Review of Processed Lives : Gender and Technology in Everyday Life

The body of literature treating the interface between gender and technology has flourished in recent years to the extent that the subject has begun to exist independently of parent disciplines, with dedicated study groups such as that at the Open University. This collection of essays edited by Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert joins notable examples such as Judy Wajcman's Feminism Confronts Technology (1991), Silverstone and Hirsch's anthology Consuming Technologies:
Media and Information in Domestic Spaces (1992) and Ruth Schwarz Cowen's More Work for Mother: the Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (1983). The stated importance of gender in these
studies varies from Wajcman's attack on masculine technology to discussions in which the association of women with the domestic space is merely implicit. Editors Terry and
Calvert have not allowed a mutation of 'Women's Studies' into 'Gender Studies' to obscure the necessary exploration of that which is particular to women's lives.