Are techno-optimists right? Can Care AI offer women a better organized, fairer, and more carefree existence? History suggests otherwise.Technofeminism has long criticized the idea that technology is the solution to the problem that has no name. In her influential 1985 book, More Work for Mother, historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan documented how the rise of “labor saving” domestic technologies like washing machines and vacuums actually increased women’s load by raising cleanliness standards and expanding housewives' responsibilities. Because technology is laid over existing cultural beliefs and social relations, it rarely fixes social problems. Innovation has not brought about women’s liberation. In fact, it’s added to women’s plates.

For example, women in early times had many rights andfreedoms: they could own property, run businesses, and representthemselves in court.

I have been dreaming in a troubled sleep Of weary days I thought not to recall; Of stormy days, whose storms are hushed long since; Of gladsome days, of sunny days; alas!

Here, she pokes fun at the fickle customs of upper-crust British society, which tended to base a woman's worth on external appearances, instead of internal qualities like intelligence and compassion.

Margaret Mary (Clancy) Sugrue, who managed the home.

Moreover, consider how contemptuously radical feminism is treating the "unacceptable" choices of these adult women. If a woman enjoys consuming pornography, it is not because she comes from another background, has a different psychological makeup, different goals in life or an unusual perspective. No: it is because she is mentally incompetent.

n the 19th century, women battled to become the legal equals of men, to have their consent taken seriously in the form of contracts and to have control of their own bodies legally recognized.

What he does write about with some frequency is the fact that women initiate a distinct majority of divorces.

Peg Costello: I love Legal - it's all men!

Mulan uses expedient means to carry out a task and, having succeeded, seems to return to exactly who she was when she began

If Mulan accepted this invitation, the remake would head in the same direction that Caro has attempted before: characterizing women, either Josey and Glory in North Country or Mulan and Xianniang in Mulan, as agents fighting structural injustice and gendered oppression together.

he two groups making most use of librarieswere “students and housewives” (women users outnumbered men by twoto one), but neither group was well served; and among employed men,6 percent of whites borrowed books, but only 0.1 percent of Black min-ers.18 These were dreadful numbers.

Jill Hasday, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, and she is kind of like a heart balm expert. She wrote about them in this book called "Intimate Lies And The Law."

In 1894, she moved to Oxford andher days as a Dictionary contributor came to an end as she took up the post ofLibrarian of Manchester College, the Unitarian college that had opened itsnew buildings in Oxford the year before. The Unitarians and the college hadalways been radical – already co-educational before any other college – so theappointment of a female librarian was in keeping with its spirit. LucyToulmin Smith, with her extensive scholarship and networks, and from an oldUnitarian family, was the perfect candidate.

The Cambridge jurist and legal historian (and advocatefor women’s education) Frederic Maitland

Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, two Readers who wereaunt and niece and also lesbian lovers.

Very early one chilly morning in October 1895, Fielding Blandfordstepped into a horse-drawn carriage with Edith Lanchester’s father and twobrothers. The four men arrived at Edith’s rented lodgings in Battersea. Theywoke the whole house with heavy banging on the front door, and FieldingBlandford forced his way in to ‘examine’ Edith. He ordered that she be takento an asylum because she was committing ‘social suicide’ by insisting on livingwith her working-class lover without marrying him. He justified this byarguing that under the Lunacy Act 1890 he would have certified her had sheattempted (normal) suicide.

Across the entry for T. W. Tonkin of Barnes, who had sent in nothingfor a sixteenth-century polemical work against female monarchs, The FirstBlast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women by theScottish Protestant Reformer John Knox, he wrote in blue pencil, ‘Impostor –Stole the Book’

This text is discussing how the concept of "women" as a group can be problematic.

important to note that identity continues to be a site of resistanc bers of different subordinated groups

But to say that a category such as race or gender is socially constructed is not to say that that category has no significance in our world

liberal feminism

which suggests that different gendered subjectivities lead to different knowledge

rather than relying on traditional methods dominated by men

“I think the most important thing I can say about Phyllis Diller,” says Bowers, “is that she was like Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique. Just like Friedan, Phyllis Diller chronicled the daily lives of woman. But she did it with laughs.”

apartheid social, al poder delegar las tareas domésticas y el cuidado de los niños aempleadas («obviamente» mujeres) mal pagadas

Czech teacherComenius (1592–1670). He championed universal education, which hepromoted in his Didactica magna, arguing for the commonality of education—itwas for everyone, including, shockingly, females.

ooks Are Feminist

Right now, it’s most prominently in my comic books. I don’t want to blow the story, but basically one of the main threads is a revolution launched against the main character.

