In a New Light: Histories of Women and Energy

The current climate crisis has prompted significant growth in the field of energy history. Yet even as the number of energy historians expands, their analyses of human energy use remain narrowly focused on the behaviors of only half the human population. Scholars who investigate the history of fossil fuel use and its consequences still concentrate largely on the activities of male inventors, industrialists, engineers, laborers, and policy-makers who produced, marketed, used, and regulated energy in public spaces. The contributors to In a New Light successfully challenge this male-dominated narrative. In their examination of the transition to fossil fuel dependence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western Europe and North America, the essayists consider energy transformation from the perspective of educators, interior designers, homemakers, and other women whose activities revolved around household energy use. As the editors note in their introduction to the collection, this volume “unapologetically returns the historians' gaze to women's domestic lives as a way of deepening our understanding of gender in the history of energy, and energy in the history of women and gender” (6).The cover of In a New Light features a woman's hand reaching to pull the chain of an electric light fixture, and the generation and use of household electricity figures prominently in the volume. Following Ruth W. Sandwell's opening essay, in which she analyzes the relative absence of women in energy historiography, Karen Sayer discusses in chapter 2 the ways in which English women used and adapted candlepower prior to the introduction of gas and electric lighting. In chapter 3, Sandwell examines Canadian women's concerns about kerosene lamps, gas-powered stoves, and other combustible household devices, noting that electric companies exploited these fears when they advertised the safety of electric-powered equipment. Abigail Harrison Moore, in chapter 4, looks at the advice that women interior designers dispensed to middle-class housewives as they arranged newly gas-equipped or electric-powered homes in late Victorian England. Chapter 5 moves into the twentieth century, with Graeme Gooday's discussion of the ways in which women engineers and educators worked through organizations like the Electrical Association for Women to promote the electrification of British households. In chapter 6, Sorcha O'Brien employs oral history research to examine the electrification of rural homes in post–World War II Ireland, while Petra Dolata focuses on postwar West Germany in her chapter investigating how women in the Ruhr region experienced coal as a salable commodity, a direct household power source, and ultimately a generator of household electricity. Vanessa Taylor concludes the collection with a chapter considering energy modernization in mid-twentieth-century Britain, which included the expanded use of electrical appliances. With a particular focus on midcentury Scotland, Taylor drives home the point that women as well as men have contributed to the current global climate crisis.In addition to the seven essayists, an eighth historian makes a major contribution to In a New Light: Ruth Schwartz Cowan. Essayists cite Schwartz Cowan's study of household power transition in the United States, More Work for Mother (1983), more frequently than any other secondary source. These numerous references to Schwartz Cowan's scholarship inevitably draw the reader's attention to the volume's major drawback: not a single chapter focuses primarily on women's experience in the United States, the Western nation with the largest carbon footprint.For readers interested in rural and agricultural history, another shortcoming is the volume's relative inattention to the unique experiences of women in the countryside. Although the book's coeditor Ruth W. Sandwell and contributor Karen Sayer are prominent rural historians, they do not specifically focus on rural developments in their chapters on Canada and England. Vanessa Taylor includes the rural Highlands in her larger examination of midcentury Scotland, but only Sorcha O'Brien's consideration of postwar Ireland exclusively investigates household energy use in a rural context. Employing oral histories that she and other interviewers collected in the late 2010s among women in their seventies and eighties, O'Brien indeed sheds new light on the electrification of Ireland's countryside in the two decades following World War II. While previous oral histories of Ireland's rural electrification scheme centered on the recollections of male engineers, O'Brien and her colleagues record the memories of female energy consumers whose adoption of new appliances produced some unexpected results. Elderly rural women express nostalgia for the delicious bread they baked slowly over turf fires before they acquired modern kitchen ranges, but they retain no such sentiments for the heavy laundry work they performed before the arrival of power washing machines. As O'Brien notes, the popularity of modern washing machines among rural Irishwomen made them must-have items in Irish farm homes. The appliances even became bargaining chips when women negotiated the terms of marriage. Women increasingly refused to marry farmers who would not invest in the electric power and modern plumbing systems that enabled use of washing machines. In a society that prohibited married women from using birth control, teaching school, or working as a nurse, Irish farm wives' demand for electric washing machines represented a significant act of female empowerment.By including women in the story of energy transformation, O'Brien and the other contributors to In a New Light successfully meet their goal of complicating and enriching the literature of both energy history and the history of women and gender. While the volume lacks sufficient attention to the experiences of rural women and those in the United States, it will hopefully inspire other scholars to pursue investigations that fill those voids. With any luck, this collection will usher in a wave of scholarship devoted to the role of women in the history of energy use.

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