Book review: The Smart Wife (2020, MIT Press)

It was my pleasure to review Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy's new book, The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot, for Science magazine.

Their book, published in 2020 by MIT Press, explores a topic close to my heart: gendered digital assistants and questions about feminized design, labor, culture, and technology. Their book offers a cheeky and provocative deep dive into the many forms, representations, and roles played by smart wife technologies, particularly as they perform cleaning, caring, home-making, companionship, and sexual labor in the home.

You can read my full review of their book in the September 2020 issue of Science magazine:

Sweeney, M.E. (2020). The Stepford wife gets smart. Science, 369 (6508), pp. 1169. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abd2192