Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)

As a theorist, Mumford is no better or worse than any other commentator on technology, past or present.  I don't know whether it's good or bad that he had so many job titles: sociologist, historian, philosopher, student of architect, literary critic.  It's good that he had access to so many varied fields of study - Mr Inter-disciplinary personified.  Knowledge from one domain can enrich and provide a new perspective in another.  But it's bad in the sense that it seems he flitted from one area to another, with a finger in every pie.  Couldn't he stick at one subject and become an expert in that?

Mumford's writing can provide some useful background to my research in the sense that he lived through the period under investigation.  Whereas his ideas are certainly not representative, they do give a taste of contemporary notions on technology.  He expresses some novel (to us) thoughts on communication in his Technics and Civilization (1934).  Telecommunications meant that an individual acquired more and more contacts, which also made increasing demands on that person's time and attention.  Nothing new here.  But these demands, Mumford asserts, result in a weakening of "reflective thought and deliberate action."  More time chatting on the phone means less time available for reading, writing and drawing.  Isn't this true though of all/most forms of communications technology?  Television, laptops, iPhones, internet all divert our attention away from reading/writing/drawing.  I'm not sure how widespread television was in 1930s America, but certainly the telephone and radio were then the only devices capable of distracting middle-class Americans.

Mumford believed the telephone was overused and that people made calls for "personal intercourse" too frequently.  Instead, he recommended that lots of short calls could be easily condensed into a short written note.  A hand-written note requires less time and effort (!) and consumes less "nervous energy."  I'm not sure if Mumford is a bit behind his times with this concern about nervous energy.  With the appearance of each technical innovation, doomsayers foresaw catastrophe for the human race.  Racing along in the first steam train (or bicycle, or motor car) was bad for the heart and nervous system.  Telephone operators suffered from nervous exhaustion and hysteria because they had to answer so many calls per hour and had subscribers yelling in their ears.  The ringing of the telephone bell during dinner was bad for the digestion and delayed the postprandial brandy.  And so on and so forth.  The appearance of a new technology will always have its fanatic supporters and detractors.  But I would have thought that such ideas about telephone communication would be long extinct by the 1930s.  


Mumford also complains of an overuse of inventions, even when there is no real need for them.  (If they are there, then why not use them?)  He gives the example of the phonograph.  People stopped learning to play the violin, he claims, and listened to the phonograph instead.  I don't know on what he bases this assertion, nor how he can equate the two activities.  He implies that a live music performance is better than the "passive" activity of listening to records.  In this respect he does have a point.  But how many of us are able to perform Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, say, or get Guns n' Roses to perform November Rain live in our living rooms when the mood takes us?  This is the era of mass production.  Ready-made products are being manufactured in greater number and the hard sell is in full force.  Families are buying factory-produced jam - it's easier and quicker than making your own.  The same holds true for making music.


In 1959 Mumford wrote an appraisal of Technics and Civilization, in which he resorts to a gendered image of various technologies.  Technics with dynamic tools and machines, and "artificial extensions" (read: protuberances) of limbs, hands, teeth are masculine.  On the other hand, containers of various kinds (read: receptacles for aforementioned protuberances) e.g. cisterns, irrigation canals, barns, reservoirs, are passive and feminine.  They store potential energy and further "chemical, biological, and social reactions."  I'm sure that with Mumford's background in literary criticism, he was well aware of the impact this binary opposition would impart.

Can it be that Mumford was alone in adhering to this gendered vision of technology?  Maybe not, and if I can find others who voice similar attitudes then perhaps I can make the sweeping statement that 'people in the interwar years believed in 'male' and 'female' technologies.'  But in locating these others, I fear I am being guilty of having a theory and looking for evidence to support it. 

Victorian call centres

Victorians had qualities which mark them out even to this day: thrift, hard work, a practical nature, a mentality of self-help.  Such qualities, I believe, are borne out of the nature of their society; there was no social security network, for example, to go to when they fell on hard times.  If there was no family to help, then people in distress would have to rely on their own resources.

Widows were especially vulnerable.  Losing a husband meant they had to become the breadwinner overnight.  For women of the lower classes, going out to work was not so remarkable and it was relatively easy to earn money.  The major forms of employment were domestic service or factory work.  For the middle class woman, however, paid employment was simply not an option.  The most she could hope for was a position as governess or companion to old ladies.  Both meant living in and a drop in social status.  And the money earned would have been peanuts.

One highly practical solution for such widows was the practice of giving them a sewing machine as a present.  This was not charity and allowed the widow to become self-sufficient.  Working from home, the widow maintains respectability, and performs a task considered appropriate for women.  She could receive orders for new garments or domestic textiles, or take in alterations.

But why bother with a sewing machine?  Close needlework ruins your eyesight (remember, they only had gas or oil lamps then) and you get a hump back bending over your work.  Some projects would take days or weeks to finish.  A much better alternative to the donated sewing machine is – wait for it – a telephone. 

A writer identifying herself (I think we can safely assume the writer is female) as “Self Help” sent in a suggestion to an 1884 periodical,[1] saying that the gift of a telephone connection to the central exchange is an inordinately better income generator than a sewing machine.  Here are some of the ways the widow can exploit her telephone (and simultaneously exploit her friends):

1. Send out flyers to her lady friends that she can now order goods on their behalf from local traders, who are also connected by telephone.  They might order the following: flowers, fish, theatre tickets, coal, wine.  The writer believes that traders would be willing to pay the widow 10% commission for all orders she puts their way.
2. She could allow merchants and their employees to use her telephone for business purposes.  They pay a few pennies to the widow and telephone the office to say they would be an hour late. 