The recipe details, moreover, assume that these “unmarry’d Women” had the kind of knowledge of arithmetic that the book’s earlier instructional sections had taught. The recipe insists on careful attention to measurement and counting. And it asks the preparer to work with repeated multiples of three. Franklin had a track record of promoting female education, and of arithmetic for them in particular. He advocates for it in his early, anonymous “Silence Dogood” articles, and in his Autobiography singles out a Dutch printer’s widow who saved the family business thanks to her education. There, Franklin makes an explicit call “recommending that branch of education for our young females.”

Fontaines

As Barbara Alice Mann suggests to us (in personalcommunication), bourgeois women may have especiallyappreciated the Jesuit Relations because it allowed them toread about discussions of women’s sexual freedom in a formthat was entirely acceptable to the Church

Peruvian letters which was supposedly the letters home by a captured Inca princess who's trapped in France and they're commenting on French society and this is later remembered it 00:50:03 comes out in his late 1740s um it's later remembered as the first book which suggested the idea of the welfare state

Judith Sargent Murray

If cleared, Merck's drug would be the first pill shown to treat COVID-19, a potentially major advance in efforts to fight the pandemic. All COVID-19 therapies now authorized in the U.S. require an IV or injection.

Η βραβευμένη στο Σάντανς ταινία του «Γιάλντα, η νύχτα της συγχώρεσης» βγαίνει την επόμενη εβδομάδα στα θερινά.

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.

His universe is always dual, always a scene of combat.

Rigoberto Lara Guzmán defines SHINE as a tactic to counter our erasure by acknowledging one another and unsettling who is considered an expert.

I am the product of male gaze – we all are. I've spent my life loving films that sometimes hated me, identifying with Superman, for example. Female gaze is a hybrid – it’s really about knowing both of these worlds. I am a lesbian, and I know how to live in a male-dominated environment. But the question is, can they?

The writing staff on Game of Thrones has always been male-dominated, with only four episodes in the show’s history being credited to female writers. Season eight is written and directed entirely by men (only one woman, Michelle MacLaren, has ever directed Thrones), although there has been at least one woman in the writer’s room, Gursimran Sandhu, this time around.

I forgave the show for its cruel treatment of Sansa a season ago, when it became clear that her story was one of survival rather than victimhood. But Thrones rarely passes up an opportunity to remind us of her rapes. It undermines a character who has refused to be beaten or defined by her suffering, especially when, in the latest episode, she credits her abuse for transforming her from a ‘little bird’ into what she is now. As Jessica Chastain pointed out on Twitter, it was Sansa and Sansa alone who transformed herself into the strong and savvy leader she is – not the men who abused and manipulated her. If the writers don’t understand that, how can we trust them to tell Sansa’s story properly?

To hear Tyrion and Varys – characters who have always been portrayed as egalitarian – say that Jon’s gender would make him a better leader than Daenerys is just depressing.

In its early years it might have lured in the typical male fantasy crowd with sex, violence and alpha-male characters like Ned and Robb Stark, Robert Baratheon and Jaime Lannister, but before you knew it a woman was on the Iron Throne, her main challenger was also a woman, and Westeros was stuffed full of female assassins, knights, wily politicos and Dame Diana Rigg.

Women in science are cited less than their male colleagues. They have a harder time getting work published in notable journals, including the flagships Science and Nature. They are likely paid less than their peers (a 2013 study found that women working in physics and astronomy were paid 40 percent less than men). And they are more likely to face workplace harassment.

Researchers are protesting grant processes that overwhelmingly fund male-led projects, and scientific societies are reforming their sexual harassment policies.

The Wikimedia Foundation says it is seriously concerned about the idea that cisgender women and transgender editors could be repelled from Wikipedia by online abuse.

Despite the controversy Rumisa doesn't regret making the poster. "I'm kind of happy that my poster got a lot of attention," she says.

