Download or read book More Work For Mother written by Ruth Schwartz Cowan and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 1985-03-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic work of women's history (winner of the 1984 Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology), Ruth Schwartz Cowan shows how and why modern women devote as much time to housework as did their colonial sisters. In lively and provocative prose, Cowan explains how the modern conveniences—washing machines, white flour, vacuums, commercial cotton—seemed at first to offer working-class women middle-class standards of comfort. Over time, however, it became clear that these gadgets and gizmos mainly replaced work previously conducted by men, children, and servants. Instead of living lives of leisure, middle-class women found themselves struggling to keep up with ever higher standards of cleanliness.
Download or read book More Work For Mother written by Ruth Schwartz Cowan and published by New York : Basic Books. This book was released on 1983-11 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book has a dual focus. As its title is meant to suggest, it is a history not just of housework but also of the tools with which that work is done: household technology. Human beings are tool-using animals; indeed, some anthropologists believe that, along with speech,, the ability to use and to refine our tools is precisely what sets us apart from other species of primates.
Download or read book More Work for Mother written by Ruth Schwartz Cowan and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Good High School written by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and published by New York : Basic Books. This book was released on 1983-11-14 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides in-depth portraits of six exemplary American high schools, revealing many different elements that create a climate of excellence while describing high school life today.
Download or read book More Work for Mother The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave written by Ruth Schwartz Cowan and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2023-02-25 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surrounded by mechanical appliances and electronic gadgets, today’s woman devotes as much time to housework as a woman living in the early decades of the 20th century. This book explains why. “This work won the 1984 Dexter Prize of the Society for the History of Technology. It is a history of housework and household technology from the 17th century to the present. Ruth Schwartz Cowan contends that households were not industrialized the way other workplaces were in the 19th century and that women’s work was industrialized incompletely or differently from men’s. Despite technological advances, housework thus remains a full-time task. Critics praised the book’s clarity and insights.” — The New York Times “More Work for Mother is a major contribution to the social history of technology and a book that attempts feats few scholars undertake... it is lucid, engaging, and provocative... On balance, More Work for Mother is a remarkable book. It makes some important aspects of the history of technology accessible to a popular audience; provides a stimulating, scholarly overview of domestic technology for courses in the history of women, labor, or technology; and seems destined to set the next decade’s research agenda for scholarship on housework and household technology.” — Isis “[A] perceptive contribution to the social history of technology.” — The Business History Review “More Work for Mother is an engaging and thought-provoking general history of household technology in America from colonial times to the present... All students of the subject will greatly benefit by the framework [Cowan] has constructed and the stimulating ideas she has put forward.” — Journal of Social History “The strength of Cowan’s work is her consistent ability to demonstrate how tools have shaped human behavior... Cowan’s book is knowledgeable, deft, and stimulating.” — The American Historical Review “Ruth Cowan’s knowledgeable, witty, and concise survey of three hundred years of household work — and her original interpretation of the industrialization of the household — will open the eyes and provoke the thoughts of historians and general readers alike.” — Nancy Cott, Yale University “It is written with eloquence and fluency revealing a subtlety of mind and an eye for the neglected obvious which I much admire.” — Daniel J. Boorstin, The Librarian of Congress “So interesting and so well written that you scarcely realize how much you are learning.” — Jessie Bernard, author, The Female World
Download or read book Working Knowledge written by Douglas A. Harper and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1987-07-27 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A number of years ago, Douglas Harper moved to northern New York to teach in a small college. Upon his arrival there his department chairman noted his eight-year-old Saab and said, "You'll be meeting Willie." Haper spent the next years establishing not only a working relationship but a friendship with Willie. In Working Knowledge, he introduces us to Willie, a mechanic and jack-of-all-trades. With this engaging and insightful profile—part biography, part ethnography, and part photo essay—Harper documents what Willie does and how he does it. Harper's dignified portrait captures a disappearing feature of modern life—the essential human factor in the world of work.
