More Work For Mother by Ruth Schwartz Cowan

I had no idea what that theory said, except that it was somehow connected with Marx and that this was bad from the perspective of the people who had trained me. I decided to give a course on “technological determinism,” the notion that historical change is caused primarily by technological change. This interview took place in Ruth’s office on the Penn campus in Philadelphia. One of them is about genetic screening the other, in collaboration with her husband, tells the story of women engineers in the United States. She is currently at work on two new books. In 2002, after 35 years on the faculty at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, on Long Island, she accepted a professorship in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her Social History of American Technology is the most popular textbook in the field she is a past president of the Society for the History of Technology.

Cowan, she has written a social history of Jewish assimilation in America, but her light shines brightest in the history of technology. Ruth’s graduate training was in the history of science, and with her husband, Neil M. It is also well known and highly regarded in realms far beyond academia, particularly her prizewinning 1983 book, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology From the Open Hearth to the Microwave, which confirms the counterintuitive proposition that the proliferation of “labor-saving” household appliances had actually increased the amount of time that women spent on housework.

RUTH SCHWARTZ COWAN IS ONE OF A VERY FEW SPECIALISTS in the history of technology whose work is widely known among teachers and students of general American history.

More Work For Mother by Ruth Schwartz Cowan