The following two articles have been taken from Scarlet Women, No. 14 January 1982 on Women and the New Technology. This issue was put together by the West Yorkshire Women and the New Technology group (WYWANT) with the purpose of alerting as many people as possible about the.implications of new technology. It raises the issue of women's specific relationship to technology in terms of new technology and capitalism and new technology and feminism, available from: WYWANT, 46 Exmouth  Place Bradford, W. Yorkshire BD 3 ONA England.

Is even Patriarchy not Sacred?

by Juliet Lozenby

A resume by ISIS

This article represents an attempt to examine in concrete terms how patriarchy effects women in the workplace, how in turn it may be affected by the introduction of new technology, and how women may resist both patriarchy and new technology as forms of control over them. I shall be focusing on women in offices since about 40% of the female workforce is now engaged in office work, so that an examination of this area will shed light on the working situation of a significant proportion of women workers.

They also point out, very importantly, that this 'office culture', while being a factor in the reproduction of women's oppression, also constitutes a world which the male bosses cannot penetrate, thus allowing women to get away with doing certain things that cannot be controlled. It is susceptible to forms of resistance rarely recognised in accounts of workplace relations (which focus predominantly on male manual workers' methods of resistance), and yet which constitute equally valid forms of sabotage. Classic examples are those of office workers pretending to look busy while chatting with their workmates, taking long lunch breaks with the excuse that 'it took ages to get round the shops' (which I've done dozens of times); there are many other methods of breaking the routine of typing and gaining some time for oneself.

However, in a time of recession and falling rates of profits, managements are looking at ways of cheapening the labour process, and this non-productive time described above is one area ripe for rationalisation. As Harry Braverman (1974) points out:

"Among the subsidiary benefits management expects to derive from (office automation) is the reduction and thus cheapening of the skills of administrative employees, and not least the squeezing out of the minutes and hours of labour power lost in the personal relations and contacts among secretaries and between secretaries and their 'principals' — which is what they mean when they speak of the 'end of the social office'." (1974:347).

According to Barker and Downing, word processors are an attempt to achieve this by the replacement of patriarchal forms of control by more direct capitalistic forms of control, based on the mechanisation and fragmentation of operations. If they are correct, patriarchy as a direct method of controlling female office workers may henceforth be taking a back seat, while control is transferred to machinery through increased use of scientific management techniques. The effect of automation in the office will be to remove skills and knowledge (which provide workers with control over their movements and pace of work) by fragmenting operations in much the same sort of a way as has already happened in factories. People will execute pieces of tasks, not entire tasks. More and more, office workers will need to know nothing other than how to push buttons, all other tasks being incorporated into the machine's programming. Marx's contention that such fragmentation of tasks leads to the worker becoming a mere 'appendage to a machine' has a chilling accuracy when one thinks of rows and rows of workers sitting all day at a screen, feeding the machine with information
which IT then processes and channels. And with the incorporation of work timing devices into word processors, it seems as if machines will be controlling the workforce rather than it controlling the machinery.

When managements introduce such innovations in an effort to tighten control over the work process and workforce and hence to cheapen these, what they do not take into account is the capacity of the workforce to resist. My own studies have indicated that word processor operators do not always accept changes in the organisation of their work and indeed find ways of retaining some control over it. One operator I spoke to used her word processor exactly as if it were a typewriter, checking her work very meticulously after she had keyed it into the machine, thus giving herself the chance to use her mental faculties, and also break from the monotony of typing all day.
Others experimented with the gadgetry and played "tricks" with the machines which they demonstrated to me. One operator would print out her documents with the layout
deliberately incorrect (vertical tables arranged horizontally, for example!). Another varied the layout of every piece of work she did, so that she could spend time fiddling with and adjusting the controls. While this is by no means the stereotyped, almost glamourous sort of sabotage one hears that assembly line workers engage in, it does represent an attempt by the women to resist being turned into mere machine minders and to hang onto elements of control and dignity over their work. Attempts by managements to tighten control will not, therefore, be unproblematic and perhaps the course of new technology will not run totally smooth.