Download or read book Recoding Gender written by Janet Abbate and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold history of women and computing: how pioneering women succeeded in a field shaped by gender biases. Today, women earn a relatively low percentage of computer science degrees and hold proportionately few technical computing jobs. Meanwhile, the stereotype of the male “computer geek” seems to be everywhere in popular culture. Few people know that women were a significant presence in the early decades of computing in both the United States and Britain. Indeed, programming in postwar years was considered woman's work (perhaps in contrast to the more manly task of building the computers themselves). In Recoding Gender, Janet Abbate explores the untold history of women in computer science and programming from the Second World War to the late twentieth century. Demonstrating how gender has shaped the culture of computing, she offers a valuable historical perspective on today's concerns over women's underrepresentation in the field. Abbate describes the experiences of women who worked with the earliest electronic digital computers: Colossus, the wartime codebreaking computer at Bletchley Park outside London, and the American ENIAC, developed to calculate ballistics. She examines postwar methods for recruiting programmers, and the 1960s redefinition of programming as the more masculine “software engineering.” She describes the social and business innovations of two early software entrepreneurs, Elsie Shutt and Stephanie Shirley; and she examines the career paths of women in academic computer science. Abbate's account of the bold and creative strategies of women who loved computing work, excelled at it, and forged successful careers will provide inspiration for those working to change gendered computing culture.
Download or read book Never Done written by Susan Strasser and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-11 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally back in print, with a new Preface by the author, this lively, authoritative, and pathbreaking study considers the history of material advances and domestic service, the "women's separate sphere," and the respective influences of advertising, home economics, and women's entry into the workforce. Never Done begins by describing the household chores of nineteenth-century America: cooking at fireplaces and on cast-iron stoves, laundry done with boilers and flatirons, endless water-hauling and fire-tending, and so on. Strasser goes on to explain and explore how industrialization transformed the nature of women's work. Easing some tasks and eliminating others, new commercial processes inexorably altered women's daily lives and relationships—with each other and with those they served.
Download or read book American Technological Sublime written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996-02-28 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. Technology has long played a central role in the formation of Americans' sense of selfhood. From the first canal systems through the moon landing, Americans have, for better or worse, derived unity from the common feeling of awe inspired by large-scale applications of technological prowess. American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. American Technological Sublime is a study of the politics of perception in industrial society. Arranged chronologically, it suggests that the sublime itself has a history - that sublime experiences are emotional configurations that emerge from new social and technological conditions, and that each new configuration to some extent undermines and displaces the older versions. After giving a short history of the sublime as an aesthetic category, Nye describes the reemergence and democratization of the concept in the early nineteenth century as an expression of the American sense of specialness. What has filled the American public with wonder, awe, even terror? David Nye selects the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, Eads Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, the major international expositions, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, the Empire State Building, and Boulder Dam. He then looks at the atom bomb tests and the Apollo mission as examples of the increasing ambivalence of the technological sublime in the postwar world. The festivities surrounding the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 become a touchstone reflecting the transformation of the American experience of the sublime over two centuries. Nye concludes with a vision of the modern-day "consumer sublime" as manifested in the fantasy world of Las Vegas.
Download or read book Engineering the Revolution written by Ken Alder and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engineering the Revolution documents the forging of a new relationship between technology and politics in Revolutionary France, and the inauguration of a distinctively modern form of the “technological life.” Here, Ken Alder rewrites the history of the eighteenth century as the total history of one particular artifact—the gun—by offering a novel and historical account of how material artifacts emerge as the outcome of political struggle. By expanding the “political” to include conflict over material objects, this volume rethinks the nature of engineering rationality, the origins of mass production, the rise of meritocracy, and our interpretation of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
Download or read book America Calling written by Claude S. Fischer and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation 'In his study of the telephone in American society, Fishcer confronts the most significant, but also the most difficult, question we can ask about a new technology--what differences did it make in the lives of its users?'Roland Marchand
Download or read book Reporting Elections written by Stephen Cushion and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-03-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How elections are reported has important implications for the health of democracy and informed citizenship. But, how informative are the news media during campaigns? What kind of logic do they follow? How well do they serve citizens?e Based on original research as well as the most comprehensive assessment of election studies to date, Cushion and Thomas examine how campaigns are reported in many advanced Western democracies. In doing so, they engage with debates about the mediatization of politics, media systems, information environments, media ownership, regulation, political news, horserace journalism, objectivity, impartiality, agenda-setting, and the relationship between media and democracy more generally. Focusing on the most recent US and UK election campaigns, they consider how the logic of election coverage could be rethought in ways that better serve the democratic needs of citizens. Above all, they argue that election reporting should be driven by a public logic, where the agenda of voters takes centre stage in the campaign and the policies of respective political parties receive more airtime and independent scrutiny. The book is essential reading for scholars and students in political communication and journalism studies, political science, media and communication studies.
