the Female Body GOVERNING

64
lori reed
In time, computer manufacturers and marketers realized that in order
to move the computer into the home successfully, they had to encourage
the comfortable and profi cient female computer user. Advertisers began
to market the computer to the female user in ways it had not previously
(Lewyn, 1990), and women’s magazines such as Ladies Home Journal
(Asimov, 1983; Hait, 1983) and Good Housekeeping (“I Couldn’t Learn,”
1987) included advice regarding how women could overcome computer
fear to use computers confi dently. Women were advised to stop viewing
their computers as tools and to, instead, view them as “appliances,” just
like a toaster, washing machine, or any other household convenience
(Van Gelder, 1983, 1985, pp. 89–91). Computer classes especially for
women helped to produce confi dent computer users (“A Computer
Lesson,” 1984). As women became increasingly competent computer
users during the 1970s and 1980s, the discourse on computers converged
with contemporaneous and emergent debates regarding “women’s rights”
and a woman’s “correct” place in the family and society. Isaac Asimov, for
example, advocated that “one of the most signifi cant uses for computers
[will be], that of fi nally raising the role of women in the world to full
equality with that of men” (p. 66). On the other hand, a prominent
conservative fi gure announced, “We are against the women’s rights
movement . . . and we are very concerned about the growing menace of
home computers” (quoted in Van Gelder, p. 36). And it made perfect
sense when Ms. Magazine provided guidance and instruction on how a
woman could fi nd herself “falling in love with [her] computer” (p. 36).
So while the manufacture of female computerphilia was necessary and
benefi cial to the computer industry, it simultaneously raised cultural
anxieties about how the machine might threaten traditional gender and
family roles. As a result, much of the 1990s discourse on computer can
also be seen as a prescriptive and mediating discourse on gender, the
family, and the politics of domestic space (cf. Cassidy, 2001).
When Love Turns to Obsession: Assembling
Healthy Women and Healthy Families
Into the 1990s, women increasingly used computers at home and questions
continued about just how computer technologies could and should
be incorporated into people’s lives. Who should use computers? For what
purpose? Where should they use them? How should they use them? What
are the dangers pertaining to computer use? As Marvin (1988) describes
in her history of “new” media, “new media intrude on existing habits
and organizations and new media provide new platforms on which old
groups confront one another. Old habits of transacting between groups