You can learn a lot about Sally Hacker’s life from Pleasure, Power, and Technology. Autobiography, in fact, informed much of her writing. Believing you could best understand sociological results only if you knew why and how the sociologist had tackled a problem, she insisted on telling not only findings but motives and methods as integral parts of her research. Pretensions to the contrary notwithstanding, value-free sociology has more often meant values hidden than values absent. Far better to set the motives up front where the reader can judge for him- or herself rather than leave them lurking in the background, all too easy to overlook, ignore, or forget. By the same token, method meant more to Sally than manipulating data. Technical virtuosity counted, but only as a step on the road from study to action. Deciding what questions mattered came first, then finding ways (not always conventional) to get the data that might provide answers. Analysis—sometimes rough and ready, sometimes as subtle and sophisticated as anything in the field—then prepared the way for the next step: putting the results in the hands of people who could use it, whether they were office workers facing automation, farm wives confronted by encroaching agribusiness, or sociologists seeking to understand technology. Research without action—without potential to advance social justice—was not research she deemed worth doing. In her ceaseless effort to seek and destroy the roots of oppression, Sally was radical in the word’s literal, and best, sense.
How did that happen? Surely it had something to do with being born and raised in downstate Illinois, halfway between the birthplace of American sociology’s most actively radical founding father, E. A. Ross, and the town where Mother Jones lies buried. Devoutly Lutheran and Republican, Sally’s parents encouraged her independence, to a point. Her tomboy phase lasted until age ten, when she learned that girls didn’t play baseball or football, though they might become cheerleaders or majorettes. She did both, and other things too. Thanks to Andrew Carnegie, Litchfield had a public library where you could find Freud as well as the encyclopedia. Fascinated by psychology, she looked forward to college and a career as psychoanalyst. That was not to be. Her life took a different turn when she met a sweet-talking stranger from the big city. Pregnancy, marriage, and expulsion from high school followed in rapid order. Eventually, the young family returned to Chicago, where Sally finished high school by mail and in due course discovered the city’s community college system. At Amundsen Junior College she also discovered sociology. It was love at first sight.
Determined to become a sociologist, she won a scholarship to University of Chicago—a move that ended her marriage. Working to support herself and her son Mark, she also explored an unimagined world of knowledge and began honing the research skills she needed. A graduate fellowship in survey research from the National Institute of Mental Health supported her study at the National Opinion Research Center. Although Chicago nurtured a reputation for radical social science, little of that tradition manifested itself during the 1950s and early 1960s. The stirrings of a campus only just beginning to awaken from a torpid decade sounded only the most muffled call to action. But when we married and moved to Houston in 1966, we found plenty to keep us busy in civil rights and antiwar movements, though none of it meshed with work. Sally had joined a mental health research team as evaluator. Gerontology, however, proved more interesting than engaging; it inspired no action. Both of us were still writing our dissertations, Sally under Alice Rossi. One day a letter arrived, telling her about a new group that Alice had just helped form, the National Organization for Women. We quickly founded a Houston chapter of NOW. Sally had always been a feminist; she simply hadn’t known what to call herself. The women’s movement at last provided the arena in which she could fully exercise her skills and unite research and action. The rest, as they say, is history.
Working closely with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the late 1960s, Sally analyzed affirmative action plans to show decisively how conventional statistical treatments disguised sex discrimination by comparing minority women to white women, rather than women to men. Sally also made sure her findings reached women working in the companies as well as NOW. Initially only one of the subjects of study, the Bell system became the target of further research; ultimately, Sally’s findings strongly shaped NOW’s key role in the landmark multimillion-dollar AT&T settlement of 1973. Curiously, however, the lot of women in the phone company seemed not to improve very much, and she began wondering about sources of technological change and managerial uses of technological innovation. We moved to Iowa in 1970, where Sally taught sociology at Drake University in Des Moines; we quickly formed a central Iowa NOW chapter. A faculty research fellowship from the Ford Foundation allowed her to complete the analysis for her important and much-cited Social Problems paper on “Sex Stratification, Technology, and Organizational Change” in AT&T. Decisions about new technologies, it seemed, had as much to do with manipulating the work force as with increasing profits.
