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Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change. By Cynthia Cockburn. London: Pluto Press, 1983; 2nd ed., 1991. 285 pp. Paper, $23.95. ISBN: 0-745-30583-0.
In these allegedly postfeminist, but sadly not postpatriarchal, times, the main theme of Cynthia Cockburn's Brothers, namely, men's use of technology to assert their dominance in the workplace, may seem anachronistic. However, not only do the ideas contained in her study continue to resonate more than twenty years after its initial publication; they could also yet dissipate the masculine tendency of business history. Recent alternatives to the Chandlerian framework notwithstanding, gender-based approaches to business history in Britain remain thin on the ground. Brothers, a highly regarded contribution to the sociology of work in the early 19805, constructs an ideological framework for understanding the creation and recreation of masculinity in the workplace. As such, it was ahead of its time; certainly it anticipated approaches to examining gender relationships and the formation of gender identity, topics that still contain plenty of mileage.
Cockburn's study focuses on a period of upheaval in the printing industry in the early 19805, when technological innovation challenged male dominance of the labor process. One hundred and fifty years earlier, an equivalent struggle had taken place in the cotton industry as male mule spinners preserved their skilled status in the face of new technology. Cockburn's work therefore demonstrates the tenacity of the association of masculinity, power, and technology.
The newspaper compositors of the early 19805 constituted an exceptional group of survivors of the craft-destructive tendencies of capitalism in an age of growing gender awareness. Displaying remarkable foresight, Cockburn seized the opportunity to explore and understand the anxieties of skilled men as they anticipated unprecedented levels of competition, and to record the processes by which they clung to their position in the labor hierarchy. Brothers was one of the first works to demonstrate that the experience of class cannot be fully understood without reference to gender, and one of the few to incorporate both successfully. It shows collective masculinity at work, as skilled printing workers, through their exclusive trade union,...