The machine in Utopia: Shaker women and technology

Abstract

Commonly believed devoted to handcrafts and opposed to technology, the nineteenth-century American Shakers were enthusiastic about the machine, viewing it as a means to a more humane life. Shaker women used, maintained, and even invented labor-saving devices, both in their domestic work and their commercial enterprises. The Shaker view toward women and technology emerged from their egalitarian religious principles that placed an equal value upon the lives of women and men. Shaker women invented the buzz saw, cut nails, and a successful revolving oven, and they were knowledgeable about the operation of machinery. Although they worked long hours at their machines, Shaker women emphasized that their lot was far better than that of unfortunate factory women, because they worked for themselves in pleasant surroundings and rotated work assignments frequently. Hard-working, they decried drudgery, and though they opposed capitalism and the factory system, they maintained a Utopian vision of technology as a source of a better American life.