Barnard President Ellen Futter: [...] women's issues. The center serves as a vital link between the college, and the community, of Scholars and feminists who work for the advancement of women in society.  In hosting this conference each year, the center aims to provide a forum for feminist scholarship, a platform from which to address issues which affect the progress and perception of women.  This year, the conference examines the question of technology, an inescapable reality of the twentieth century. We hope to examine today how technology affects us in our homes and in the workplace, how it influences both our private lives and our professional lives. I am glad that you were here today to join in that exploration and I welcome you to Barnard College.

Bettina Berch?: Thank you. As a coordinator of this conference, I have some remarks. I shall be brief. I begin with thanks. There's one person who has made all 10 of these conferences happen. Jane Gould, the director of The Women's Center. [Applause] You want to stand up Jane? [Applause] There are three people, Janie Kreitzman, Lee Coppernoll, and Maria LaSalle at the Women's Center who not only handled all the administrative work this conference, which is no small feat, but also participated in the planning, and took care of my frazzled nerves every now and then, when the inevitable crises flared. They have my deep appreciation. You know there are more people that could be thanked, the planning committee members, various other people that inspired these proceedings, but I'll be mindful of the time and simply thank them collectively.  I would like to make some remarks of my own and then introduce to you our speakers. After all three speakers have spoken, there should be time for questions from the floor.

In one of the most remarkable pieces of writing I've known, in a short story "Self Experiment," Christa Wolf enters the futuristic Paradise, otherwise known as the Citadel of Reason. She enters this high-tech Eastern Bloc world of men in science and volunteers for the hormone experiment that can transform women into men. The experiment Works she lives the world as a man. Or rather, she discovers that, unlike women, men do not live the world. They use the world. Her words: "Your ingeniusly constructed system of rules, your hopeless addiction to work, all your withdrawal maneuvers were only an attempt to protect yourself from this discovery: that you cannot love, and know it." She request the reverse hormone treatment. She knows she wants the life of a woman. I do not think Wolf's decision to intertwine the themes of gender and technology is insignificant. Now we're talking here today about women in technology, yet it is not the technology itself that is ultimately to be judged good or bad for women. A particular technology does not determine too much. Larger economic or social objectives sponsor characteristic technologies.  A class biased economic system and a gendered social system will install technologies that reflect their biases and priorities. And the outcomes are mixed. Even more research has useful byproducts: the cheap pocket calculator. 

Most important technologies have a variety of applications. Word processors can enable overworked feminist organizations to reach each other's mailing lists at a lowtime and money cost. Yet word-processing maybe one of the most boring jobs in any office. The good and bad effects of any Given technology will fall differently on different classes, genders. We are now inventing a new form of poverty, information access poverty, a whole new and important way to be disadvantaged. We need to start thinking broadly about the impact of technological change on our lives. Start with the impact of technological change on the quality of working life. What is the impact on skill, autonomy, physical stress, mental stress,  work intensity, isolation, work monitoring and privacy? Consider the proposed dispersal of work. The end of the work place as a central working space. Are we ready for the electronic cottage? Mattera's recent description of the home computer sweatshop in a recent issue of The Nation asks women if they really are ready to go back to [piece] work in the home with no coverage under labor legislation, no union to negotiate peace rights no fringe benefits a staggering workload and continual pressures of childcare and housework as breaks in the working day. Can feminists afford to give up public space, such fertile soil for making movements happen? 

We can consider how new entertainment technology reshapes our free time. Will interactive communication systems reconstruct our political life? Our sense of time changes. On the mundane level digital watches can produce unwanted precision in our time sense, but will our life cycle sense of time be altered by developments in reproductive engineering? Will nuclear experiments continue to erode our expectations of having futures? Our sense of space changes. Teleconferencing and telecommuting change our notions of proximity to others, and will we indeed annex outer space as battle ground or is dumping ground for nuclear waste? The scope of the revolution is enormous.

Now let us examine from the literature of this revolution. Scan the computer manuals and magazines in the book stores. Read the prophets of new tech, the Steward Brands and the Alvin Toffler's. They're suspiciously unaware of feminist issues. And the feminist Community itself is polarized, between its high-tech make it to power feminists and its low-tech ecological types. Not much dialogue. A lot of mutual suspicion. What is needed? Christa Wolfe demanded the return to her female body and the revolt of all those outside the Citadel of Reason and assertion of the right to meaning in language and life, a refusal to accept the type of world being constructed by those she saw devoted to the Big 3: business, science, and world politics. I would suggest that the most important principle of feminist strategy is to take the active not the passive role. It matters little if we learn to use word processors or if we loudly avoid them, but it matters a great deal if we do not intervene with our own agendas, our own priorities. As Toni Cade Bambara put it,"In whose name will the 21st century be claimed?"

I would like to present to you our first speaker. Judith McGraw teaches in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Some of you may remember her from her review essay, "On Women and History of American Technology" in last summer's issue of Signs,ne of her many publications. She is currently researching a book on science and technology in American agricultural development 1785 to 1860. Judith.

[Applause] Judith A. McGaw:Thank you. As feminists concerned with technological futures, why should we bother to look at the past. After all, history is replete with examples of our failure to learn from history, of the limits of historical analogy for predicting what lies ahead. Although I would agree that in this narrow sense, we do not learn from history, it is nonetheless true that individually and collectively, we repeatedly justify policy by invoking the lessons of the past. Opponents and proponents of Reaganomics begin with assumptions about the New Deal. Discussions of aid to El Salvador are also disputes over the origins of the war in Vietnam. Likewise, feminists and anti-feminists often idduce illfounded historical police to support predetermined technology policy. Given the prevailing technological illiteracy of the American population, these historical myths serve as potent weapons. But myths are double-edged swords. They can also cut us off from our understanding of the historical relationship between technology and society.

My argument today is that we must divest ourselves of such weapons for if we embed historical myth in our analyses of technology we risk self-destructive outcomes. Too long lived but recently exploded historical myths about women in technology illustrate the dangers of a non-critical view of the past. To use the words of historian of technology Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "One of the most firmly grounded shibboleths about the relationship between women's work and technology has been the notion that power-driven machinery opened new jobs to women by reducing the amount of physical strength required." Within the last twenty years, numerous studies in the history of women have reiterated this assertion and have ascribed to the technologically-based economic liberation of women, the simultaneous origins of 19th century feminism. For feminists  and anti-feminists, the lessons of history seemed clear. For feminists, new technology seem to be a boon expanding women's opportunities and consequently raising their consciousnesses. Moreover the history of women in technology apparently supported a view of homebound wives and mothers as benighted prisoners of pre-modern sex rules. For anti-feminists, technology malevolentgenie depriving male breadwinners of their jobs and threatening the stability of home and family. 

