| Sumario: | The discourse that promoted personal digital assistants (PDAs) to women between 1999 and 2001 is a key site for studying the evolution of computer marketing strategies and the construction of ideology about women's place in the gendered division of labor. The marketing goals and cultural environment surrounding PDAs targeted at women helps reinforce Moore's law that requires new markets for more powerful, smaller, microchipped technologies. Advertising campaigns for PDAs that featured women as consumers recycle the general architecture of the gendered division of labor. The “Simply Palm,” “Schiffer Palm,” and “Audrey” PDA ad campaigns imagine women as adornments and assistants to men in the workforce and as primary (often sole) familial workers in the domestic sphere. Drawing on such promotional texts as news articles, press releases, promotional Web sites, and advertisements appearing in newspapers and magazines, the writer considers how the computer industry sought to sell smaller, faster computing devices to women while promising to mediate and thus reproduce women's overwork as paid and familial laborers.
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