On The Machinery of Dominance : Women, Men, and Technical Know-How

A quarter century has passed since I wrote The Machinery of Dominance. Back then, socialist feminists were struggling to understand the connection be tween capitalism and patriarchy, as social systems. Heidi Hartmann's "The Unhappy Marriage of Capitalism and Patriarchy" (Hartmann 1981) came out while I was writing this, Zillah Eisenstein's Capitalist Patriarchy (Eisen stein 1979) had appeared two years before. One system or two? How re lated? That conceptual project was tough. Mid-eighties we abandoned it. Still today we haven't got it sorted. Meantime, what I was doing in Machinery of Dominance (Cockburn 1985), it now seems, was showing how, if you get right down to the level of cultures?cultures of the workplace and its labor processes, cultures in which technologies are invented and put to work?it isn't difficult at all to see the relations of capitalism and patriarchy being produced and reproduced simultaneously. The book starts by trying to grasp the significance of technology as a medium of power. In the early eighties we were fresh out of the feminist "Capital reading groups." We understood the contradictions and tensions between the interests of the capitalist, the skilled worker and the unskilled laborer. We understood the importance of that special category of worker that had historically garnered the creative, transferable skills of engineering, the one who uniquely was able to design and control the instruments of labor, owned by the capitalist, that shaped and disciplined the labor processes of the ordinary worker. We saw his contradictory class position. He was the only one whose job and earnings weren't threatened as one new machine after another revolutionized the factories.