You know very well 'tii-inlinitcly better lo be good than to .�eem so.

She brielly mentions delivery, calling it "Pronunciation" and claiming that women have an advantage over men here, in that their voices arc naturally more plcusing and better suited lo the mostly private occasions on which Astell imagines women will speak

Blood Orange

hat always entails constitutive exclusions and there-fore requisite questions of accountability

feministpolitics of locations

he would extend this to "science" tout court-does not use value-free lan-guage, that value-free language does not exist, and that we cannot posit a purely transparent language devoid of distracting ornament, through which we transact business with pure facts.

The society, the civilization they were talking about, these theoreti-cians, was evidently theirs; they owned it, they liked it; they were human, fully human, bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing. Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that's what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all. That's right, they said. What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero

To participate in the economy, we’re encouraged to shape ourselves into a strategically pleasing form, always with a sale in mind.

Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice

In 2007, the pharmaceutical company Bayer gave up on a male contraceptive “that involved an annual implant and a quarterly injection,” as my colleague Olga Khazan reported in 2015. The company, she wrote, “concluded that men would consider the regimen—in the words of a spokesperson—‘not as convenient as a woman taking a pill once a day.’”

College enrollment has historically been higher among women who have access to the pill, and “birth control has been estimated to account for more than 30 percent of the increase in the proportion of women in skilled careers from 1970 to 1990,” the report reads.

he might have mood swings.

most men wanted to continue using the injectable birth control—more than 80 percent of them said they would choose to use it.*

38 percent had an increased libido, and 23 percent felt pain at the injection site.

“It was believed women would tolerate side effects better than men, who demanded a better quality of life,”

Transwomen and women were once each other’s strongest friends and allies. We respected and supported each other’s rights and safety. We fought side by side on the same team against the common enemy – toxic masculinity. Tranwomen never made any claims on womanhood. Both sides knew that our lives, challenges, experiences and biology were different. But that didn’t matter; transwomen were welcomed into the club as honorary members and we all rubbed along together in harmony.That, however, was back in the day we knew what “Trans” actually meant. A transsexual was someone who had medical treatment and surgery in order to live socially as the opposite sex. But now the new identity politics woowoo has allowed the trans community to be invaded and overtaken by cross dressers, transvestites, fetishists, autogynephiles, men with porn-soaked lesbian fantasies, any attention-seeking, gender non-conforming male who loves glitter and lipstick and calls himself non-binary… They’re all covered by the ‘trans umbrella’.  Trans now means everything. And it means nothing.

The trope of configuration animates another study of surgical practices by MargunAanestad (2003), who focuses on the labors (carried out predominately by women)involved in aligning a complex sociotechnical environment for the conduct of so-called‘minimally invasive’ or ‘keyhole’ surgery. The latterrequires, among other things,displacing the direct gaze of the surgeon and attendant practitioners from the interior ofthe patient’s body– formerly achieved only through a correspondingly large incision– to aview mediated through camera and video monitors. Aanestad’s analysis follows thecourse of shifting interdependencies in the assemblage, as changes to existingarrangements necessitate further changes through what she names thein situwork of“design in configuration” (2). She emphasizes that, incontrast to views of technologydesign as the province of (predominately male) ‘inventors’ located in research anddevelopment labs, the ongoing work of design takes place in the worksite, and isaccomplished by actors rarely recognized as designers.. Moreover, her analysis makesclear again how in such a setting the capacity for action is relational, dynamic andcollective rather than inherent in specific network elements, and how the extension of thenetwork in turn intensifies network dependencies.

The feminist orientations of these studies add crucial sensibilities to thereconceptions of agency under development in STS more broadly. First, feministresearchdisplaces traditional preoccupations with abstracted and decontextualized formsofknowledge in favor of particular, specifically situated practices of knowing in action.Second, feminism directs attention always to the labors (particularly those previouslyignored) that are an essential and ongoing aspect ofsociotechnical assemblages and thecapacities for action that they enable. And finally, feminist research orients us not only torelations and symmetries among persons and things, but also to the politics of difference.The boundaries that constitute things as separate and different are treated not as pre-given, but as enacted, and practices of boundary-making and the enactment of differenceare inevitably political.