Given a choice, I would opt for the telephone.  It’s much easier than labouring over a sewing machine that’s not even electric.  Turning your front parlour into a one-woman call centre has a lot going for it – intense networking with friends and local business people; no commuting every day; being at home to look after children.

This idea surfaced during the telephone's first decade in Britain.  It shows amazing entrepreneurial spirit and innovative thinking on how to put a new technology to good use.

I still maintain that the technological practices and gadgets that we consider ultra modern and super digital are not in the slightest bit new or original – they are merely faster/bigger/cheaper versions of what the Victorians did before us.

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[1] Work and leisure: a magazine devoted to the interests of women.  London: F. Kirby, 1884.

Sex discrimination, in the opposite direction

“There are now 120 women in the Berlin telephone exchanges.  It has been decided to use only women in the future, as it has been found that their voices are much more audible than men’s, owing to the higher pitch.”

The American Magazine, 1891

… and, of course, you don’t have to pay a woman such high wages, as you would a man.

Women, Work, and Works of Art

BWS’s blog It’s About Time features extraordinary works of art with “uncommon grace,” to use the author’s own words.

The title of the latest blog post caught my eye: "19th & 20th Century Women Working".

I’m not sure what I expected to find, perhaps depictions of women using technologies in their daily chores, or at work in an office.  (Here I admit I have been prejudiced by an ‘obsession’ with new technologies of that era.)  But I was pleasantly surprised to see women working at all manner of simple jobs, without mechanical aids.  Predictably, most women are shown doing something connected with food.

My preconceptions, I see, have coloured my judgement.  The phrase ‘working women’ immediately brings to my mind scenes of women labouring in factories, or working switchboards, or scribbling at office desks.  If not in paid employment, then the woman would be at home - cooking, cleaning, caring – with or without the aid of labour-saving devices.  Yet women work everywhere and everytime, paid and unpaid, sometimes acknowledged and sometimes not.  There is work, and then there is work.  Call me a Marxist/Feminist if you like, but if every woman woke up tomorrow morning, deciding to take the week off from domestic chores and disappear, then the whole western capitalist system would collapse, IMHO.

By necessity, some selection process would have been necessary before showing the paintings but I can imagine that there aren’t too many works of art that show women, say, using a vacuum cleaner, or working on the production line in a factory.  On this point, I would love to be proved wrong.  From an aesthetic viewpoint, bucolic scenes of women harvesting or caring for children are much more palatable and leave our sensibilities undisturbed.

"Complaints against women"

Writing in 1894, Miss Agnes Amy Bulley and Miss Margaret Whitley (prefaced by Lady Dilke!) elaborate on the many career choices open to women in the late Victorian era.  One of these areas is clerical and commercial work in the General Post Office.  I have already discussed elsewhere the working conditions and benefits employees could expect.

Not only do the Misses Bulley and Whitley describe careers at the GPO, but they feel it necessary to mention the fact that members of the public have lodged complaints about the shoddy service they have received.  Things got so bad that the Postmaster-General himself (Sir James Fergusson) felt compelled to issue a circular, requiring "greater civility" from the girls when dealing with the public.

Customers experienced "indifference and carelessness" from the telephone girls, who seemed to have forgotten that "important business transactions" were being conducted.  The authors even report that at one exchange, which they refuse to name, the Post Office had to resort to replacing the women with men.  Undoubtedly, everyone in the town would know which office this was; it would have been the only one with an all-male staff working the day shift.  A newspaper editor was always glad when the day shift (worked by women) was over and the night shift (worked by men) came on.  Reading between the lines, the authors merely mention the subject as a warning: 'behave yourselves, girls, or else this new line of work will be cut off to you in the future.'

Young boys were the first telephone operators but they didn't last long.  They kept messing about and had to be replaced by docile, obedient young women.  You only need to look at any contemporary photographs to see rows of young women seated at their switchboards, backs ramrod straight, a matron-figure patrolling behind them and the managers/engineers seated at their own desk to one side or in the middle of the room.  These girls didn't even have a chance to exchange a surreptitious glance with their neighbour, never mind being insolent to a caller.  And, of course, if the call was for business, then the caller undoubtedly would have been male and much older than the operator.

I find it strange that the authors inserted this paragraph ("Complaints against Women") in what is essentially a careers guide for young women, having details of wages, qualifications, etc.  There are many other jobs described in the book (teaching, commerce, textile trade) but nowhere does it mention customers complaining about employees' behaviour.  On the contrary, quite often the authors describe grievances attached to certain professions, such as low wages, long hours and so on.  Readers thus gain an honest picture of what's in store for them.  It's almost as if the Post Office told them to write this paragraph?


A. Amy Bulley, Margaret Whitley.  Women's Work.  London: Methuen, 1894.
 

Rulers of the wire

Summary of "'Rules of the Wires'?  Women's Contribution to the Structure of Means of Communication"
Michele Martin
Journal of Communication Inquiry 1988; 12; 89

1. Definition of communication from Raymond Williams, Armand Mattelart [i.e. it represents a real link between real people within a real time & space, and the link has different forms according to the social groups involved]
2. Women as producers and consumers of communication: (a) Operators; (b) Consumers [party lines, easing of burden of housework, gossip]
3. Women's social life before the phone
4. Bell's advertising of phone
5. Women insisted on using phone in their own way -- Bell forced to re-evaluate how it developed the phone system.
6. Phone's impact: housewives modified their habits - characteristics of their regular haunts changed e.g. before they used to go to market to shop and socialise with friends; now they go only to shop.