Teaching a Feminist Technology History with More Work for Mother: A Unit Guide
Civics of Tech Announcements
Monthly Tech Talk on Tuesday, 06/04/24. Join our monthly tech talks to discuss current events, articles, books, podcast, or whatever we choose related to technology and education. There is no agenda or schedule. Our next Tech Talk will be on Tuesday, May 7th, 2024 at 8-9pm EST/7-8pm CST/6-7pm MST/5-6pm PST. Learn more on our Events page and register to participate.
3rd Annual Conference Announcement: We are excited to announce that our third annual Civics of Technology conference will be held online on August 1st, from 11-4 pm EST and on August 2nd, 2024 from 11-3pm! Our featured keynotes will be Dr. Tiera Tanksley and Mr. Brian Merchant. You can register, submit proposals, and learn more on our 2024 conference page. Proposals are due by June 14th!
June Book Club on Tuesday, 06/18/24: For our next book club we will Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein! The book club will be led by Dr. Marie Heath. We will meet at 8pm EDT on Tuesday, June 18th, 2024. You can register on our events page. Another summer book club is coming too.
by Alexandra Thrall & Paige Arnell
To prepare to join my first Civics of Technology book club in July 2022, I (Allie) went to my local public library to take out the assigned book: Ruth Schwart Cowan’s, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. With the jotted-down call number in hand, I walked to the aisle where I expected to find it among other history books. Instead, I found myself peering at stacks of cookbooks and scratching my head. I reread the call number and checked that I was in the right place. I even called over a passing librarian to make sure that I was not mistaken in my location. Finally, it dawned on me that I was not lost. The book that I was looking for to understand the relationship between household technologies and women’s labor in American history had been relegated to the genre of kitchen how-to’s. Alas, women’s work remains in the kitchen afterall.
The glaring miscategorization of this book reifies the need for school history curricula that interrogates the intersections of technology, gender, and labor. As the brilliant Civics of Technology crowd has agreed, More Work for Mother has the potential to serve as a curricular resource to achieve just that. In this groundbreaking work, Cowan demonstrates that the household technologies, which traditional school histories have long characterized as liberating and time-saving devices for women, actually eliminated male household labor, while creating more work for women. Throughout the book she illuminates the historical contingencies and shifting social norms that shaped technological systems and work processes of American households, from the colonial era to the 1980’s (when the book was published). Using this book as a curricular resource has the potential to facilitate an exploration of technologies’s intended and unintended consequences, challenging assumptions behind technological “progress”, and upend naturalized assumptions about the gendered division of labor, while allotting curricular value to women’s work in the private sphere.
Having enlisted the help of fellow educator and fellow mother, Paige Arnell, we set about developing resources to teach with More Work for Mother. In the More Work for Mother Unit Guide, graciously housed on the Civics of Tech website, we provide lesson plans and supporting resources for a middle grades project-based unit. While this unit was originally taught in Allie’s 8th grade United States history class, we have already adapted and taught it in upper elementary classes, and could imagine it slotting nicely into high school history and/or economics classes. The unit culminates in a project that invites students to collect their own empirical evidence to answer the question: how has housework changed or stayed the same since Ruth Schwartz Cowan wrote More Work for Mother? Overall, this unit allows students to move from a critical inquiry of technology, gender, and labor in the past, into an interrogation of how that past has come to shape our present assumptions and practices. We hope that the lessons and resources support teachers in adapting More Work for Mother and these lines of historical inquiry for their own class contexts. For questions or concerns, feedback or follow-ups, we would love to hear from you at Allie_Thrall1@baylor.edu.
Author Bios
Alexandra (Allie) Thrall is the mother of two small kids, a former 8th grade history teacher, and current doctoral researcher in Baylor University’s Department of Curriculum & Instruction. Her research focuses on the interplay between technological developments and civic possibilities, and the implications for teaching and learning.
Paige Arnell is the mother of four children, a former high school English teacher, and current Dean of Curriculum at Kirby Hall School in Austin, Texas. While literacy has always been her primary focus, she finds herself drawn more and more to studying systems of education, specifically exploring the ways school structures can support imagination, curiosity, and critical thinking.