Page 24 RAIN April/May 1983 labor, and the primary consumers in this society, they have been barred from technology. Women are left out when technology takes over — dairy and egg farming were women’s domain until they became mechanized and profitable. Or women are relegated to disappearing technologies. The first typists were men because the typewriter was thought too complicated for women; then the women were typists while men ran the word processor; now women are trained for key punch and computer programming when systems analysis and engineering are the real power bases. Women sit at video display terminals (VDTs) all day entering data and soaking up radiation. Finally, computers harm or replace women workers. Imagine: a world linked by telecommunications—libraries accessible from home, newspapers and mail replaced by VDTs, office work done by computers, telecommunications substituted for transportation. Women, displaced by technology, stay home, shop from home, bank from home. The computer that registers their answers on two-way TV monitors their choices, profiles, and targets them for marketing and for political persecution. People have no need to go outside, to see their neighbors, to talk to bus drivers, bank tellers, or check-out clerks. Computers regulate the home, the clean American dream. Meanwhile, whole populations can be moved away and hidden. People need never see crime or oppression or poverty — and women comprise two-thirds of the 25 million living below the low-income level in the U.S. Fragmentation and isolation make social change impossible. Everyone is "safe,” at home, with family. Women are where they are "meant” to be: isolated, alone, in the home, invisible. '"Back-to-the-land” for women often means ”back- to-the-kitchen” or "back- to-feudalism.” Technology—some assumptions Many women have anxiety about technology—any kind. It is a language we are not taught to speak, whether it is computers or carpentry. We have to fight to learn. Machines can enable women to do what men do: chainsaws and power drilling equipment mean upper body strength is not a limit, and women work in timber industries and mining. Machines — appliances, cars — can free women in/from the home. But men invent the machines. Men maintain the machines. Machines can force women out of work. Machines can attack women’s health and lives. Technology is a double-edged sword. It is good and bad. Technology does not mean things; it means the way we do things. In this country, whoever controls technology controls society. Technology is a tool — the issue is who devises it and controls its use. Technology implements patriarchy, implements racism, implements capitalism. Technology implements androcentrism and domination of the earth. In a world where women are oppressed under the guise of "natural order,” technology is neither "natural” nor "unnatural,” and definitions of those words must always be questioned. Technology is not value-free, is not neutral. Technology is here and we have to face it. It affects women differently from the way it affects men. There is a longstanding myth that traditionally female occupations are safe; however, workplace hazards jeopardize virtually every body system and organ. Nurses are exposed to radiation and infectious diseases, waitresses and maids use caustic cleaning agents and do heavy lifting, secretaries may inhale PCBs and carbon black, women in industrial laundries handle workclothes without knowing which of a whole range of toxic and/or carcinogenic chemicals may contaminate them, women working at home may be exposed to formaldehyde emitted from polyurethane insulation, and all of these women are likely to be affected by stress. A safer workplace is something we must have and can get from technology. Exposures to toxic substances and radiation can be greatly reduced or eliminated by the use of closed systems, ventilation, and shielding. Woman-scaled machinery can be designed that will greatly reduce strain and hearing losses. Changes in workplace technology are termed workplace controls and represent the only real longterm solutions to occupational health heizards. What if we drink our water, eat our food, breathe our air without worrying what was in them? Add to these concentrated workplace exposures general environmental exposures. An estimated 75,000 chemicals are in common use yearly in industries, pharmaceuticals, food additives, pesticides. Close to 1,000 more are added each year. Most chemicals are considered safe, but adequate tests have yet to be performed on the 1,500 suspected carcinogens. Most chemicals are never tested for their potential to cause allergic, nervous, and other disorders. Add to these exposures the proliferation of low-level radiation. According to the 1979 BEIR Report by the National Academy of Science, women are twice as likely to get cancer from low-level radiation as men are. Our risk of involuntary sterilization is greater. Consider that the necessities of life — food, clothing, shelter, air, water — are all touched, and that the poor (the majority of whom are women) have the fewest options for how to avoid these hazards. Consider that the hazards can act together in ways not predictable from how they act separately through complex interactions called synergisms. Substances can become toxic — or more toxic — in combination. Consider Love Canal. 'The overlapping of the teratogenic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic effects of environmental contaminants accounts for 60% of the birth defects due to "unknown causes.” We are beginning to hear about "lifestyle cancers.” Consider that widespread disruption of habitats — through development, overuse, pesticides, dumping of toxics — is now the major destroyer of species. According to a report by the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality, 20% of all animal species on earch could become extinct during the next two decades, a loss "unparalleled in human history.” 'Iliese extinctions include us. Environmental mutagens pose dangers for the entire human species. Mutated genetic material, whether it causes visible damage or not, adds its permanent changes to the total human gene pool. A mutation rate increased by the effects of chemical and radioactive toxins could not only produce a general decline in human genetic health, but could also threaten human existence.
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