A rich body ofempirical studies have further specified, elaborated, and deepened the senses in whichhuman agency is always inextricably tied to the specific sociomaterial arrangements ofwhich we are part.These studies provide compelling empirical demonstration of howcapacities for action can be reconceived on foundations quite different from those of anEnlightenment, humanist preoccupation with the individual actor living in a world ofseparate things. Insofar as we see the politics of technology to be based in fundamentalassumptions about where agency is located,and whose agencies matter, these approacheshave at least the potential to work as powerful allies to feminist projects. In particular,these scholars align with feminist theorizing in their emphasis on the always relationalcharacter of our capacities for action; the constructed nature of subjects and objects,resemblances and differences; and the corporeal grounds of knowing and action.

Must those not presentlyidentified as creative be shown in fact to be inventors in order tobe fully recognized? Thisquestion suggests that we need to pay close attention to the tensions and contradictionsthat arise when we adopt a strategy that distributes practices previously identifiedexclusively with certain people and places (for example, with privileged white menworking in elite institutions of science and technology) across a wider landscape (one thatincludes women). In distributing those practices more widely, they are givencorrespondingly greater presence. A counter project, therefore, is to question the valueplaced on innovation itself. The aim is to understand how a fascination with change andtransformation might not be universal, but rather specifically located and with particularpolitical consequences for women, both in termsof the possibilities that are available tothem, and the visibility of their already existing contributions.

Recent research on the actual work involved in putting technologies into usehighlights the mundane forms of inventive yet taken for granted labor, hidden in thebackground, that are necessary to the success of complex sociotechnical arrangements.

While not all of the authors and works cited would identify asfeminist, they share with feminist research– in my reading at least– a commitment tocritical, but also reconstructive engagement with received conceptions of the human, thetechnological and the relations between them.

So, let’s summarize. Men get frustrated when they are not competitive in the sexual marketplace (note: the fact that they DO get frustrated does not mean that they SHOULD get frustrated. Pointing out the existence of something is not the same as justifying its existence). Frustrated men tend to become dangerous, particularly if they are young. The dangerousness of frustrated young men (even if that frustration stems from their own incompetence) has to be regulated socially. The manifold social conventions tilting most societies toward monogamy constitute such regulation.

The turn towards intersectionality has also made feminists uncomfortable with thinking in terms of false consciousness: that’s to say, with the idea that women often act against their own interests, even when they take themselves to be doing what they wanted to do. The important thing now is to take women at their word. If a woman says she enjoys working in porn, or being paid to have sex with men, or engaging in rape fantasies, or wearing stilettos – and even that she doesn’t just enjoy these things but finds them emancipatory, part of her feminist praxis – then we are required, as feminists, to trust her.

Finally, science doesn’t make aesthetic judgments about what we should or shouldn’t value. For example, right now, Western culture, broadly speaking, measures success based on largely material standards: how much money you make, what car you own or how big your house is. It similarly rewards more material results, such as working more hours and improving efficiency. What it generally doesn’t do, arguably, is measure or value compassion, or long-term ecological thinking — look at how we treat our environment, for example. So while it may be the case that differences between men and women — biological or otherwise — in part explain average differences in income between men and women, perhaps if societal values and measures of success changed, some of these differences could too.

Jeanine Dear Miranda, Thank you for writing and publishing such an excellent essay. I have printed this as a .pdf and wish to ask the students in my Intro to Women and Gender Studies class to read it this week as part of our examination of “transgender.” You grapple with issues most avoid and do so eloquently and in a scholarly manner, and I am sure many call you a transphobe for your arguments. As a transwoman holding a doctorate who teaches women, gender and sexuality studies, an ardent feminist, the spouse of a feminist female attorney and a past advocate and activist for trans rights I have become quite disillusioned with the transgender trend/phenomenon over the past many years for all the reasons you identify. Please continue your much needed work! Best, Jeanine

I watch so many young transwomen dissolve, or lash out, at the notion that they aren’t female, that they haven’t always been female. The conflict arises because deep down they know they aren’t female. They know they cannot be. Any insistence they are male triggers an existential crisis. I wish I could show them how it doesn’t have to be this way. I want them to feel what I felt during Christmas: The joy and freedom the truth allows. I wish other transwomen would listen to that voice that knows what you really are. I want them to embrace it. To deny the truth, to insist otherwise, is internalized transphobia. To speak this truth is not self-hatred. It is self-love. It is self-care. I speak from experience. The truth will set you free.