Upon examination however, Cowan found the assertion that technology opened new jobs to women, quote "almost entirely unwarranted." She found that quote "Women have replaced men in several occupations in which hard physical labor was not required before industrialization (for example, cigarmaking); they have replaced men in some occupations in which no significant technological change occurred (for example, schoolteaching); and they have replaced men in some occupations in which
technological change made no difference in the physical labor involved (for example, bookkeeping)... Alternatively, there are many trades in which work has been transformed by the introduction of new machines but in which women have not replaced men. (for example, typesetting.) Moreover, as she notes, three economic Facts of Life for women predate industrialization and persisted through the revolutionary technological changes of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Women are almost always paid less than men for the same work, women rarely perform the same tasks as men, and women consider themselves, and are considered by others to be transient participants in the labor force. Since Colin published her conclusions, a number of historical monograph support an even stronger emphasis on continuity. Despite fundamental changes in the process of production, 19th century mechanization introduced virtually no changes in the kinds of work women performed or in the division of labor between the sexes. Thus far then historical scholarship finds early modern sex roles more  profound and pervasive than technological change and does not warrant the earlier hopes of feminists or fears of anti-feminists. 

The even more widely-held myth of labor-saving household technology has played a similar role in feminist feminist debates about women's liberation and technological change. Feminists have generally applauded new home appliances as freeing women from drudgery and making it possible for married women with children to have rewarding careers outside the home. Anti-feminists have also assume that household technology left women without much to do around the house so that they sought outside employment to the detriment of their families or spent their enormous amounts of free time concocting wild-eyed theories of women's oppression. But as with non-domestic technology, scholarship on household technology finds no historical basis for expectations that mechanized homes will liberate women. Historically domestic conveniences made housework less arduous but were not used to make it less time-consuming primarily because more demanding standards of cleanliness, diet, and child-rearing accompany the new technology. In addition, most women with domestic appliances bore the whole burden of housekeeping whereas their mothers had been aided by domestic servants and growing daughters. 

Defining household technology more broadly, as have historians of architecture and home economics, we still find little scholarly evidence that technology has brought fundamental changes in women's situation. Housing reform altered interior and exterior sacial arrangements and decor, but kept homemakers relatively isolated and inefficient. Similarly well trained professionals in home economics sought to professionalize, industrialize and standardize America's household work but they relied upon unpaid at generalists in single-family households to implement these suggestions.  Thus. substantial changes in household technology, even broadly-defined, left the sex, hours, efficiency and status of the household worker essentiallyunaltered.  As these two examples suggest, feminist scholarship in the history of technology has focused on myths about women and machines.  Its lessons for technology policy may be stated succinctly: when we look to machines to alter women's roles, we are looking in the wrong place. But most of the history of technology concerns men and machines, primarily because men have invented, built, and financed the development of most new technology and because men of operated and repaired most sophisticated industrial machinery. Rarely has the history of men and machines been written from a feminist perspective because most feminist historians have devoted their attention to the study of women. Nonetheless, myths about men and machines, like myths about women and machines, often provide powerful but deceptive justification for political and economic decisions that affect women, including decisions made by feminists.

It is time for us as feminists concerned with technological decisions to begin looking at these myths as well. But I would like to do in the time remaining is to present several myths about men and machines and to suggest what preliminary revisions emerge when examined from a feminist perspective in light of extant non-feminist scholarship.  I suspect that all of these myths will be familiar to you because they figure prominently in popular writing about technology. They are the myth of the inventor, the myth of the labor-saving machine, and the myth that machines deprive men of their skills. The myth of the inventor briefly stated holds the technology is primarily shaped by great men, and occasionally women, who devised new machines and processes. It is a particularly important myth for feminists to consider because there is an important body of scholarship documenting that historically, our systems of socialization, education, technical training, and professional advancement in mathematics, science, mechanics, and engineering have made it relatively unlikely for women to become inventors. Drawing on this scholarship, some feminists have argued that, given equal access to technical skills and advancement more women would become inventors and the result would be a more feminist and even a more humane technology.

 While there is certainly abundant reason to argue that women should be accorded equal opportunity in the scientific and technical professions, the argument that more female inventors would profoundly alter our technology seems to me a specious one, because it rests on historical myth- the myth of the inventor. Not surprisingly, historians of technology of conducted considerable research on invention. I cannot summarize briefly all of the conclusions they have reached, but two themes in literature suggests that inventors play distinctly limited roles. First, invention is a response to a widely recognized social or economic need, and second, invention is only one stage in the process by which new technology is implemented and becomes influential. Evidence that new technology is a social and not an individual product comes from studies of simultaneous invention and of technological systems. In cases of simultaneous invention, two or more inventors working independently arrive at the same solution at about the same time. For example, as early as the late 18th century we find American Oliver Evans and Welshman Richard Trevithick both inventing the high pressure steam engine. Such cases illustrate dramatically that invention is not an inexplicable  flash of genius, but an understandable response to generally recognized problems, a response that is shaped by the tools and knowledge that many men in a society possess. And it is generally men, which is why I use that word advisedly. I suspect that a woman working with the same equipment and the same information would have arrived at a similar solution. 

Moreover, historians studying the electrical industry in particular have recognized that individual machines, tools, or processes,  rarely function in isolation, and therefore, that they cannot be developed successfully without recognition of the system of tools, machines, and processes, of which they will be a part. In fact, the failure of one part of a technological system to keep pace with the rest is often the catalyst of invention. Female inventors too would be motivated by inequities within systems and would invent within the constraints of these systems. Equally important in placing the inventor in perspective have been the numerous studies which revealed that invention does not suffice to create a new machine, process,  or product. Most patents have not resulted in a marketable product, usually because something can be technically feasible without being economically reasonable. For example, it is technically possible to make a synthetic silk purse out of a sow's ear [laughter] but the process has never been used commercially because we can make real silk purses much more cheaply. Even after sifting out the numerous inventions that are patently absurd from an economic point of view, most machines and processes that have been invented did not operate efficiently on a commercial scale without considerable investment of time and money in their development. For example, although a poor Frenchman invented a paper making machine in 1799, before it could produce salable paper, two wealthy English stationers spent eight years financing a specially equipped machine shop and paying the wages of a machine builder and his men. Similarly, although Eli Whitney propounded the notion of interchangeable parts manufacture in the late 18th century, the implementation of his idea required about 50 years of government-financed machine tool development. 	In sum, even in the early industrial era successful innovation was distinguished less by inventive genius than by substantial financial investments. Since the late 19th century, the growth of corporate research and development has institutionalized the preeminence of  financial decision makers and reduced most inventors to corporate employees. Thus, feminists heeding quote unquote, the lessons of history, should concentrate their efforts not on MIT and Caltech but on Wharton and Harvard Business School.

