Histories of Women and Energy

Location: Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich, Germany

Conveners: Prof. Abigail Harrison Moore, University of Leeds, UK / Prof. Ruth Sandwell, University of Toronto, Canada

Historians have become increasingly aware of energy as a discrete force in shaping and changing societies.In a parallel move, scholars within energy studies are increasingly acknowledging the importance of social historical contexts, as well as technological and economic, within which energy transitions occur.

A recent convergence amongst social, environmental, and energy historians has created a socio-ecological approach to energy transitions, and one that emphasizes their historical contingency. This exciting, new approach, however, remains under-developed, and particularly with regard to gender. While class and ethnic inequality have received some attention, studies have largely focused on men’s experience of energy and environment. We now have a rich and growing analysis of men’s inventions, men’s labour, and men’s planning and development of systems for financing, selling, running, repairing, and maintaining the new networks of power, particularly electricity, oil and gas. Though worthy topics, these have not left much room for understanding the varied relationships that women have had with their environments through the energy that they produced, processed and consumed to support themselves and (typically) their families. We are delighted, therefore, that the Rachel Carson Center (RCC), and the University of Leeds, have enabled us to hold a writing workshop to address this lacuna. We are expecting that this workshop will result in a scholarly manuscript (with the support of Canadian funding agencies), and a Special Issue of the Rachel Carson Center Perspectives.

The workshop and resulting publications, convened by Professors Ruth Sandwell (University of Toronto, Canada) and Abigail Harrison Moore (University of Leeds, UK), draws together international scholars whose work is focusing on the profound transformations in women’s relationships -- with their families, their work and workplaces, with the environment and with political power -- that accompanied their changing energy production, consumption and awareness around the world.

The ambition of the workshop is to think and write together, and produce one or more publication that we hope will act as catalysts to further research on gender as an important category of analysis in energy history. Given that social and economic historians have long pointed to considerable differences in the ways that women and men interact with their environments, with structures of power, and with energy, we feel it is time to address this considerable omission with a volume on women and energy.

Please note: This is a closed event.

Read the workshop report here.