Download or read book Just a Housewife written by Glenna Matthews and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1989-05-11 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Housewives constitute a large section of the population, yet they have received very little attention, let alone respect. Glenna Matthews, who herself spent many years as "just a housewife" before becoming a scholar of American history, sets out to redress this imbalance. While the male world of work has always received the most respect, Matthews maintains that widespread reverence for the home prevailed in the nineteenth century. The early stages of industrialization made possible a strong tradition of cooking, baking, and sewing that gave women great satisfaction and a place in the world. Viewed as the center of republican virtue, the home also played an important religious role. Examining novels, letters, popular magazines, and cookbooks, Matthews seeks to depict what women had and what they have lost in modern times. She argues that the culture of professionalism in the late nineteenth century and the culture of consumption that came to fruition in the 1920s combined to kill off the "cult of domesticity." This important, challenging book sheds new light on a central aspect of human experience: the essential task of providing a society's nurture and daily maintenance.
Download or read book Societal Impact of Spaceflight written by Steven J. Dick and published by U. S. National Aeronautics & Space Administration. This book was released on 2007 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the dawn of spaceflight, advocates of a robust space effort have argued that human activity beyond Earth makes a significant difference in everyday life. Assertions abound about the "impact" of spaceflight on society and its relationship to the larger contours of human existence. Fifty years after the Space Age began, it is time to examine the effects of spaceflight on society in a historically rigorous way. Has the Space Age indeed had a significant effect on society? If so, what are those influences? What do we mean by an "impact" on society? And what parts of society? Conversely, has society had any effect on spaceflight? What would be different had there been no Space Age? The purpose of this volume is to examine these and related questions through scholarly research, making use especially of the tools of the historian and the broader social sciences and humanities. Herein a stellar array of scholars does just that, and arrives at sometimes surprising conclusions.
Download or read book Wireless World written by Barry Brown and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the massive growth of mobile technologies, very little research has been done on how these technologies influence human interaction. Most of the published work in this area focuses on technological aspects and not on the social implications the technology is having on society. This book aims to fill this gap by providing an overview of these issues. It identifies the major trends, discusses the main claims made about the mobile age, and looks at issues which affect design, usability and evaluation. This unique look at the mobile age provides many interesting and important insights and will appeal to anyone designing, testing, or studying mobile devices.
Download or read book Inside the Smart Home written by Richard Harper and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2003-08-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using clear and accessible language this book examines the growing field of ‘smart technology’ for the home. The author first introduces the field before exploring the various background issues, including how the home differs from other environments. He then shows how these background issues affect the design and usability of these technologies. A detailed case study looks at the use of handheld and wearable digital technology in sheltered housing. The last section examines what it is like to live in a smart home and why they have so far failed to reach the levels of success originally predicted. Invaluable reading for anybody interested in designing smart technologies for the home.
Download or read book Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives written by Pnina G. Abir-Am and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These pioneering studies of women in science pay special attention to the mutual impact of family life and scientific career. The contributors address five key themes: historical changes in such concepts as scientific career, profession, patronage, and family; differences in "gender image" associated with various branches of science; consequences of national differences and emigration; opportunities for scientific work opened or closed by marriage; and levels of women's awareness about the role of gender in science. An international group of historians of science discuss a wide range of European and American women scientists--from early nineteenth-century English botanists to Marie Curie to the twentieth-century theoretical biologist, Dorothy Wrinch.
