Feminism, the Body, and the Machine
Wendell Berry defends his refusal to buy a computer after receiving hostile responses to an earlier essay. Many critics, especially feminist correspondents, assume that his wife is exploited because she types his manuscripts and comments on them. Berry argues that they condemn his marriage by category rather than evidence, ignoring the possibility of marriage as mutual help and of the household as a productive economy shared by husband, wife, and children. He contrasts such a household with the modern consumptive home, where little is produced and family members depend on outside employers, energy suppliers, household technology, and purchased entertainment. He rejects the assumption that work away from home necessarily liberates women, arguing that corporate employment often subjects both women and men to hierarchy, obedience, specialization, monotony, and loss of economic independence. Feminism, he contends, should not merely seek women’s equal inclusion in an industrial economy that exploits people, communities, and nature alike. He also defends unpaid help as a gift rooted in love, friendship, duty, and neighborliness, rather than accepting the industrial premise that help matters only when sold. Berry broadens his attack to “technological progress,” which he sees as detaching production and consumption from household and community while concentrating property and power. Its advocates cite abundance, consumer goods, and longevity, but fail to reckon with soil loss, pollution, social disintegration, degraded workmanship, stupefying television, and education reduced to child supervision and career training. Industrial society, he argues, weakens families, communities, cultural memory, care for land, and religious or moral purpose. Its real aims are money and ease, justified by faith in a supposedly better future. Instead of inventing a future through present destruction, people should care for the soils, forests, waters, cultures, families, and children already entrusted to them. Technological choices must therefore be judged by motive. If the goal is speed, ease, money, and an imagined future, innovation appears automatically desirable. If the goal is love of family, community, country, and God, each innovation requires thought and may need to be refused. Berry admits that dependence on established technologies, particularly automobiles, is difficult to escape because they have reorganized life around themselves. Yet he insists that difficulty does not eliminate the need for judgment. As a writer, he rejects the claim that a computer would make him write faster, more easily, and in greater quantity, because these are not his standards. He already has help from family, friends, teachers, editors, and readers, and believes that becoming a better writer requires human help rather than a machine. He refuses to “keep up with the times,” seeking instead to live fully and to resist products that ultimately replace human capacities. The deepest danger of technology, in his view, is contempt for the body. Modern technological thought treats the body and natural world as imperfect limits upon an abstract mind or machine. Berry sees industrial sexuality as another form of this contempt: it treats the body as a pleasure mechanism, seeks pleasure without consequence, and evades natural and social responsibility. Art, like sexual love, depends upon bodily presence, sensory experience, and the union of mind, spirit, and hand. Writing is therefore bodily work. Language is spoken by the tongue, heard by the ear, shaped by the hand, and tested through the senses before it can make sense in the mind. Berry values handwriting because its erasures, crossings-out, and revisions preserve a work’s history and invite further improvement. A manuscript is a palimpsest, whereas computer text, easily erased and replaced, embodies an absolute industrial present. Good work remembers its materials, sources, predecessors, and making; factory-made objects often conceal those origins and leave materials spiritually orphaned. He concedes that good writing can be produced on computers, but maintains that computers cannot make a person write better and may encourage a radical separation of mind from body. Machine-made text seems sterile and untouched, unlike bodily work, which bears marks of pulse, breath, skill, care, flaws, hesitation, and love. Writing also belongs to walking and freedom: with a pencil and scrap paper, he can work anywhere, independent for a time from the systems of power and energy connected to IBM. Berry rejects the argument that one person’s refusal to buy technology is insignificant. Individual abuse contributes to general devastation, and individual restraint can become meaningful when shared by many. One should do what is right without waiting for collective approval. He can easily refuse television, a computer, recreational machinery, second homes, and counterfeit foods, though he remains dependent on automobiles, airplanes, chainsaws, and energy companies. The line against technology should be drawn wherever it can be drawn easily, especially by refusing what one does not need. But a world fit for children will also require people to surrender things they have learned to call necessities. Berry remains uncertain and imperfect in this effort, yet resolves to keep searching for escape from machine dependence, guided by the memory of a man who continued to cut wood with a handsaw and axe.
By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Essay, Social Criticism, Cultural Criticism · 7,984 words
First lines
SOME TIME AGO Harper's reprinted a short essay of mine in which I gave some of my reasons for refusing to buy a computer. Until that time, the vast numbers of people who disagree with my writings had mostly ignored them. An unusual number of people, however, neglected to ignore my insensitivity to the wonders of computer enhancement. Some of us, it seems, would be better off if we would just realize that this is already the best of all possible worlds, and is going to get even better if we will just buy the right equipment.
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Feminism, the Body, and the Machine is listed on Textopian as an essay by Wendell Berry, dated 2019 CE.
This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.
- Work type: Essay
- Author: Wendell Berry
- Date: 2019 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Essay, Social Criticism, Cultural Criticism, Environmental Nonfiction, Technology Criticism
- Length: 7,984 words
- Structure: 1 section, 57 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Fairly Difficult (10th-12th Grade)
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- Work identity for Feminism, the Body, and the Machine by Wendell Berry
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
- Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
- Readability and classroom-planning context
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Genres
- Essay — The work is a sustained first-person argumentative essay, developed through personal reflection, rebuttal of correspondence, and philosophical analysis rather than fictional plot.
- Social Criticism — It critiques modern marriage, household labor, corporate employment, consumerism, education, family life, and the industrial organization of society.
- Cultural Criticism — Berry examines prevailing assumptions about feminism, technological progress, work, sex, media, individuality, and public rhetoric.
- Environmental Nonfiction — The essay connects industrial technology and consumer economies to soil loss, pollution, ecological degradation, resource extraction, and the desecration of land.
Tags
ecofeminism · gender roles · embodiment · technology critique · industrial society · environmental ethics · agrarianism · human dignity · social criticism · patriarchy · reproductive labor · domestic work