When Pocahontas, Abigail Adams, Harriet Tubman, or Amelia Earhart were girls, technology did not mean computers and the Internet. In fact, a girl growing up during the Revolution or the Civil War would not have used the word technology&endash;the word can be found during the 1800s but did not become common until the 1930s. When we talk about girls and technology in American history, we have to think about technology as "knowing how" and to examine all the ways of making and doing things girls learned at different points in time. This view of technology is used by historians and anthropologists to understand the tools and techniques of widely varying cultures.
Thus "girls and technology" includes grinding corn and growing squash, mending clothing, tending fires, churning butter, and even playing with dolls as well as using sewing machines, riding bicycles, and surfing the Web. Just as modern toddlers practice grownup work by playing with small pots and pans or trucks or toy cash registers, children in earlier times learned how the technologies of their societies worked by playing with a small horse and wagon or making doll clothes. Learning about technology is part of how girls learn to be women and boys learn to be men. In some places and times, girls and boys learn about the same technologies: for example, a child who has the job of taking out the garbage learns about garbage cans and garbage trucks. In other cases, grownups expect girls to know about some technologies and boys to know about others, as in the days when girls took home economics in school and boys took shop.
Before the Word Technology
Girls in Native American communities, the British colonies, and the new United States learned all about the tools and techniques of women’s work as they grew up. Among Native Americans, girls learned to tend and harvest crops, cure meat and fish, cook food, and make clothing and leather goods, depending on where they lived. Among European Americans, most girls lived on farms, so while their brothers were out in the fields helping their father, girls learned all the household and garden jobs that kept the family going. Families often made the things they used from day to day: clothing, soap, candles, bread, and furniture. African American girls in this period grew up in enslaved families, often on farms growing cash crops such as tobacco, so they learned all the work of farms but also knew more about fieldwork&endash;hoeing and keeping bugs off tobacco plants and drying the leaves for sale&endash;than their free counterparts. Their parents did not have much say in what slave children did all day. In all these communities, even small children learned to be careful of fire, and older girls would be taught to tend the hearth. The big cooking pots might be too heavy for her to lift, but she would be instructed in making stews and how to make a hotter fire, find the warm spots away from the flames, and keep the temperature even while cornbread was cooking.
In European American communities, fieldwork&endash;except at harvest time when everyone’s help might be needed&endash;was mostly for boys and men, but vegetable gardens were planted and tended by women. Girls learned how to pick vegetables when they were ready, save seeds for the following year, and plant and tend seedlings at the right time in the spring. Seasonal tasks like salting meat or pickling vegetables preserved food through the winter, and in northern areas, potatoes and beets and apples stored in a root cellar had to be checked every now and then to remove any items beginning to go bad. Families with a dairy cow had milk and cream, and girls and women churned butter and processed cheese. Sometimes such goods could be traded at the local store for items not made at home. In the modern days of the World Wide Web, a butter churn seems quaint&endash;but more than 1,000 patents had been issued for different kinds of churns by 1873 when the U.S. government tallied all the patents since 1790.
In the days when family members might make all their own cloth and then all their own clothes, mothers and daughters had very important jobs. Little girls practiced sewing scraps together until they had learned to sew straight seams, and then they could help make underwear and shirts and help with the mending. Making clothes took so much time and effort that only the oldest and most worn-out clothes went into the rag basket. Even then, the fabrics were recycled: girls pieced patchwork quilts from good scraps or sewed rags together in long strips so they could braid the strips and then coil them to make a rug. When they were seven or eight or nine or ten and were good at sewing, in many families or schools they sewed a sampler using all the stitches they knew and pretty colored threads, if they could afford them. Older girls often learned to spin linen or wool and eventually to weave, and teenagers set up the loom with warp threads so their younger sisters could do simple weaving. Spinning and weaving were good activities in households with older girls or teenagers, and sometimes these girls worked for neighbors; a mother with very small children would usually trade some of her squash or beans for getting her weaving done. Then, of course, there was the laundry. Girls learned to make soap as they helped their mothers, as well as how to wash and hang the clothes. Ironing had to be done using a solid metal "iron," heated in the fire (or, later, on the stove). The iron was heavy, and if it was too hot it might scorch the clothes, but if it was too cool it would not smooth out wrinkles.