Another common belief about men and machines is the myth of the labor-saving machine. American historians have been especially prone to argue that machines served primarily to eliminate workers because the American population was relatively small during the era of industrialization. Contemporary feminists often rely upon this myth and conjure up the spectre of mass female unemployment resulting from office automation. Again there's a little historical evidence for this myth. The advent of machines in nineteenth-century America served primarily to reduce capital costs and did not reduce industrial employment. For example, in the textile industry one power loom cost far less than the much larger number of handlooms required to produce the same amount of cloth, and one spinning jenny required a smaller investment than the numerous spinning wheels it superseded. By reducing the capital costs of textile production, machines opened a huge market for cheap textiles, creating a growing number of jobs for textile workers. Furthermore histories of labor-saving machines have focused on craftsman and machine tenders who were usually male, a view which distorts the consequences of mechanization for the labor force as a whole. Because women generally performed tasks requiring visual discrimination such as sorting raw materials and inspecting finished product, their work could not be replicated by machines until recently. As a result, the factories that installed more productive machines often hired increased numbers of women to perform unmechanized tasks, tasks that historians, especially the stories of technology have generally ignored. What we know about the history of office technology often also lends little credence to the myth of labor-saving machinery. Businesses  introduced the typewriter because the supply of hand copyists could not keep pace with the growth of paperwork in the emerging corporate offices of the late 19th century. As a result, the typewriter did not reduce the number of clerical workers. Rather, its introduction coincided with huge increases in both white collar and female employment. All this is not to say the machines never eliminate jobs including women's jobs. It does suggest however the technological change often increases employment, especially when we look at the whole industry instead of at a particular task.

A final myth about men and machines is the belief that new technology deprives workers of their skills reducing creative craftsmen to button-pushers, cogs in the corporate assembly line. The history of technology attacks this myth on two fronts. First, it indicates that the image of the creative craftsman has been overdrawn. For example, it is true that the men who made paper by hand were highly skilled, but their work consisted of repeatedly dipping a handheld mold into a vat of [dilute] pulp, a task about as repetitious is most of those in Detroit today. Second, the history of technology finds the image of the docile machine tender equally overdrawn. Spinning mules, industrial sewing machines, and most other 19th century industrial equipment required considerable skill to attend, maintain, and repair. The same point has been made about post-World World War II technology, such as computers and programs machine tools. Moreover, when examined from a feminist perspective, it becomes clear that the history of technology and workers skill requires thorough revision. For the skill designations we have relied upon as historians, have been borrowed from employers, not based upon an assessment of task performance. When free to do so, employers generally define as unskilled or semi-skilled any tasks for which no apprenticeship or on-the-job training is required. Thus, for example hand and machine sewing, the tasks most women performed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century industry, were classified as unskilled, not because of work involved no skill, but because virtually all american women knew how to sew and competition for the work kept wages pitifully low. Similarly, typewriting was not considered skilled work because public schools provided women with the requisite literacy and manual skills before they reach the office. Until historians of technology formulate a more acceptable definition of skill, the question of technology's influence on workers' jobs, job descriptions, must remain moot.  Probably many of you will be disconcerted at the sum and substance of my message today, namely, forget everything you thought you knew about the origins and impact of technology. But I would maintain that solutions based on myth will, at best, to be irrelevant to our problems. What we don't know, may or may not hurt us, but we only think we know, almost certainly will. Thank you. [Applause] 

Bettina Berch: I have a very low-tech stage here. [laughter] Thank you I'd like to introduce to you our second speaker. Maria Patricia Fernandez Kelly is currently a researcher for the El Centro de Estudios Fronterizos del Norte de México and a visiting scholar in the program in U.S. Mexican studies at the University of California San Diego. She has been doing fieldwork on international industry and labor, particularly on ['Maquila'] women. Maria...[applause]

Patricia Fernandez Kelly: That's wonderful. I want to thank the organisers of this conference and you for being here, and allow me to present some of the ideas that I have collected in about 4 years of research along the US/Mexico border. Judy certainly established a number of parameters that are very significant for the kinds of things that I will try to share with you. In particular, I think that for the afternoon and for the workshops, that I presume all of us are going to be participating in, the point that she raised about the definition of levels of skill is probably one of the most exciting, and one that at this particular point in time, in the light of technological development, has to be revised. She's quite right. 

I have recently written a paper which has the curious title of "Contemporary Production: Seven Features and One Puzzle." It is one of three papers that I intend to write. This one I envision, more than anything else, as an introduction to a seres of considerations that will be presented in the second paper, in which I will try to propose some ideas about gender as process. The third paper, in fact, will have to do with an attempt at looking at some of these conceptual repertoires in a concrete example, in a concrete instance that is occurring at this time in Southern California. I will refer to that particular example in a just a few minutes. Before I do that, let me tell you what I would like to present to you today. Indeed I would like to make a quantum leap from what Judy has already revised and to place ourselves very much, in the period of contemporary production. Secondly, I would like to place some emphasis today, both upon the issue of advanced technology, how it is produced and how it affects the lives of women and men. And particularly, I would like to look at two examples that have been precipitated by the development of advanced technology. One is a phenomenon that I have labeled in my paper "pseudo regression." I think it's a curious and interesting term. "Pseudo regression," by which I mean, the emergence and [fluorescence] of forms of production in our days, that are strikingly reminiscent of forms of production that we generally associate with 19th century factory production and other such things, for example, sweatshops and cottage industries. And the other one is what I refer to as a puzzle in this paper, which is the issue of feminisation. As I said earlier,  I'll try to bring your attention to that most exotic part of the United States which is Southern California, [laughter] where some of these interesting concepts are actually being lived out. I thought about writing a paper on contemporary production, because much is being said both about advanced technology, about modern production, about the [paralyzation] of the US economy, about the loss of hegemony of the US as a political power, etc. But in fact, I had suggested, or had felt, that we don't have adequate conceptual tools to differentiate between what generally has been known as contemporary production, excuse me, modern production and contemporary production. My research has been carried out along the US-Mexico border and it started in late 1978. I have seen the US-Mexico border since then as a very large scenario where very broad economic and political forces are being played out. So I don't see the US-Mexico border simply as a distinct geographical, but indeed as a scenario where broad economic and political forces are being enacted. To me, it is almost like a micro-laboratory where we are able to perceive trends, often invisible in certain areas of both the United States and in other parts of the world. 

