Steven Lubar's Spheres Summary

Steven Lubar breaks chapter one into three parts: the historical background, roles of gender in technology, and the mapping of borderlines between production and consumption. The analysis of gender in technology is broken down into “separate spheres” for easier examination, dividing “domestic” and “public” into two. This idea of “spheres” questions whether the industrial revolution caused women to be pushed out of the production side of things or if “changing the ideals of the proper work of woman as consumers, then, helped drive the industrial revolution.” By further investigation, it is found that the industrial revolution helped redefine masculinity by using mechanical metaphors, ultimately shifting production to invention to engineering into a man’s role. Technology has since then been redefined, arguing that women’s work was “natural” rather than skilled. In addition, instead of noting the skill and knowledge used in operating

Although Lubar explains how advertising was targeted at women in the 19th century, in the target in the 21st century have shifted to a more equal side: boys or girls, men or women. There’s a clear correlation between advertisements featuring men and women on their prospective packaging and the matching gender of the consumer, but what deeper psychological meaning reasons this gender-based consumerism? Also, how did women in the STEM field now overcome the explicit gender advertisement tactics and get to where they are now? Not only has advertisement become a cultural and socially constructed issue, but so has arranging things into groups, such as roles and “spheres.” Although it is human nature to classify things into groups, such as the colors pink for girls and blue for boys, will this natural instinct hinder us from