Thus even very young girls knew about many important technologies, and by the time they were teenagers they were very helpful people to have around the house. Often a teenage girl from a family with other sisters would go live with a neighbor’s or relative’s family for a while, so she could learn from a different woman and help in a different household before she began her own. Sometimes her family set up the arrangement as a formal apprenticeship, with a contract called "indentures" signed by both sides, especially if one of her parents had died or if an older woman had particular skills. A town girl learning fancy dressmaking or mantua making (coat making) usually did so under formal indentures, promising to serve her mistress faithfully until she was eighteen years old in return for food and lodging and clothing provided in her new mistress’s household.
Industrialization and New Machines
During the first 150 years of U.S. nationhood, Americans changed the technologies for almost everything they did. In the early days of the republic, the vast majority of Americans lived on farms and worked in agriculture, but by World War I more than half of Americans lived in towns, and increasingly they expected that food would be purchased rather than grown. This long, slow process of industrialization meant that many of the tasks girls and women had learned and performed changed dramatically&endash;slowly at first but more and more noticeably as Americans thought of themselves as a nation of "progress" and tied "progress" to expanding production of all kinds of material goods. When we think about girls and technology, it is very important to remember that someone had to buy all the things the new factories were making: consumption is the other side of the coin of production.
Even by the early nineteenth century, items like soap and candles were being made in small factories, and families could purchase them in local stores. Girls might have some extra time, but buying goods meant the family needed extra money; many farm families added tasks such as making extra butter or plaiting straw for bonnets as part of their household routines. Some families could acquire a stove for cooking, and girls and women learned new techniques for keeping fires going and for cooking and baking.
New technologies brought major changes early on for enslaved girls as well. Most important, perhaps, was the cotton gin: with a machine to pick the sticky seeds out of cotton, landowners could make large profits from growing and selling the soft fibers. But more cotton fields meant more people picking cotton, and the number of slaves in the United States grew from less than 700,000 in 1790 to 4 million by 1860. A girl on a cotton plantation helped care for the smaller children until she was old enough to help with household chores for her owners or with the cotton picking in the fields.
The cotton was the raw material for the new textile mills in the North that got under way by the 1820s, for by that time fewer people were making cloth at home. The factories turned out yards and yards of standardized cotton and also woolen fabric, all of it carded, spun, and woven by large, fast, noisy machinery. Factory owners thought teenage girls would be good at tending machines like looms, watching for bobbins near empty, or tying broken threads. They also found girls were good at making craft-based items for the stores, such as cardboard boxes or artificial flowers. In this period many people, African American and European American and new European immigrants, were moving to cities, and by the middle of the century and especially after the Civil War, girls who lived near factories often worked long hours doing repetitive jobs for cash wages, a new kind of contribution to the family economy. Or they worked in wealthier households, cleaning and cooking, learning all about the new household technologies even when they were too expensive for many working people to have at home.
For most of the nineteenth century, even with factory-made cloth, making clothing and household linens was a job for women and girls at home, or, for fancy dresses, for dressmakers and their apprentices. Girls learned to sew just as consistently in the 1800s as they had in the 1700s, although the new coeducational public schools meant sewing was a home activity rather than a school one for many children. But this task, too, changed with the new machines: besides machine-made cloth and machine-made thread, in the second half of the century families with enough money could buy sewing machines to help with straight seams. By the end of the nineteenth century, sewing machines and paper patterns were common tools in many households.
Girlhood in Industrial America
By the time of World War I, a wide range of household items were available ready-made: flour was sold in packages by national distributors, prepared food was sold in cans, and clothing could increasingly be found already sewn. Besides underwear and men’s shirts, in cities the new department stores sold entire gowns and suits to middle-class customers. Meatpacking plants in the Midwest packaged hams and sausages and shipped them by train to the cities, and railroads brought factory-made goods out to the new towns in the western states. By the turn of the century, even rural people could choose items from thick catalogs&endash;Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward&endash;and order them by mail, getting a taste of all the items people in big cities could find in the stores. For women and girls, being consumers was one of the jobs of running the household, along with old jobs like cooking and cleaning and gardening. But the old jobs changed as more and more houses had hot running water, gas hookups, and even electricity for washing, cooking, lighting, and eventually running small motors. Girls’ roles changed as public schooling became not only more widely available for more of the year but mandatory by state and local law.
