by Liz lse
The question 'Are computers feminist?' was posed at one of the London based Women and Computing Group's open meetings held in August 1981.
It stimulated a particularly interesting discussion because, of the arguments of the women who took part — some from within the industry, others with no experience or knowledge of computers at all - underlined what looks like becoming a crucial dilemma for the Women's Liberation Movement.
This dilemma turns on resolving mutually exclusive positions on the appropriate response to the development and use of technology.
Some feminists argue the WLM could and should benefit from the burgeoning of information technology and its increasing availability and comparative cheapness.
Computer systems could, they argue, be devised to automate mundane tasks at women's centres like answering routine queries or addressing letters and labels.
More ambitiously, they could be used to set up a central information bank to serve women's centres across the country which could give easy access to current women's action groups and the progress they're making.or to give generally useful data on available jobs, training programmes, banks with good loan policies, and so on.
The painstaking and inevitably arduous job of unearthing and collating the facts about women's lives down the centuries could be speeded up dramatically using inexpensive and already available microcomputer systems connected to the data base of a much larger computer miles away. ,
Feminists who envisage systems like these are actively urging women to demystify the jargon surrounding the whole computer industry, to storm the technological barricades and seize what they need for their own ends.
At the other end of the ideological divide, however, some feminists are deeply concerned that technology should not be seen as a neutral means whereby society (woman) achieves its (her) goals.
They argue that women must not forget that the range and nature of a society's technology is a reflection of the dominant socio-economic system. And in the Western culture that means that it is a process guided by the values of the various patriarchies and one which owes its very existence to the requirements of the military-industrial complex. At its furthest development, their argument challenges the whole nature of technology and the societies that spawned it, asking the final question: can feminists use technology as it stands at all, or does using it involve fatal compromise and collusion with the forces of patriarchy?
None of the women at that meeting back in August had any answers; it was enough that they registered anxiety about issues like job displacement, the gross exploitation of women workers in the Far East who produce the silicon chips for computers, and the deskilling of jobs generally by machines like word processors.
The WLM will have to open up this debate and tackle it without fear especially with media events like the Government sponsored Information Technology Year (known as IT 82) bringing only the received wisdom of the Establishment to the woman in the street.
We will have to decide, and very soon, whether we are for IT or against IT; there is no middle route. Technology and our attitude to its future development precludes the usual shades of grey in both argument and resulting action because it can be argued to be the clearest, most direct message from men about the state of a world they have created almost unaided.
The most important question then is: can women really change its nature by being more involved, more informed or are they deluding themselves about the nature of the beast in assuming it will or can admit of challenge and change?
Scarlet Women, No. 14, January 1982