At the time of beginning my research, I was interested in four points. On the one hand, and first among them, I was interested in the relationship between so-called highly developed countries and underdeveloped countries. I have noticed and continue to be very impressed by the fact that along the US-Mexico border we have an experiment consisting of border plants, of industries that operate along Mexican border-cities, as subsidiaries directly owned or subcontracted shops of generally US based or multinational corporations. These are companies that have been established since 1965, but more importantly since 1972, by US multinational corporations in order to take advantage of incentives provided by the US government and incentives provided by the Mexican government. In the United States, the incentives contained in the US Customs code, and I'm referring concretely two items 609.30 and 607, are fractions of customs that actually allow for the temporary exportation of American raw materials and components to areas of the world where they may be assembled and where afterwards they m ybership to the United States for purposes of marketing and redistribution. The structure of the Customs codes in the United States, in other words, make it rational for corporations to seek areas of the world where large wage differentials make it possible to hire very large numbers of people for the purposes of assembly of US made products. However, this process is only complementary to another that is taking place since the end of the second world war, and particularly since the sixties, in so-called underdeveloped areas. 

Certainly Mexico is a case in point. Here since 1965, the Mexican government has implemented what has come to be known as the order industrialisation or maquiladora program. This is a word that I will use frequently in the next few minutes of my presentation. A maquiladora is nothing else but a subsidiary or subcontracted affiliate of a corporation, whose purpose is to assemble and export most of its production. Mexican government has offered a number of incentives and I would just like to mention three to you. One is the overhauling of the Mexican customs code precisely to complement the rationality of the American one and enable the entrance of raw materials and components into  Mexican territory for purposes of assembly. Secondly, and most important, is the fact that under the maquiladora program and since 1965, the Mexican government has allowed American corporations, and in general, foreign corporations to purchase land or to lease land through a simple trust agreement with a bank, for a period of thirty three years renewable. This, as well as the next incentive to which I will elude, is contrary to the general spirit of the Mexican constitution and the spirit of nationalization and quote "Mexicanization" of industry that has been followed in the country since the end of the Revolution. As I said, the third incentive is equally interesting, in that under the maquiladora program, foreign corporations are allowed 100% over industrial investment. The idea here is to enstir or to stimulate the involvement of US corporations primarily, and all other foreign corporations in the area of export manufacturing. Again, it is an incentive that runs contrary to the issues of both nationalization and  Mexicanization. Finally, you should know, and I'm sure that many of you know, that since 1972 that these incentives have been applied and extended beyond the border belt. They are now applied to all of Mexico with the exception of three highly industrialized areas. As a result of this, you can well say, that the juridical basis exists in the country to transform Mexico into a so-called export processing zone. And this is precisely the issue that I want to bring to your attention.  Contemporary production is a period in our history which does not exclusively focus upon the development of technology, but upon a whole transformation of the structure of production, as a continuation, or also as a break with traditional capitalistr production.

I have chosen the date of 1962 to mark the beginning of this period of contemporary production. Why 1962? It marks the date when the very well-known semiconductor company, Fairchild, moved operations for the first time to Hong Kong. In 1964, operations were moved to Korea. In 1965, Mexico with an border industrialization program was incorporated into a similar trend of development. And in the following decade, we would see the incorporation of such areas as Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius, other parts of Latin America. And now it's at this very instant, the Caribbean Basin. And all of you have heard about the famous and most innovative, imaginative, intelligent [laughter]  proposal for industrialization of the Caribbean Basin that is promulgated by the Reagan Administration.

Let me mention the five features which I think are interesting in contemporary production, and then let me focus in on those which I believe are most significant from the purposes of this particular conference. One of the features which I think is very interesting, is that of the internationalisation of the economy since the end of the Second World War which can be attributed to a second but not distinct feature, that is the increasing mobility of capital across international borders, so that one I think and rightly say, at the risk of oversimplification, but still with some degree of accuracy, that while international borders have retained their political significance, they have become increasingly permeable to the movements of capital. This is an interesting feature because it is related to still a third one, in which we see the world actually being restructured, and different parts of this geographical mosaic being redefined.  Aníbal Pinto, a well-known  Latin American sociologist, has spoken about the recent quote "opening to the exterior" of Latin American countries. Indeed, what he's referring to is precisely this propensity that underdeveloped and developing countries are demonstrating vis-a-vis advanced industrial countries. The former are being transformed increasingly into the sources of manufacturers for export. Here's where the export processing zone becomes again significant. Whereas in the past, underdeveloped countries were the sources of raw materials and of cheap labor at present, they increasingly become the sources of manufactured commodities, manufacturing certainly, in the form that I have described before, as it is represented by the maquiladoras in Mexico, and which way I will describe a little bit in more detail in a minute. But this has had very potent impact up on both ends of the geo-political spectrum. For example, in Asia and Latin America, an increasing number of people have been incorporated into industrial workforce, but it is an industrial workforce like the world has never seen before. First of all, it is industrial workforce that is producing manufacturers, not for internal consumption, and not on the basis of national productive capacity, and certainly not under the guise [audio cuts out]. The element that is at the center of the preoccupation that guides this conference is at the forefront of this tendency. Lest you believe that this is a reduced phenomena, let me remind you that only in Asia, excluding Continental China and Japan, there are at this very instant, more than 300,000 people working in export processing zones where the majority of industries are electronics. 

