Naming The Complexity: Women's Experience And The Holistic Assessment Of Technology

Historians of technology have long recognized that the development of technology can only be fully understood if it is conceptualized as “an integral part of cultural history” (Cappon 1966, p.x). Charles Singer, whose pioneering A History of Technology (1955-58), helped establish the history of technology as a distinctive field, asserted that “a history of technology should be clearly related to human history as a whole” (Singer 1959-60, p.306). Still, many historical assessments of technology have fallen short of this ideal, in part because they oversimplify the story by overlooking the diversity of human experience of technology. In the words of the poet Adrienne Rich (1975), they fall short of “naming the complexity” involved in the interaction between technology and the social fabric.