The same Ford grant allowed Sally to study technological and social change in other Iowa industries as well: displacement of craftwork in printing and publishing, office automation in insurance, and the mechanization of farming. Agribusiness growth at the expense of family farming, in particular, sparked her concern. From that research came her incisive report on technological change and the lives of rural women, “Farming Out the Home.” Once again, she shared her findings widely, with a broad spectrum of feminists, migrant workers, farm women, advocates of appropriate technology, academics, and rural social workers. Meanwhile we’d become grandparents, Sally learned roofing and tried communal living, and a motorcycle became her preferred mode of transport. She moved easily between roles as disparate as college teacher and witch, civil libertarian and radical activist. All this and more helped make the early and mid-1970s the yeasty time so vividly portrayed in Pleasure, Power, and Technology.
Increasingly, technological change seemed to Sally the central engine of modern social change; unlike many, though, she refused to view technology as an independent factor. Rather she saw it embedded in a matrix of social groups, relations, and processes. Technology, in other words, became a fit subject for sociological analysis as both cause and effect of social change. To balance then common questions about the impact of technology on society, Sally started asking about the social shaping of technology—how human purposes and values, interests and motives, institutions and actions, produce our technologies. Circumstances have changed dramatically in the past decade or so, but few scholars were asking such questions in the mid-1970s when the sociology of technology scarcely existed as a field of study. Guided by what she had already learned about technological innovation in the Bell system, Sally resolved to study engineering. Engineers appeared to occupy a crucial nexus in the corporate creation and deployment of new technologies. That made the next step clear: find out what made engineers tick. In 1975, with help from the Mellon Foundation, she set off for MIT to begin doing just that. She audited engineering classes, talked with students and engineers, interviewed faculty members, and read widely. Continuing her research while teaching sociology at Oregon State University from 1977 onward, she formally enrolled as an engineering student. Later she even took a secretarial job with an engineering firm.
Engineering was never to Sally merely machines and buildings or an occupational field lacking female practitioners. It was those things, of course, but it was also ideology and culture—ways of looking at the world and ways of molding society. Her angle of vision widened to include past as well as present, the social shaping of engineering practice as well as the internal structure of the engineering profession. By the late 1970s, Sally was finding less scope for the kind of activism she had earlier practiced. But taking advantage of a quiet decade, she reflected more deeply on her findings and shared her insights with a wider audience. Several themes assumed growing prominence in her thinking as the decade progressed. One was the largely overlooked past and present influence of military institutions on the organization, ideology, and tasks of engineering, and through engineering, on work and society. A second theme centered on work itself, the labor process, and the quest for a democratic workplace as affected by technological change. More recently, a third theme increasingly came to the fore: technology’s aesthetic and erotic dimensions. “The whole field of engineering,” she said in a 1987 interview, “is shot through with passion and excitement.” She was just beginning to explore what that implied.
Sally looked forward to the 1990s, believing, as many of us do, that a time for action is building again. But this time it will have to be without her. Sally would have led, as she always did, though seldom seeing herself as leader. Although she organized and directed and lectured and discussed, mostly she led by example. For anyone who knew her—kin, colleague, student, friend—she epitomized integrity and courage. Throughout her life she did what needed doing without ever counting the cost. Sally died in the summer of 1988, too soon by far, no less courageously than she lived. Death came not very long after she put the final touches to her book. For Sally, of course, text finished remained a long way from work completed. Results still needed broadcasting, courses of action still needed plotting, new research needed doing. Perhaps Pleasure, Power, and Technology will serve some of these ends; perhaps other activists will find their paths a little clearer. And perhaps other sociologists will venture further into the regions she helped chart. In the spirit of Mary Ellen Lease, the legendary Kansas populist she met while writing her book, I’m sure Sally would urge them to raise less fog and more hell.
Barton C. Hacker
Originally published as Barton C. Hacker, “Sally Hacker (1936–1988),” Technology and Culture 31, no. 4 (1990): 925–29. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1990.a901689.
Hacker, Sally. Pleasure, Power, and Technology: Some Tales of Gender, Engineering, and the Cooperative Workplace. Winchester: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Hacker, Barton C., and Sally L. Hacker. “Military Institutions and the Labor Process: Noneconomic Sources of Technological Change, Women’s Subordination, and the Organization of Work.” Technology and Culture28, no. 4 (1987): 743-775. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/889301.
Hacker, Sally. “Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the, American Experience by Merritt Roe Smith (review).” Technology and Culture 28, no. 3 (1987): 709–12.
Hacker, Sally. “More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwaveby Ruth Schwartz Cowan (review).” Technology and Culture 26, no. 2 (1985): 291–93.
The Sally Hacker Prize was established in 1999 to honor an exceptional book on the history of technology intended for non-specialist as well as scholarly readers.