page_title: Ursula Franklin
section_title: Technology and power
hierarchical_section_title: Ursula Franklin / Technological society / Technology and power
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Singer naaimachine - 31K32 (detail 1) English: Singer sewing machine - 31K32 (detail 1)
context_page_description: Ursula Martius Franklin CC OOnt FRSC was a German-Canadian metallurgist, research physicist, author, and educator who taught at the University of Toronto for more than 40 years. She was the author of The Real World of Technology, which is based on her 1989 Massey Lectures; The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map, a collection of her papers, interviews, and talks; and Ursula Franklin Speaks: Thoughts and Afterthoughts, containing 22 of her speeches and five interviews between 1986 and 2012. Franklin was a practising Quaker and actively worked on behalf of pacifist and feminist causes. She wrote and spoke extensively about the futility of war and the connection between peace and social justice. Franklin received numerous honours and awards, including the Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case for promoting the equality of girls and women in Canada and the Pearson Medal of Peace for her work in advancing human rights. In 2012, she was inducted into the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame. A Toronto high school, Ursula Franklin Academy, has been named in her honour.
context_section_description: Ursula Franklin rejects the idea that powerful technologies automatically determine the ways in which people live and work. She maintains that the uses of technology are not preordained, but are the result of conscious choices. The dominant prescriptive technologies establish structures of power and control that follow what Franklin sees as male patterns of hierarchy, authoritarianism, competition and exclusion. Female workers are often victims of these patterns. Mechanical sewing machines were introduced in 1851 with the promise that they would liberate women from household drudgery. But when the machines ended up in factory sweatshops to produce cheap clothing, the new technology was used to exploit female workers. "A strictly prescriptive technology with the classic division of labour arose from the introduction of new, supposedly liberating 'domestic' machines," Franklin notes. "In the subsequent evolution of the garment industry, much of the designing, cutting, and assembling began to be automated, often to the complete exclusion of workers." She points to similar examples in other industries. Female operators helped introduce the telephone only to be replaced by automated switchboards after the technology had been successfully established while secretaries struggled to make the early mechanical typewriters function properly, but ended up performing fragmented and increasingly meaningless tasks.
  "Many technological systems, when examined for context and overall design, are basically anti-people," Franklin writes. "People are seen as sources of problems while technology is seen as a source of solutions." As a result, people live and work under conditions structured for the well-being of technology even though manufacturers and promoters always present new technologies as liberating. "The dreams of flight, of fast private transportation, of instant communication across continents, and of helpful machines, all stress liberation from hard physical labour at work or drudgery at home." But once technologies are accepted and standardized, they often enslave or displace their users. Franklin argues that work could be made less prescriptive in workplaces that are less rigidly hierarchical if we adopted more holistic practices based on the way women traditionally work in running households for example, or in caring for children.
caption: Franklin writes that household sewing on machines such as this gave way to the industrial production of cheap clothing in sweatshops that exploited female labour.
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