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- To say that technology is male comes as no surprise, but the claim that its history is a short one strikes a new note. Ruth Oldenziel maps the historical process through which men laid claims to technology as their exclusive terrain. She also explores how women contested this ascendancy of the male discourse and engineered alternative plots. From the moral gymnasium of the shop floor to the staging grounds of World's Fairs, engineers, inventors, social scientists, activists, and novelists emplotted and questioned technology as our modern male myth. Oldenziel recounts the history of technology - both as intellectual construct and material practice - by analyzjng these struggles. Drawing on a broad range of sources, she explains why male machines rather than female fabrics have become the modern markers of technology. She shows how technology developed as a narrative production of modern manliness, allowing women little room for negotiation.

- This is a pioneering cultural study of the relations between gender and technology. Why do we think of engineers as stereotypically male and of technology as part of the masculine realm? Ruth Oldenziel has cleverly utilized many kinds of sources - including an astonishing amount of imformation about American women engineers - and has applied insights from cultural and.femjnist studies in order to create this fascinating answer to those two questions.

Ruth Schwartz Cowan, author of More Work for Mother, and A Social History of American Technology.

- A beautifully written narrative…provides an exemplary study of the relationship between technology and culture.

Professor J. Wajcman
Sociology Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University , Canberra
Technology and Culture (2001)

- Oldenziel’s book contributes importantly to the literature…urges us to rethink not only the submect matter of technology and its contextual meanings, but also how we do our research.

Professor J. Rothschild
City University of New York
Icon. Jouranl of the International Committee for the History of Technology (2000)