Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office"Mechanical Brides: Women and Machiens from Home to Office consider design history from the perspective of female users and consumers. The telephone, typewriter, washing machine, and electric iron have been central to the definition of 'women's work' in twentieth-century America. Cultural ideas about the duties and ambitions of women are reflected and reinforced by the ways appliances have been designed, marketed, used, and imagined. More than 40 illustrations in color and over 100 in black and white reveal the gender significance attached to seemingly neutral things"--Back cover. |
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advertising American appliances Associates AT&T automatic become body Bride Building CENTER central chairs cleaning clerical clerical workers clothes Collection colors commercial laundries communications Company compared consumer Courtesy cultural desks difference directed domestic Dreyfuss dryer early earnings economic electric employed employees equipment executives fabric female feminist filing force functions furniture Gender hand handle History households housework human industrial Industrial Design introduced iron kitchen labor late laundry LEFT leisure living look male manufactured material means mechanical models Museum objects occupations operators percent Press promoted RIGHT rises Royal secretary seen sexual Smithsonian Institution social space Sparke talk Technology telephone things twentieth century typewriter typing University Press voice wages washer washing machine woman women World York
Popular passages
Page 12 - woman?... She only becomes a domestic, a wife, a chattel, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, or a human dictaphone in certain [social] relationships. Torn from those relationships, she is no more the helpmate of man than gold itself is money
Page 10 - based to a large extent on the woman's yearning to know how to be a more attractive woman, a better housewife, a superior mother, etc.. use this motivation in all your promotion and advertising Ernst Dichter, quoted in Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique. 1963.
Page 9 - it is also a decision to create a partnership in establishing a comfortable home, equipped with a great number of desirable products....” Ernst Dichter. quoted in Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique. 1963. By looking seriously at popular media, Betty Friedan and Marshall McLuhan studied their own society in the way anthropologists examine foreign cultures. They set precedents for the field now called cultural studies, which examines the relationship between
Page 31 - a paragon of perfection, a kind of human machine, the exponent of speed and courtesy, a creature spirited enough to move like chain lightning, and with perfect accuracy; docile enough to deny herself the sweet privilege of the last word.
Page 8 - cosmetic industry in a few years, and do it on sheer emotional appeal to the American woman, there is no reason why such common everyday objects as alarm clocks, prefabricated homes, hair curlers, and helicopters should not be sold on the same basis.
Page 7 - The sexual division of labor is a central feature of the modern home and office. Certain tasks, accomplished with certain tools, have become associated with “women's work,” while others traditionally have been assigned to men.
References to this book
Bibliographic information
| Title | Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office |
| Author | Ellen Lupton |
| Editor | Ellen Lupton |
| Contributor | Cooper-Hewitt Museum |
| Edition | illustrated, annotated |
| Publisher | Princeton Architectural Press, 1993 |
| ISBN | 1878271970, 9781878271976 |
| Length | 65 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |