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...