Under the Mexican border industrialization and maquiladora programs, at this very moment, there are approximately 200,000 people working in the subsidiaries of Sylvania, IBM, Chrysler Corporation, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, United Technologies, Motorola, etc. We're speaking about large consortia and we're speaking about some of the most developed of electronics manufacturers. According to figures collected by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, there are at present approximately 200 export processing zones operating in different parts of the so-called third world. Now certainly, what is interesting about this, to which I will again come back, is the fact that between 85 and 90% of those who work in export processing zones are women, and generally very young women, women whose ages fluctuate between 17 and 25 years. As I say, I'll return this point later, but before I do so, let me also point to the fact that the changes that are being undergone by the so-called third world are complemented by changes of profound importance that are being, that are taking place, in countries like the United States. The so-called shift from traditional manufacturing to a service economy hides a very important number of phenomena. Indeed, very often we hear about these changes, between tradition or this shift between traditional manufacturing and services, but do we often ask for two weeks open ask as to what this shift means? The Assumption which is made by certain students and certain political thinkers, including some representatives of the Reagan Administration, is that the change towards service, at service economy, is not only satisfactory but desirable considering the present day international economy. For example, we have such thinkers as Peter Drucker. I like to mention Mr. Peter Drucker often, not because he is a magnificent thinker, but because he is a management expert, and because with a certain degree of naivete and straightforwardness,  has been able to articulate the Faults of indeed multinational corporations. Rather than becoming less sophisticated, many corporate representatives have been interested in articulating a coherent series of thoughts that will enable them to justify and seek the most optimistic views about-of their actions. According to Mr. Drucker, the world is going toward ever increasing prosperity. Consider the following. Here we have under present circumstances and precisely thanks to the existence of advanced technology, [hallowed] and haled by the electronics industry, the possibility of transforming the world into a series of partnerships in shared production. And indeed, shared production is the catch phrase that has become linked to Drucker. 

What is the nature of these agreements?  Well we all know of course that there are those countries where labor is short and capital abundant, countries like the United States, and then there are those countries where labor is in abundance, but capital is scarce. Logically the most appropriate course of action for international development is to enable the existence of partnerships between countries where that balance between labor and capital is complementary and reversed. As a result of that, this will bring about very important benefits for both types of countries. The advanced economies will be able to reduce costs by transferring their operations to areas of the world where labor is less expensive, and in turn, countries of the world where there is poverty, and often times abundance of available laborers, will benefit by generating the tools for increased employment. So we're all happy and we all derive benefits from this particular paradigm. What this optimistic view of the word covers is what is precisely being uncovered by such economist as Bluestone and Harrison. In a recent book which I'm sure you're all reading avidly titled "The Deindustrialization of America," a rotten title, but an interesting concept, Bluestone and Harrison explain that according to their compilations in observing plant closings, first in New England, and then in other parts of the United States, they came to the rather staggering figure of 38 million jobs lost during the seventies as a result of plant closings in this country. They do not intend to say with this that all those jobs were destroyed permanently, but they do mean to suggest that some of those jobs were transformed radically, some of those jobs were substituted by so-called service job,s and many other of those jobs were simply exported overseas, either right across the border, or to Asia, or to other parts of the world. A simple example will suffice to give you the idea of how powerful this important shift in the economy of the world is. Considered the case of Chrysler Corporation, its pitiful situation, the fact that it knelt down on its knees and asked for forgiveness from for its past sins,  the fact that it had not invented or produced an adequate car for the consumption of American consumers [laughter] and then after having been exorcised, castigated, penalized, and forced to do penance, [laughter] it was then engulfed in the arms of the government and provided with some guaranteed loans. At that very instant, Chrysler Corporation,the profitless corporation in the United States was operating no less than 11 maquiladora in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua where all of its electrical components were being assembled by Mexican nimble-fingered women. With this example, I believe you get a rather interesting, although too simplistic idea, of what some of the impact not only of technology, but in fact of a whole international restructuring of the economy is about. 

Two final points will enable me to fulfill or to end my argument I  notice that indeed the course that the world is following is one in which the advanced industrial economies will cease to be so. As Mr. Drucker himself has calculated, although there are right now 20 million people employed in so-called manufacturing activities, traditional manufacturing activities, there will only be between 5 and 10 million by the year 2000. Instead of the jobs in traditional manufacturing, there will be an extraordinary large number of jobs created in the following sectors: orderlies, nurses, typists, janitors, restaurant and hotel assistance, etc. This in itself suggests that the shift between traditional manufacturing and service is not an emotionless and political-less transit. Indeed, just to summarize some of the consequences that we are looking at, I would argue that the United States' shift from traditional manufacturing to service economy, is actually a euphemistic way of saying "we are observing very important hopefully temporary defeats of workers in the United States." The jobs that used to provide American workers with wages that were seen as above average and benefits that were desirable are being lost to jobs which are now temporary, unstable, low-paid, often hazardous, etc. How does advanced technology fit within this interesting vista? Well indeed, advanced technology, very much as Judy so excellently described, not as the creature of human imagination as a sudden stroke of genius, but rather as a response, a process that is generated by a recognized necessity. And may I add to Judy's  presentation, that the necessity, the need is recognized by a particular class generally, not by all classes in the same way. Advanced technology indeed, as we see it at present, has enabled the fulfillment of two very important capitalist dreams. On the one hand, it has enabled capitalists to be less dependent on workers. And here is where I believe that we should return to a re-examination of the issue of skill, a very similar ways that Judith was describing. And I don't know even if we agree in our perceptions of that matter. I will leave that for a workshops later on. But certainly advanced technology encapsulated in the notion of the computer now being refreshenned  and increased with a notion of artificial intelligence and robotization, all these are artifacts, which paradoxically enough, are nothing else but the ultimate result of an old, almost infinite assortment of minute repetitious operations performed by women, very frequently in export processing zones, either within or outside of the United States. The conclusion is also that many of these machines have enabled not only less dependence upon workers, from the capitalist class, but also which is most characteristic of our contemporary stage of production, which is the geographical dispersion of the labor process. Indeed the term, the global assembly line, which was  coined by Rachel Grossman in a now classic article which appear in the Southeast Station Chronicle titled "Woman's Place in the Integrated Circuit," it is an excellent way of looking at it. In other words, here you have a situation where a single piece of imaginative, a technology such as a computer, a home computer, or even this tiny, little, and very useful artifact, a clock (which is telling me right now that I had exactly one minute to conclude this presentation) [laughter] may have been in many different parts of the world. Indeed the silicon wafers and chips that are contained in here, probably with the 64K capacity, were manufactured and produced in Silicon Valley in Northern California, in the Santa Clara Valley. Then afterwards, they were shipped to Taiwan, where women were capable and were able to assemble assemble them. And very frequently, other parts, if the product is more complex are sent to the Mexican-American border or elsewhere. Point being, that what we have here is a very large number of workers of disparate nationalities producing the components for one single similar product, a product which is in fact, always seen as a staggering representation of human imagination, not as the product of geographical dispersion of production. 

