Technology’s Stories: Past and Present October 2015 Interrogating the "Machine" and Women's Things Laura Ann Twagira, Wesleyan University{1} When I interviewed Mariam "Mamu" Coulibaly in Kankan (Mali, West Africa) about women's work in the early twentieth century she told me about a labor intensive cooking process that involved farming, collecting and processing spices, pounding grains, and finally combining all those ingredients in the cooking pot.{2} Her description was echoed by other elderly women I interviewed in the same region. As we ended our conversation she joked that soon Westerners will bring machines to do the cooking!{3} It was a light-hearted comment but fully intended to chastise young women for their changing cooking practices and reliance on Western things. Earlier in our discussion Mamu had lamented that women's lives are now "relaxed" because they no longer pound grains using the mortar and pestle, rather they take their millet and rice to be processed by machines.{4} Many of the younger women I spoke to sought out those very same petrol-powered grain grinding machines, which, contrary to Mamu's assessment, are not ubiquitous across rural Mali. These mobile grain-grinding machines, the product of various development interventions dating to the 1970s, have been widely promoted by scholars of women and development as labor saving devices.{5} Like Mamu, historians of women and technology have reason to be skeptical of such broad claims about labor-saving technologies for women in Africa and elsewhere.{6} Certainly, women in Mali have been innovators in adopting labor-efficient technologies,{7} and Mamu's criticism has much to do with generational differences, but her critique of the "machine" merits examination. Embedded in her joke is a valid questioning of the emphasis on the role of Western machines in Malian society and their meanings for women. This interrogation also sheds light on larger questions about how we study gender and technology, women as users of technology, and even their role in designing technological systems. Mamu's central question is a good starting place: What will happen to women if they abandon the mortar and pestle and other specifically women's technologies, or as they are called in Mali "women's things"? I suggest that what is at stake is not only a question of labor time but also one of labor value in society.