Julie Wosk’s My Fair Ladies takes us on an amazing tour of  artificial females in art,  film, television, literature---and today's startling electronic robots that look so real they can easily fool the eye.  The book’s images of female robots, mannequins, and  mechanical dolls  showcases the fascinating story of how men throughout history have used the tools of technology to create the “perfect woman."

​

As  technology has advanced over the past century, the figure of the lifelike simulated woman has popped up  everywhere from Bride of Frankenstein to The Stepford Wives to Her  and more. The book also highlights women filmmakers and artists who are creating their own witty versions of simulated females, and women working in the field of robotics who are reshaping the field in imaginative ways.

​

See also Julie  Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations From

the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (Johns Hopkins University Press). This well-illustrated book  highlights how artists and photographers  historically  have depicted women using bicycles,  automobiles, airplanes, factory machines, and more. Images of women often depicted them as baffled by machines, but in other illustrations, they are shown upending the stereotypes and happily mastering these machines.

​

Her book Breaking Frame:  Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century (Rutgers University Press) features images by artists that captured the excitement and anxiety that accompanied the arrival of new factories and mechanization in the nineteenth century.  The book has been reissued with the new title  Breaking Frame:  Technology,  Art, and Design in the Nineteenth Century.