I want to bring this to your attention. Advanced technology, however, has also made a third aspect of contemporary production possible, which is the following. Technology is powerful, not only in that it really is capable of being used to alter the way in which labor processes take place. It is also useful as a political tool. At this very moment many workers in the United States are making important concessions to companies through their unions or as independent workers, because of the fear of being replaced by machines. Many feel indeed that they are at this very instant assembling the machines that will later on replace them. However, this may happen or this may not happen. Judith herself  gave us some convincing and interesting information about the fact that very often we do have cases in which production and technology increase the number of jobs rather than decrease it. But what we can be persuaded, it does put the fear of the Lord in the hearts of people who see their jobs at risk because of technological development and as a result are willing to make more concessions and give up wages for the sake of retaining their jobs. I do not have time to describe to you although you may have been interested last year and following the contractual agreements between the United Auto Workers Union and General Motors, but that is, I just mention it to you as a perfect example of a situation in which the company was totally devious in its dealings, and once the workers had given up a number of concessions the company still found ways of bringing not only the components from other parts of the world, but in fact the whole car. [...] if I'm not mistaken. 

Let me mention in order to conclude then, only three more features. Observe then, that what we have here are two sides to the same process. On the one hand, we have very important changes which are not only economic, technological, but also political occurring in the United States. And let me also remind you that the concept of the export processing zone is not only a curious and interesting concept being developed in cheap labor countries. Look at the definition of a so-called urban enterprise zone, an idea dear to the Reagan Administration, presumably with a purpose of stimulating investment in quote "depreciated areas and ghetto areas," and which is based also upon the notion of reducing minimum wages by half. The idea is then is to provide companies to invest and to come to cities and hire teenaged workers or minority workers, predominantly black workers, in the assembly of similar products to the ones that are being assembled in export processing zones elsewhere in the world. On the other hand, we have in the third world, the emergence of a very important of new industrial workforce which is formed by women, and predominantly young women. Again returning to the countries like the United States, the emergence of the so-called cottage industries. Judy mentioned the electronic sweatshop. That's certainly very important to remember this time, and may I remind you also of another political aspect to this process. Consider, as was considered in the article that she cited or that Bettina Burch cited that have came out in The Nation.  The situation that the so-called cottage industry is being sponsored and actually praised by some very conservative sectors in this society. Why members of the Moral Majority and supporters of the Family Opportunity Act see the possibility of using home computers and other technological paraphernalia as perfectly appropriate in order to retain or provide "homebound workers" quote "with employment, particularly women with domestic responsibilities. As I point out in my paper this is not a very original representation of the so-called double burden syndrome for women. So as a result of many of these trends come on the one hand, the deterioration of life standards, of living standards as a result of many of these processes that I have described, the changes in the economic structure within the United States. You also have the need for women to continue being employed. I think that the new development of technology and advanced technology itself casts an entirely different light upon women's legitimate right to have a remunerated job. And I hope said one of the tasks of this conference will be precisely to examine what the impact of this kind of technology will be when in fact, it can be taken to the home itself in order to reproduce a form of production strikingly similar to that which existed in the 19th century. My final words have to do with Southern California. Here we have discovered in a sample of 300 Mexican workers, women workers, working in the United States without proper documentation. In other words, in a sample of 300 undocumented Mexican women, that one-third of them are women who have worked in the maquiladora industry on the Mexican side of the border and that's now after being ejected only after a few years of time from their jobs (this is a highly replaceable workforce that is being created in the third world) they look for New Alternatives by migrating to the United States and can now be found working at the margins of the electronics industry and assembling electronic goods in their own homes. Again a phenomenon strikingly similar to that which we have observed in other stages of capitalist development. But here what we observe too is a curious situation. On the one hand sophisticated computers and technological paraphernalia, on the other hand the geographical dispersion of the production that leads to their creation, and in those countries, the exacerbation of many social problems as a result of the introduction of this new form of industrialization, and then, in turn, the production of a new class of migrants who then come to the same areas where capital has migrated away from, in order to find jobs at the margins of the most developed and most advanced of those industries. And isn't it ironic in the last analysis, that it is the electronics industry that has been seen by the Reagan Administration as the most viable course for quote "revitalizing and industrializing the United States. Thank you very much. [Applause]  

Bettina Berch:Thank you.  I have the pleasure of introducing to you (if you want to move around for a second maybe, that'd be a good idea. No no no, not getting up. [laughter] Just breathe for a minute.) I want to introduce to you, Donna Haraway. She teaches feminist theory and the history of science, in the History of Consciousness program of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her current research is both on the history of primate behavior studies, and the construction of a feminist theory of science. Donna...[Applause]

Donna Haraway: We disassemble and reassemble bodies when we're cyborgs so that certain prosthetic devices are no longer necessary. [laughs, laughter] Okay. The title of this talk is "New Machines, New Bodies, New Communities: Political Dilemmas for a Cyborg Feminist." one of my students suggested before I left that it ought to be called "Confessions of a Cyborg Feminist," on the notion that any important sense of pleasure or connection with the realization that we are historically cyborgs ought to be resisted by feminists with every part of our action and our bodies. And I would like instead to propose a set of suggestions that have to do with ambivalence and to try to explore what kind of politics that seriously give women internationally, and across the barriers of class and race, power, in the face of ambivalence and partiality and fragmentation when we have no clear single line or any clear grasp of what's happening, when so much of what's happening is very confusing in many ways. 