In the case of misogyny, if a radical feminist is shown survey evidence that most men favor equality of opportunity, she might respond that they are fooling themselves, and that deep down most men are unconsciously motivated by misogyny, or participate in a society that has institutionalized misogyny

(Of course, there were plenty of other things happening between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries that changed the shape of the world we live in. I've skipped changes in agricultural productivity due to energy economics, which finally broke the Malthusian trap our predecessors lived in. This in turn broke the long term cap on economic growth of around 0.1% per year in the absence of famine, plagues, and wars depopulating territories and making way for colonial invaders. I've skipped the germ theory of diseases, and the development of trade empires in the age of sail and gunpowder that were made possible by advances in accurate time-measurement. I've skipped the rise and—hopefully—decline of the pernicious theory of scientific racism that underpinned western colonialism and the slave trade. I've skipped the rise of feminism, the ideological position that women are human beings rather than property, and the decline of patriarchy. I've skipped the whole of the Enlightenment and the age of revolutions! But this is a technocentric congress, so I want to frame this talk in terms of AI, which we all like to think we understand.)

He calls for more thoughtful engagement with the notion not so much of making things, but of fixing them, repurposing them in their diminishment and dismantlement—not of making new, but of making do, and of thereby engaging what he calls ‘an ethics of mutual care’—with each other, the world around us, and with the (quite literal) objects of our affection (Jackson, 2013, p. 231). This is a source, he says, of ‘resilience and hope’ and it’s a way of being in space and time that has deep feminist roots (Jackson, 2013, p. 237).

resist the patriarchy

n. Women countered some of the denigrating attitudes expressed toward them by males and asserted positive self-images. The local folklore, to which females as well as males contributed, stresses the importance of women, their indispensable role, and their ability to get their way.76

This brings into women's writing an element which is entirely absent from a man's, unless, indeed, he happens to be a work-ing-man, a Negro, or one who for some other rea-son is conscious of disability.

I killed her

Let one of these crusted distinctions return to its source, and in this alchemic center it may be re-made, again becoming molten liquid, and may enter into new combinations, whereat it may be again thrown forth as a new crust, a different dis-tinction. So that A may become non-A. But not merely by a leap from one state to the other. Rather, we must take A back into the ground of its existence, the logical substance that is its causal ancestor, and on to a point where it is con-substantial with non-A; then we may return, this time emerging with non-A instead.

I shall only remark that it might well suit the poet's fancy, who sings of sparkling eyes and coral lips, and knights in armor clad; but it seems to me ut-terly inconsistent with the dignity of a Christian body, to endeavor to draw such an anti-scriptural distinction between men and women. Ah! howl many of my sex feel in the dominion, thus un· righteously exercised over them, under the gentle appellation of f'rutection, that what they have leaned upon has proved a broken recd at besl, and oft a spear.

Moreover, fcminii;ts in the twentieth century have further developed an alternate women'$ rhetoric to which Sarah Grimkc con· tributed.

These would i.ccm to be topics lo engage future public leaders, not just those who hoped merely to marry the leaders.

Not surprh,ingly, as women's education improved, women increasingly began to speak in public :md to reflect on their rhetorical practices.

0, ye fairer sisters, whose hands arc never soiled, whose nerves and muscles arc never strained, go learn by experience! Had we had the opportunity that you have had, 10 improve our moral and mental faculties, what would have hin-dered our inlcllccts from hcing as hright, and our manners from hcing as dignified as yours'! I-lad it been our lot to have been nursed in the lap of af-fluence and case, and to have husked beneath lhc smiles and sunshine of fortune, should we not have naturally supposed that we were never made to toil'! And why arc not our forms as deli-cate, and our constitutions as slender, as yours'! Is not the workmanship as curious and complete'! Have pity upon us, have pity upon us, 0 ye who have hearts to feel for other's woes: for the hand of God has !ouched us. Owing to the disadvan-tages under which we labor, there arc many !low-ers among us that arc