newspaper
"Roberta" in robot costume, 1966
In 1966, “Roberta,” also known as “the housewife of tomorrow,” appeared at Macy’s in New York to demonstrate Hamilton Beach appliances.1
The New York Times article, noting that “she can be turned on and off at will,” also highlighted a divide between men and women viewing the robotic spectacle.
When women see Roberta perform at Macy's, their usual comment is "harumph." Men, on the other hand, often express a desire to take her home.
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Klemesrud, Judy. “Housewife of Tomorrow: She Can Be Turned Off,” The New York Times, November 17, 1966. ↩︎
Born Digital newspaper project
This summer I've been working on the "Born Digital" project at the Center for Bibliographic Studies and Research (CBSR) at UC Riverside. The Born Digital project is an effort to help preserve small, weekly newspapers that are currently being produced in digital formats.
While digital technology has allowed modern newspapers to be created and distributed in new and exciting ways, it has also made the records of those newspapers more fragile. The Born Digital project helps newspaper publishers preserve, and make accessible to the general public at no charge, their digital files. As an online archive, the Born Digital project is a portion of the California Digital Newspaper Collection, which holds titles from 1846 to the present.
More information about the Born Digital project is available in this UCR news article: http://newsroom.ucr.edu/2667 (Wayback Machine link)
(Revised and republished April 21st, 2025)