But let me begin by quoting for you something that was ascribed to a spokesperson, a spokeswoman, for the association, from the Association for Women in Computing, a newspaper article that appeared in the San Jose Mercury, which is a press in the middle of the Santa Clara Silicon Valley near where I live. This woman was quoted as having said, which I think is different from having said, [laughter] this woman was quoted as having said, that other women are afraid of the computer, other women working with video display terminals, indeed do experience stress. I think she was aware of the finding of the National Institute of Health and Safety that the highest stress job in the United States ,by the ratings of that national organization, the highest stress job is the full-time video display terminal operator. The stress ratings are higher than they are for air traffic controllers or any other male or female job. This is full time, nothing else built into the job. Her explanation of this experience of stress was that women are afraid of the machine and that with proper lighting and  a little bit of adjustment of the height of the machine, women would somehow, if they could only overcome their psychological stress problem, have some kind of serious control of the machine. That in the face of what we've heard today, I think ought to be a plain kind of serious problem in developing for women who are politically conscious about the new technologies. Some kind of coherent political strategy on the face of of what we ought to know, universally as feminist women, that the introduction of advanced technologies in the history of industrial capitalism has been intended to make people work harder and to transfer, perhaps not skill, but control, and to relocate skill in a political system, so that whether skill increases or decreases, by some measure, a skill separated from political powe,r however you would measure that, that the relocation is of control. And that's what the advanced technologies are about. 

Now as I think you know from feminist science fiction, a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, that is, a hybrid, a chimera, a being with confused boundaries, a being that is an information-processing device and an organism, a biotic component in electronic communication system-in short ourselves. [Laughter] Now, as an historian of science and technology, and as a lapsed biologist, I've spent a lot of time looking at the body as a map of power. And I want to look today at the cyborg body as a particularly interesting kind of map of power. And I would like to suggest that as a source of imagination, a source of politics, and a source of analytical understanding, feminists as a group with all of our differences, have got to let go of a particular analytical tool and pick up another one. The one I think we simply must let go of is any version of an understanding of the world according to a public-private split, and I consider the relationship of political and personal, the relation of mind and body in many ways, the relationship of male and female, and the way most feminists and particularly white feminists have approached race as examples of mistakes. By moving from an understanding of the world as really divided into public and private components so that our political task is in some way imagined as the expansion of the private into the public, or the statement that the public is the private, or some kind of way of continuing to accept that this is a description of the world, as women and other people have lived in it. I think there are several sources for what I think is an imaginative and an analytical mistake in the history of feminist thought. Aome of the sources have to do with the location of so many feminist theorists in the academy, in the University, where we have inherited often uncritically the tools of reworking Greek political theory, that work from an understanding of the world divided into public and private spaces. We also have inherited an understanding of the world from the period of the Victorian white middle-class, and the feminism that went along with it, that argued that the factory and the home, the public space and the private space were truly divided. We've inherited an ideological picture of the world tried to turn into feminist tools. What I would suggest among other things, is it the understanding of the world divided in this Victorian middle-class way, is one of the reasons that we systematically missed that the reality of the world for most working-class women had nothing to do with a split between private and public, and it certainly the reality of the world for the forced labor of black slave women in the United States was not a public-private world but forced production reproduction integrated into a system of world production of which slavery was an intrinsic part of the development of industrial capitalism, that what's happening by the late 20th century, is that internationally and across race and class, we can no longer miss that we are women in the integrated circuit, and then we are not women in the world divided into public and private spaces.  I think that the integrated circuit metaphor that Rachel Grossman gave us is an extremely rich source for our imagination, for our political analysis, and for our political organization.

Now I would like to look at metaphors for a few minutes, that have to do with women in the integrated circuit, metaphors that I think are profoundly ambivalent for us. The metaphors all have to do with imagining the possibility of networking, or of connection, of coalition in a world in which we really do no longer believe in essential natural substances, in which we truly no longer believe that there is something like a woman that we can recover, either through making her speak historically, that there is nothing pure and original in anyone's voice to recover, but instead we have partial identity, fragmentation,a possibility of connection, but it's an extremely fragile possibility, and an effort to imagine our politics in an integrated circuit which we have not to date designed. 

First of all, let me suggest the metaphor of the cyborg or the chimera, the one around which I organized the title of this paper. The cybernetic organism or cyborg showed up in a story by Anne McCaffrey called "The Ship Who Sang," which many people in the room have probably read. It involved the implantation of the nervous system of a severely handicapped baby into an advanced technological device that was a spaceship, and her education as this cyborg to be a scout ship paired with a human symbiont for dventures around the universe. the notion of the technological device, integrated crossing boundaries with a part of the organism. The breakdown of boundaries involveg in this cybernetic device and the sense of imagination of what consciousness of the world might possibly be lik,e if you took seriously a prosthetic device notion of a cyborg, that to be a cyborg is a kind of reintegration extension of the capacity of being in the world.  The breakdown of the boundary between human and machine, between human and animal, between mind and body, between self and other, between self and environment, the imagination and the extreme pleasure built into this and other stories, of ourselves as integrated into a world where boundaries are no longer are to be defended, but are to be explored, that are to be fluidly possible. We've heard Patricia talking about the permeability of national boundaries to capital and watched the world system power working and being restructured. But its feminists too who can take control of the imagination and the reconstruction of boundaries when we understand that boundaries are strategic devices for control, and are not ontological structures put in the world by a designing deity, which has been our primary mythological understanding. So if we have an understanding of the body as chimeric, as cyborgian, among the understandings I think feminist need to rework are understandings around race and sex gender because we no longer exist as women [laughs] in this framework within a sex gender system, or as total women from the point of view of the right. Instead we exist as creatures who are structured as female in partial and fragmentary ways, that nonetheless have a great deal to do with the domination of biologies of bodies and people who are structured as female,  but  we get a sense that to be female, to be people of a particular race or color, is to have a strategic identity and a world in which powers are being rearranged, that sex is a local phenomenon, and race is a local phenomenon of extreme importance in the imposition of power, but these are not essential identities that can in some sense be restructured. So that search for a kind of essential self, I think gives way in an imagination that is partly prompted by the machines of which we are deeply deeply afraid. 