Industrial society meant everyone in the family had new roles to play and new technologies to learn. When Americans imagined their ideal family, many of them thought of a married couple with children, in a household managed by the mother (possibly with the help of a servant), using money earned by the father. In this image, children went to school and played until some time in their teenage years. And when Americans thought about machines and progress and engineering and modern cities, they thought of these things as good but also as so noisy and so fast that everyone needed a break from them&endash;and they imagined that "home" was a peaceful place in comparison to work and school and travel and commerce. In fact, many technologies and even many modern machines could be found inside this cozy peaceful place, but people came to think of machines as belonging somewhere else. More importantly for girls in the twentieth century, many people came to think of home as a place where people consumed things and used things but did not make things. Making things, designing things, producing things, repairing things&endash;these activities were seen as industrial, not domestic. And so they also came to be seen as boys’ and men’s activities, not girls’ and women’s.
We can see these differences in the kinds of indoor toys children played with in the first half of the twentieth century. Girls had not only dolls but toy kitchens, small versions of the appliances people were installing once electricity or natural gas was available to run them, and small pots and pans and utensils. Most of these toys were not designed to be taken apart and reassembled but to serve as props in role-playing games. Girls played at being homemakers and going shopping&endash;but they also practiced using the new technologies and came to understand grown-up versions of cars and gas stoves and electric appliances. This period was one of much technological change in the kitchen, so a girl who learned to bake or to help her mother put up tomatoes was, as in past periods, acquiring significant technological knowledge even if she did not think of it in those terms. Meanwhile, the building toys of the period were marketed to boys, who were encouraged to play at designing, constructing, and repairing the material world. These activities were the ones people came to see as "technological" as the word came into use in the 1930s. And these differences in expectation were reflected in the adult world, as well, for example in the ways auto manufacturers marketed to women (color, upholstery, comfort) and to men (design, engine type, mechanical innovations) from the 1920s on.
These ideas also played out in schools. Educators began reintroducing technological activities into schools, partly because they believed children should learn from activities as well as books but also because it seemed that children from immigrant families and children who would grow up to work in factories needed different kinds of schooling from children who might go on to college. The new "progressive" education for girls meant cooking and sewing, starting in the 1880s and becoming more popular with the home economics movement of the early twentieth century. Home economics meant incorporating scientific ideas about nutrition and public health into girls’ education, but it also focused girls’ learning on domestic issues. For boys, who were thought generally to have suffered from too much city life, progressive lessons meant basic carpentry and sometimes metalwork, a standard class often referred to as "shop" or sometimes "industrial arts." In the later decades of the twentieth century, these classes became coeducational and then, in many towns, obsolete, but they were standard fare for well over fifty years. Some boys learned drafting and advanced metalwork in preparation for careers in engineering; girls looking for careers after high school could learn clerical tasks, including the use of typewriters and bookkeeping machines. In these school activities, too, girls were taught in terms of using machines, whereas boys were taught about either building them according to someone else’s design or designing them themselves. Even when they were mostly users, boys were taught to believe they should understand and interact with machinery&endash;for nice girls, messy dishes and diapers were appropriate, but greasy overalls were not.
Nonetheless, as machines became more ubiquitous, everyone acquired new knowledge of the changing material world. Girls growing up with radios, television, refrigerators, washing machines, and curling irons acquired mechanical understanding under the rubric "housework." Just as girls had learned to churn butter or make soap in the past, twentieth-century girls learned about wash cycles, thermostats, circuits, and fuses. But in the age of steel mills and fighter-bombers, this knowledge was not labeled "technological." Most twentieth-century households depended on large technological systems supplying electricity, gas, or drinking water, and most people running those households made technological choices on a regular basis, but the technological nature of domestic spaces was invisible in the common understanding of where technology might be located.
