Gender

By connecting two historiographies that, with a few exceptions, have generally ignored one another—gender history and the history of energy—this introductory article for the special issue “Home and Hearth: Gender and Energies within the Domestic Space, 19th-21st Centuries” highlights the fruitful

In the advanced countries, the electrification of houses was one step further in the wave of modernization resulting from the sudden arrival of electricity in all areas of daily life at the beginning of the 1930s.

By the 1870s the gas industry had no competitors for lighting, turning it into a near monopoly. However, by the 1880s the possibility of using electricity for street lighting changed the equation and the threat for gas industry was huge.

Access to clean and affordable energy services and technologies is a global concern as stated in global conventions and goals. Different energy needs and interests are identified between men and women.

The electrification of households in Los Angeles provides an instructive window through which to study the changing contours of masculinity between 1900 and 1930.

At the same time that urban American hearths and kitchens became dependent upon coal, proscriptive accounts of gendered domesticity grew in popularity. Buying coal was a man’s world, full of sharp dealings, underhanded sellers, and cutthroat competition.

Traditional energy histories have treated electrification as an inevitability: the assumption has been that making cheap energy supply readily available for the masses required the energy efficiency uniquely attainable by large-scale networked electricity grids.