I would also like to suggest a metaphor that comes from a friend of mine at M.I.T. named Sharon Traweek, a graduate of  History of Consciousness program, who thinks of machines, the contemporary - Oh, Sharon did a book, is doing a book called Uptown - no - "Uptime, Downtime, SpaceTime: an ethnography of the particle physics communities in Japan and Palo Alto - [laughter] wonderful feminist activists for years and years, Sharon has begun to imagine what modern machines are like namely invisible. There is if you compare the machines of the Communications Revolution to the machines of the Industrial Revolution, our machines are oddly invisible while they are ubiquitous. For example, the little digital clock that Patricia has sitting over there on her, [laughs, laughter] on her table is, I think, an example of a node from which communication and power flows, buta kind of object that takes the medieval clock tower which was so critical and rearranging the structure of daily time in the origins of European capitalism and put it into a kind of visual framework for us. The machines that we are working with are oddly immobile, they don't have working parts. If you look in the magazines - they don't have moving parts - if you look in the magazines that advertise them, you find a very curious visual poverty in the machines themselves, okay, at a poverty that is oddly connected with the, with the eclectic reaching out of symbolic moments, from other mythological systems, mythological systems of Genesis and creation, mythological systems of the importance of the author and the text, and the origin of the word, like quotation marks or images of a text that are appearing in an ad. You find an eclectic reaching out for imaginations, for moments out of mythic systems that come together to somehow mark these odd almost filmic machines, and of course, film itself is a privileged technological moment within the Communications Revolution. Film itself is the eye that has transformed the organic eye into the technological eye, and is the major late 20th century art form in the third world as well as in the so-called first world.  Sharon has done some very interesting work in imagining the machine as a film that disappears as it is ubiquitous, that used to be a trick only God could play. I think that we have, in a sense, an electronic God.

Another friend of mine named Rip Gordon has been playing with the imaginations and metaphors around time, and has pointed out the importance of the phrase, "real time" in the computer world. Now real time is shared time, real time is online time, and real time is instantaneous time. That is to say, real time is a time made possible by a set of machines largely invisible to us, and terribly miniaturized, in the same way that our own neurons are terribly miniaturized information processing subsystems or biotic components.  Real time is made possible by a rate of processing of a nearly invisible machine that is sufficiently faster than our physiological time, such that information can be exchanged, processed, and read back to us so quickly that lumbering human cyborgs see it as instantaneous. Real-time also tecnologizes the kind of now-generation culture mythology and makes all other kinds of time, like historical time, or future time, for which you are responsible in a way that Marge Piercy tried to make visible in Woman on the Edge of Time, where the past was the contestanted zone. Real time is an image that obliterates the seriousness of all other time and instead says time is comparison of right processing systems and where you can integrate yourself in a rate processing system.

Another set of metaphors comes from another Santa Cruz freak. She worries - this is Zoë Sofoulis, an Australian feminist who worries about techno-monsters and techno-sex.  She's interested in the confusion of organic and technological elements, such that the creatures made, drain energy from the organic, particularly organic reproduction, and transfer energy into a technosex monster concerned with production, a kind of phallocratic, extraterrestrial move and science fiction films. [Laughter] She's great. Okay, she's anlyzed in particular, the film Alien, in which there is an alternation of generations, a wonderful techno-biological imagination of a monster erupting from different parts of the body that are heavily mythically loaded, the brain, the gut, a monster that takes on the mythic meanings of a consuming, the consuming penis-breast or ]phenis]. She's interested in the psychoanalytic poetics of the technosex monsters in science fiction film, as a clue to power. Okay? 

Another person, Nancy Snyder, has been interested in the film Tron, which is undoubtedly the successor to Walt Disney's Fantasia. It is the technological animation.  Of course you know Tron was made by the Walt Disney Studios and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, whose major mission in the world is the development of nuclear weapons. Tron as the successor to Fantasia, makes a number of terribly important translations of the status of beings in the world. For example, in one place in the film, an orange is digitalized by a laser, read out of a room, processed in some way, and read back, still full of vitamin C and totally edible. Later in the film, the main character interfaces with a computer and its trying to operate to destroy master control program, interfaces with a computer, and makes a mistake, and enters a kind of dream state and is brought into the machine where he makes the discovery, as any dream-state quester will make, that he is - that users and programs are ambiguous in relation to each other. That  there is no ontological distinction between users and programs, and emerges from the machine, with the knowledge that makes him a computer corporate executive.

 Now, one more metaphor before I go onto what I think is something of the structure of daily life in a world where imaginations work like this, and the metaphor is C³I - Control Command Communications Intelligence. It's a military metaphor and you find it if you read military hardware advertising magazines,  or military software advertising magazines, or read the reports on military budgets. You find a kind of mathematical icon,  C³I standing for the structure of the world, where the problem is the integration of command, control, communication, and intelligence, and you find that the worldwide organization for the destruction, the worldwide organization for apocalypse, that in the United States in basic research and development right now, is probably using about 50 billion dollars a year for research and development money right now. That may be a low figure, in other words, a very important area of social organization. You find also a disappearance of hardware in an odd kind of move in the imagination and its substitution of a control strategy that is visually almost invisible, not just that the missiles are in fact underground, and in some basic way not visible to the population, but you find you can go to a military show with the most advanced moves in the military power in the world are programs. Our C³I machinery, our communications machinery, you can find that the very large scale integrated circuit research is intimately dependent on military priorities, and further miniaturization, further architectural changes, that reduce again, the military's extraordinary real presence in our lives kind of invisible film of C³I.  

We also have a tremendous range of imaginations in contemporary women's science fiction. We have the figure in Joanna Russ's "Female Man," or the four figures in Joanna Russ's "Female Man," figures which eliminate any possible imagination, I think, of essential identities for a woman.  The four "J's" in Joanna Russ's  "Female Man," all have to take responsibility for violence, for their own partial identities, for their inheritance of the violence of those immediately preceding them. They have to take responsibility for not having an origin, for not having an identity, in an impossible and inappropriate Western mythological system. Now, let me move through from these metaphors to the second half of, or part of my talk, what you called the dream of a common language in the Communications Revolution, or, An Informatics of Domination and Women's Lives in the Integrated Circuit. First of all, I would like to sketch what I think is the reality of women's lives in the integrated circuit, which has nothing to do with trying to figure out what is public and what is private and how those things ought to be changed.  I would like to look for a moment at home, market, workplace, state, school, church, army, farm, spaces - multiple spaces - and suggest that they are interfaced with each other, disassembled and reassembled, that sex, race, work exist in all of them, that what we are seeing is a reality, a structural reality, in women's lives, and also in other people's lives, that reflects an informatics of domination. For example consider the home in advanced late 20th century US Society where women are faced with the demographic reality of serial monogamy in the flight of the male, where women are faced with the reality of women head of household, where black women and third world women in particular are faced with the feminization of poverty related to those households, with the necessity of continuing supplied wage, the money. We are faced with the irrelevance of the technology of domestic labor to truly reducing the labor to women of any class, but rather of the arrangement of the labor and we are faced with an extraordinary expansion on a worldwide basis of out-work, homework. The electronic cottage for women of the middle class in the United States means at home professional consulting jobs and for all other women in the United [cuts off]