In addition, girls did have a few daring role models, women who defied stereotypes: to drive cars, early on, and soon to fly airplanes. The wide publicity of "first women" such as Amelia Earhart or Bessie Coleman and then the women pilots of World War II, who ferried every type of military aircraft used during the war, showed girls that women could handle machines reserved mostly for men. The wartime campaigns to persuade women to enter heavy industry, known now by the emblematic "Rosie the Riveter," also taught girls that the rules were not steadfast. Despite the home-and-family ideology of the baby boom decades, for most of the century girls had a widening range of role models skilled at manipulating machines everyone came to recognize as technology, as well as role models knowledgeable about technologies hidden behind the curtains of domesticity.
But being publicly technological took real courage, and even these unusual women had to remind everyone that they were still feminine. By a broad historical definition those reminders can be called "technologies of identity": shoes with high heels, hosiery made of the finest silk or the latest laboratory-made fibers, and makeup designed to provide a range of pigments in convenient and safe powders, creams, and solids. Aviator Jacqueline Cochran sold her own lines of cosmetics, and women’s events like the All-Women’s Transcontinental Air Race were commonly known, from the 1930s through the 1960s, as "powder puff derbies." Similarly, most girls learned how to "dress up," and in doing so they learned not only to choose among the many products of the mass production economy but to design their own external identity using a range of tools: colors, fabrics, chemicals, and fasteners. Similar options&endash;with a larger apparent budget&endash;could be exercised in the world of Barbie and other fashion dolls, as well. By the end of the century such choices were treated more generally as choices, but beginning by the 1920s and continuing at least into the 1970s, girls most often learned that without performing such feminine rituals they might jeopardize their access to a proper place in society.
Girls of the Information Age
Girls in what is now called the "information age"&endash;the recent decades when computers and chips and wireless communications have been changing what the older mechanical machines can do&endash;are also girls growing up after the major changes in men’s and women’s roles of the 1960s and 1970s. The strict differences between boys’ work and girls’ work, men’s work and women’s work, along with many legal distinctions in property rights and economic controls, have given way to much more choice about who learns how to do what and what kind of adult life a child can imagine seeking. Meanwhile, everyone assumes they will be able to see pictures of the other side of the world almost instantly and that they will be able to purchase a wide range of items on the telephone or the Internet; kids and parents keep in touch via cell phones or beepers. Food often comes ready to eat or at least ready to heat, and restaurant chains sell standardized meals to people who are, accordingly, producing fewer meals at home. These behaviors and expectations can be attributed to the combination of technological, political, social, and economic changes that have shaped modern American society.
Thus, in the middle of the twentieth century, a girl wanting to be a veterinarian or an engineer or a race car driver might have been told, "That’s for boys, dear"; in the beginning of the twenty-first century, she has more chance of being encouraged. Even Barbie rollerblades, has a career wardrobe, and flies an airplane. Girls meet women doctors, see women on highway construction crews, and learn about women astronauts. Both girls and boys take home economics and shop, or else such subjects are left out of the curriculum entirely. The budding female electrician will probably find some adults who will say, "Of course you can," in addition to the ones who say only that it is difficult, that there will be mostly boys in her classes, or even that boys will not like girls who do jobs like repairing air conditioning systems. In other words, many of the activities people think of as "technological" as well as many technological activities we do not think about&endash;heating soup in the microwave, calling home on a cell phone&endash;are now performed by men and women and learned by boys and girls. Nonetheless, despite all the changes, girls and boys continue quite frequently to be assigned different kinds of technological tasks. When adult women in fields like engineering tell girls about how much they love their exciting jobs, they wonder whether it is better to leave out the stories of fighting for the opportunity or to warn girls ahead of time that someone along the way will probably tell them they do not belong.
