and then working on the computer, Wosk tells the story of women celebrating their new liberties and growing competency but, along the way, gives interesting examples of ambivalence, male-engendered sexual fantasy, and fears of displacement. With more than 150 images, the volume presents how women and machines have appeared in (mostly male-created) art, photography, advertising and literature in America and Western Europe over the past 200 years. The book also explores the work women artists and writers have fashioned to represent their own images of machines. In dramatically contrasting views, the images Wosk has collected portray women as timid and fearful creatures, baffled by the workings of science and technology, and yet fully capable of machine mastery and control - and of making machines beguiling as products. The work illuminates popular gender stereotypes that have haunted women throughout history while underscoring the ambivalent advances women have achieved in the supposedly male world of machines.