When we talk about women's rights, we rarely bring up the steam engine, and that's just wrong. 

It's wrong because ever since the steam engine was invented, technology and women's rights have interacted in curious ways, revolving mostly around work. 

Certainly, the right to work outside the home, in all the same occupations as men, has been a core issue for women throughout my lifetime and more. When my mother graduated from college in 1940, she had three main choices: She could teach, get married, or teach and get married. Since then, women have moved into most occupations, from doctor to boxer. My daughters, I'm told, will soon be able to serve in the infantry if they want. And maybe even if they don't.

Working at home
All this focus on work, however, can create an impression that women didn't work in the good old days. That's false. Women have always worked, and not just as wives and mothers. Indeed, every society has depended as much on the work of women as of men. It's just that in the past, most women worked at home. 

Before 1800, however, home and workplace were often one and the same (even for men). 

The core economic unit back then was not the company, but the family. Few, for example, bought ready-made clothes; they sewed their own. What we now call counselors were then called grandmothers. The entertainment industry boiled down to Grandpa and his stories. Family units produced almost everything people consumed back then. Today, it's the industrial economy. 

When people went shopping, they mostly bought stuff made in someone else's home. I read recently that in France--in 1800--over three-quarters of all workers labored at home. Most of them were women. In addition to raising animals and doing farm chores, women crafted goods for sale, such as textiles, garments, shoes, eyeglasses, jewelry, and whatnot (see Employment of Women).

The crash 
Then the steam engine was invented. That led to the power loom. And that led to the textile mill. And that soon led to factories popping up everywhere and wiping out home-based cottage industries by the thousands. Work outside the home? Suddenly, most women had to if they could, because "cottage industries," cute as they sound, were not hobbies but sources of desperately needed family income.

A few "lucky" women got to be servants or mill workers. But the industrial economy couldn't absorb all the workers idled by the collapse of cottage industries. It was the same as any crash. Remember the dot.com bust? This was worse. 

What jobs did exist went first to men. They were the visible existing work force. Women, the invisible workers of the private realm, largely ended up at home, where they still had children to raise and houses to keep--arduous and time-consuming tasks, to be sure, given the primitive housekeeping technology of the time--but no income-producing work in most cases.

And what d'you know, right about then, a set of ideas known to cultural historians as the "Cult of Domesticity" sprouted throughout the Western world. 

According to this ideology, women had a natural duty to stay home, rear children, and cozy up the nest, because they lacked the brains and brawn to compete in the jungle of the working world. Starting in the 1820s, preachers, pundits, magazines, song lyrics, and popular sayings all conspired to justify barring women from the public work space and relegating them to the private realm. Mainstream culture suggested that women were a different species from men, and their genius lay in piety, submission, and tenderness. As one popular saying put it, "A woman has a head almost too small for thinking, but just big enough for love." 

Today, such doctrines are sometimes cited as age-old traditional beliefs; actually they go back to this momentary blip in Western cultural history generated by the sudden advent of machines that could produce inexpensive goods in mass quantities.

The department store
Life went on, however, and the consequences of mechanized mass production continued to unroll. Historians cite 1848 as a seminal date in the women's movement, because that year activists held the world's first conference on women's rights, at Seneca Falls, New York. 

But another event two years earlier may have been just as consequential for women. New York businessman Alexander Turney opened the first department store in the United States. In Paris, four years after the Seneca Falls Conference, Aristide and Marguerite Boucicaut opened the Bon Marché, which they soon built into the world's biggest department store. Macy's, Marshall Fields, and others were soon to follow. 

What made department stores such a big deal? 

They hired women--lots of women. The Bon Marché peaked at 4,500 employees. Macy's and Marshall Fields ranked as America's biggest employers by 1900. These stores promoted from within and offered pensions. Working at these places, women could advance to ever higher positions and eventually retire on their earnings. Talk is cheap. This was real independence.

Department stores had another significance as well. In earlier times, respectable women stayed home in part because they had nowhere to go. They certainly couldn't go to the public places frequented by men: clubs, bars, gymnasiums, taverns, and the like--at least, not on their own. 

Entrepreneurs like the Boucicauts and Macy saw the need and spotted a business opportunity. They modeled their stores after the great expositions of the time, the great world fairs where marvels of science and "wonders" from exotic places were displayed in glamorous themed settings. Department stores put inexpensive, mass-produced consumer goods on display in similarly lavish settings. For example, clothes might be presented on mannequins placed in fake Japanese gardens or in pasteboard casbahs with artificial waterfalls and paper trees. In short, department stores functioned like middle-brow museums for the masses.

In the old days, if you entered a shop, you had to buy something. Department stores, however, pioneered a daring new concept in retail called "no-obligation entry." They actually encouraged people to come in, browse, socialize, spend the day. Amenities such as post offices, libraries, information bureaus, hair salons, roof gardens, and restaurants made them into wondrous self-contained worlds, principally designed for women. Some 40,000 people a day flowed through Marshall Fields in the early 1900s. Macy's had the largest floor space of any building in America--over 1 million square feet.

Bicycles meet bloomers 
Just as department stores were getting into full swing, bicycles were perfected. A German nobleman had invented the first steerable bicycle back in 1817, but his machine was primitive, heavy, and dangerous. Few would ride it then. 

Over the next 60 years, however, the bicycle acquired brakes, handlebars, and pedals. The invention of refined steel in 1855 made the frame lightweight. Steel also made it possible to build a bicycle with no cross bar running from seat mount to handlebar post--in short, a woman's bike (see History of the Modern Bicycle).

By 1890, bicycles were cheap enough for most middle-class families to afford. By that time, millions of middle-class women were itching to go window-shopping (or "glass-licking," as the French call it) and now they had a way to get there. 

Certainly, they couldn't get around the city on horseback. All other factors aside, horses were costly and difficult to keep in a city. Bicycles, by contrast, ate nothing, produced no manure, and never needed grooming. Also, you could stash them anywhere. Women took to them en masse, finding freedom and personal mobility they had never known.  

Bicycles, in turn, brought bloomers into fashion. Bloomers were Turkish-style pantaloons worn under knee-length skirts. Feminists (such as Amelia Bloomer, for whom they are named) had championed them throughout the 1840s and 50s. Bloomers gave women freedom of movement and took them out of whalebone corsets, rigid undergarments not unlike certain medieval instruments used to extract confessions in dungeons. But traditionalists called bloomers scandalous, scandalous--because they put women in pants. No good could ever come of that, traditionalists fumed. So bloomers didn't catch on---until the 1890s. 

At that point, bicycles succeeded where feminist polemics had failed: They turned bloomers into popular and respectable (if sometimes ridiculed) sportswear for women. It was but a short step from there to women wearing pants. 

And modern technology was just getting started. That age of invention produced not just the airplane, car, light bulb, and radio, but also the washing machine, vacuum cleaner, gas stove, sewing machine, and iron. In other words, women had access to new labor-saving devices that brought sweeping changes to their lives. And the process continues. 

Interactions between technology and gender roles should come as no surprise, of course. They merely reflect a larger theme: Our machinery constantly shapes and reshapes our work, our relationships, our lives. Our inventions and our values interact. The steam engine jolted the social psyche of the West in part by ripping the workplace out of the home. That's worth examining, I think, because now technology seems to be doing just the opposite. More and more people today are working out of their homes. Is technology restoring the home as a workplace? 

I wonder how that will change us.