Gender

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.