A trip through the aisles of any large toy store at the turn of the twenty-first century reflects these examples of change and continuity. Boys and girls both will find computer chips and electronic enhancements in their toys; grow up familiar with the possibility that inanimate objects talk, move, and even respond in lifelike ways; and assume that images move, morph, and portray unreal scenes in very realistic ways. These features can be found in toys for toddlers&endash;in primary colors with cheerful dinosaurs, monsters, and other creatures&endash;as well as for older children. But on the aisle where most of the plastic and packaging is pink and lavender and white, most of the toys recreate homes and fashion choices; on the aisle where most of the plastic and packaging is black and green, most of the toys emphasize transportation, adventure, and combat. "Pink" technological choices are most often about consumer activities and domestic settings; pink technological design focuses on how bodies look and on domestic settings. "Black and green" technological choices are most often about making machines go places, dig holes, build things, or kill imaginary enemies; black and green technological design focuses on mechanical, architectural, or military capabilities. Girls and boys both learn to use computers, but the "Barbie" computer, in pink and white floral casing, comes with a digital camera and fashion design software, and the "Hot Wheels" computer, in blue and flaming yellow casing, comes with a steering wheel, foot pedal, and racing scenario software. The users of both computers learn about graphics and the capabilities of computer processing. But the uses of the tool in these color-coded packages encourages different kinds of technological knowledge and portrays interaction with different technologies: pink technological knowledge includes fabrics and colors and the visualization of how things look; blue and yellow technological knowledge includes engines and speed and the visualization of what things do. It can still be quite difficult to cross these lines, in either direction.
But knowing there are computer chips in things or knowing what computerized tools and toys are likely to be able to do is not the same as knowing how to make them work. The earliest computer programmers, including Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, were mostly women, but the field of computer science, as it developed, became a terrain populated mostly by men. Girls today often do not think of programming as a good thing for girls to learn, and teachers report boys are more interested in how computers work, whereas girls work with them as tools for other tasks. Books teaching computer programming often compare a program to a recipe, a set of instructions to follow using particular "inputs," and Web design depends on visualization of how things look, so perhaps in the twenty-first century women will be heavily involved in these areas based on what they learned as girls.
In general, the trends since 1800 have resulted in less difference in what girls and boys know and what work men and women do and more difference in what machines do versus what people do. This pattern can most easily be seen in the food we eat, if we think about who grows it, who harvests it, and how it is processed and cooked and heated and eaten. Consider potatoes: instant mashed potatoes and fast food French fries are industrial products just like cars and disposable diapers. But machines doing more work affect areas far beyond consumer choices: large jets now have automatic controls, for example, so pilots make fewer minute-to-minute decisions about flying the plane. In this world of powerful technologies, some people are learning how to use the new devices, while others are deciding how to design them. Who will learn which approaches? In some schools students can study computer science, and in general right now more boys than girls choose to do so. But in other schools there are not enough computers or even not enough electrical outlets for all the students to get a chance to use the word processors. Nobody learns computer science in those schools. In the 1820s and the 1890s and the 1930s and the 1990s, Americans discussed and debated how to prepare their children for adulthood partly in terms of what technologies they should understand. Nobody can predict the future, but what girls (and boys) learn about making and doing things now shapes what choices they will make about technology&endash;about making and doing all kinds of things&endash;later, when they grow up and teach technology to children of their own.
References and Further Reading
American Association of University Women. 2000. "Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls for the New Computer Age." Washington, DC: AAUW Educational Foundation.
Calvert, Karin. 1992. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600&emdash;1900. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Canel, Annie, Ruth Oldenziel, and Karin Zachmann, eds. 2000. Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges: Comparing the History of Women Engineers, 1870s&emdash;1990. London: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Cassell, Justine, and Henry Jenkins. 1998. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. 1983. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books.
Douglas, Deborah G. 1990. "United States Women in Aviation, 1940&emdash;1985." Smithsonian Studies in Air and Space no. 7. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Douglas, Susan. 1994. Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media. New York: Times Books.
Dublin, Thomas. 1994. Transforming Women’s Work : New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Jellison, Katherine. 1993. Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913&emdash;1963. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Jensen, Joan. 1986. Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750&emdash;1850. New Haven: Yale University Press.
King, Wilma. 1995. Stolen Childhood : Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington : Indiana University Press.
Lerman, Nina E., Arwen Mohun, and Ruth Oldenziel, guest eds. 1997. "Gender Analysis and the History of Technology." Technology and Culture 38, no. 1 (January).
McGaw, Judith, ed. 1994. Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Peiss, Kathy. 1998. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Owl Books.
Scharff, Virginia. 1991. Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Spector, Janet. 1993. What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press.
Stanley, Autumn. 1995. Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. 1990. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785&emdash;1812. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.