Mother of Invention
How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An illuminating and maddening examination of how gender bias has skewed innovation, technology, and history—now in paperback
It all starts with a rolling suitcase. Though the wheel was invented some 5,000 years ago, and the suitcase in the 19th century, it wasn’t until the 1970s that someone successfully married the two. What was the holdup? For writer and journalist Katrine Marçal, the answer is both shocking and simple: because “real men” carried their bags, no matter how heavy.
Mother of Invention is a fascinating and eye-opening examination of business, technology, and innovation through a feminist lens. Because it wasn’t just the suitcase. Drawing on examples from electric cars to tech billionaires, Marçal shows how gender bias stifles the economy and holds us back, delaying innovations, sometimes by hundreds of years, and distorting our understanding of our history. While we talk about the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, we might as well talk about the Ceramic Age or the Flax Age, since these technologies were just as important. But inventions associated with women are not considered to be technology in the same way as those associated with men. Mother of Invention is a sweeping tour of the global economy with a powerful message: If we upend our biases, we can unleash our full potential.
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Innovation takes a long time because people tend to create with only men in mind, argues journalist Marçal (Who Cooked Adam Smith Dinner) in this quirky treatise. Needs that are coded as "female" fall by the wayside as "frivolous," she argues, which has limited the scope of invention: it took decades to put wheels on suitcases, for instance, because it was assumed that men would never be willing to appear in public using an assist, and cars powered by electricity were thought up as early as the beginning of the 20th century but were never mass-produced since they were seen as only suitable for women (men hand-cranked a starter). By telling a history of technology that includes "women's tools," Marçal writes, "the entire narrative we hold, both about ourselves, the economy, and the world, becomes something else"—if, for example, humans' first tools were digging sticks rather than hunting tools, "it is no longer as clear that humanity's inventions must always seek to crush, dominate, and exploit." Told in a conversational tone, this feminist directive—if a little heavy on the focus of gender imperative—fascinates with its wealth of historical tidbits. Fans of Caroline Criado-Perez's Invisible Women, take note.
