ABSTRACT
This chapter describes three instances of feminist research and action linking gender, technology, and work. Each falls roughly within one of the three major paradigms of feminist theory found in the United States at the moment-liberal, socialist, and radical. The fit between theory and action, and the interpretation of each, is specific to place, time, and people. Moreover, although these were instances of more and less collective efforts, they are being recounted by one person. The strengths and weaknesses I perceive in each perspective must be taken in that context. Further, I experienced them in a particular sequence, so that my years among working women, who were by comparison older, more conservative, and less privileged, preceded my years of action among largely college-age and -educated socialists. My years of radical feminist research followed both these experiences, and thus may incorporate historical and materialist components to a greater extent than usual. The fourth approach to research and action outlined in Chapters 3 and 4 can hardly claim status as well-developed theory. It builds on my earlier work, and on ethnography in engineering education. This line of thinking emerges from my analysis of the military origins of engineering education, and from what I see to be related debates on technology and eroticism. It combines what I take to be most helpful elements of dominant perspectives into a version of social anarchist feminism. - My experiences have shaped by approach to gender, technology, and cooperation in general, and to the study of the Mondragon cooperatives in particular. I offer, then, some of the content and context by which feminist discourse may best be judged (Ferguson 1984).
