On the Joy and Glory of Modern Devices

[sakon76]

I love my crockpot. I love my rice cooker. Between them they make making dinner fairly easy and stress-free. I love the dish washer, which ensures that most of the dishes I don't have to do by hand, and I love the clothing washer and drier, which also make life immeasurably easier. I love the electric iron, and the electric microwave, and the gas stove. I even love the vacuum cleaner. Because combined all of these things mean that in a middle-class household such as ours one person doesn't have to stay at home all the time just to get food on the table, clothing cleaned and presentable, and the house tidy. I'm able to go out and have a job and earn money. Of course, society has accordingly shifted such that it's necessary for both partners to work, but still I end up wondering... would women's lib have been possible in the absence of an industrial revolution? Which is the symptom, and which the cause...?

Comments

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about that question for a while. I concluded that while women's status does change from culture to culture and time period to time period, full womens lib as we know it, with women being able to work out of the home and the like, IS largely dependant on technology.

And not just the obvious technology either. Advances in medicine played a huge role, especially in dealing with obsteretics and childhood diseases. Not having half of the children die in childhood meant that women didn't have to spend much of their life having large familes. Likewise, the shift toward an urban, industrialized soiety meant that people didn't have to have large families in order to provide for their old age.

To relate this to writing: one of the failures of Suspension of Disbelief I've been having recently has involved societies with medieval level oftechnology, and essentially twentieth century social attitudes. It relies on the author handwaving away or ignoring the reasons why social attitudes were the way they were, the better to promote a sense of pseudo-nostalgia.

My recommendation to counter this is of course, "The Family Trade" by Charles Stross, which deals with a 21st century woman encountering a medieval society. It's not nostalgic at all.