WOMEN AND THE MACHINE

"Engaging and entertaining"--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For more information see womenandthemachine.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I Framing Images of Women and Machines
II Wired For Fashion: Images of Bustles,Corsets, and
Crinolines in the Mechanical Age
III The Electric Eve
IV Women and the Bicycle
V Women and the Automobile
VI Women and Aviation
VII Women in Wartime: From Rosie the Riveter to Rosie
the housewife
CODA The Electronic Eve and Late-Twentieth-
Century Art

DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE: Artists, photographers, advertisers and writers present images--many in color--of nineteenth-century women and sewing machines, typewriters, looms, The New Woman, and more, including women as goddesses and sexy lures in machine advertising. Artists poke fun of women as technologically naive, while also portraying women demonstrating their mechanical skills.

CHAPTER TWO: Newly-invented corsets, bustles, and steel-cage crinolines helped nineteenth-century women shape their bodies and fulfill fashion ideals. Artists and photographers picture women as elegant and awkward, regal and ridiculous.

CHAPTER THREE: Images of women as goddesses of electricity, automatons, models in electrical advertisements,users of electric household machines.

CHAPTER FOUR: Women riding bicycles experience a new sense of freedom and mobility even as satirists fret that they'll ride off, leaving leave their husbands and families behind.

CHAPTER FIVE: From the 1890s onward, women automobilists welcome these new vehicles of change even as satirists lampoon the wayward woman driver. Females and their automobiles become emblems of the modern woman, even as advertisers feature women as beautiful models in automobile advertising.

CHAPTER SIX: Pioneering female flyers challenge stereotypes about women's limited abilities. Images of decorative women in aviation posters vie with images of women flyers in World War I and II. Women artists and photographers (including Margaret Bourke-White) feature airplanes in their work.

CHAPTER SEVEN: Women war workers in World War I and II transform their identities as they demonstrate their expertise. Images by artists, photographers, writers, and advertisers portray female automobile and airplane mechanics, welders, riveters, machinists, railway workers. These images reveal women's struggle to maintain a sense of femininity amidst the machines, and make the transition from Rosie the Riveter to Rosie the housewife in the postwar world.

CODA: Women artists draw on new technologies including digital imaging to represent female identity in their work.