2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel, co-sponsored with the Society for the History of Technology, brings together scholarship that looks at the marketing and use of various technologies to examine changes in women’s social, economic, and geographic mobility within 20^th century France, Egypt, and the United States.

Looking beyond a single-nation context, this panel examines how various actors such as states, corporations, employees, and consumers have leveraged ideas about technology to both challenge and affirm gendered social expectations. All three papers especially emphasize the persistence of “domestic spaces” as sites of contestation over technological use in various political, economic, and historical contexts. “The Pleasures of Domesticity” demonstrates that an analysis of the market for Egyptian-made household appliances reveals that domestic technologies during the period were deeply implicated in public, state socialist modernization plans that rested on newly gendered definitions of citizenship and economic mobility. Looking at the US, “The City Ready for Tomorrow” explores the intersection of industrial and domestic technology in the mid-twentieth century through the experiences of women living in Calhoun City, Mississippi and the attendant changes in patterns of work and diet this tension wrought at the local level. Finally, “L’art de faire un bon voyage” examines how the work of female Air France flight attendants re-defined the commercial aircraft as a domestic space and how the French state enlisted their work in a larger political project to shore up the cultural and ideological bounds of its rapidly declining empire.