The Digital Dissertator

Project Description

Most now recognize that the effects of climate change will lead to a global move away from high CO2-emitting forms of energy and that such a transition is overdue. Few, however, realize the role that gender will play in this transition. My dissertation is an environmental and gender history of past energy transitions in the United States. Taking the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as a case study, my work uncovers how gendered ideologies influenced national energy policies and examines how different types of energy production shaped gender roles in material ways. Cold war masculinity, for example, led to an increased willingness among male policymakers to take risks, which shaped the expansion of nuclear power plants. On the other hand, the material effects of hydroelectricity served to differentiate and physically separate the labor men and women in the Tennessee River valley. An increase in mosquito breeding grounds and a reduction in farm sizes reveals that a malarial outdoor environment coupled with a decline in the need for women’s farm labor pushed them into their homes. TVA promoters even claimed through conditioning indoor environments with electrical heating and cooling, it made women more beautiful.

My dissertation engages important conversations in environmental and social history. Scholars have recently begun to engage the relationship between energy production and social division. Andrew Needham, for example, explores how electrical infrastructure served to reinforce race and class divisions in Phoenix and on the Navajo Reservation. Kate Brown’s study of the Hanford plant in Washington briefly explores issues of gender in nuclear power production. Social historians, like Alice Kessler-Harris, have explored the role that a “gendered imagination” played in shaping public policies that appear neutral on their face. Yet overall, the connections between gender and environment remain underexplored. My dissertation builds upon this recent work while, through its careful engagement with the material landscape, developing new insights. It will be the first study to foreground the ways in which the material and landscape changes instigated by energy production differentially affected men’s and women’s lives in a particular location. The dangers of radiation for pregnant women, for example, may be linked to strict gender divisions in nuclear plant workspace and hiring practices that encouraged the employment of single rather than married women. Birth defects were more visible than the effects of radiation experienced by men. Plant managers therefore had reason to police female workers’ sexuality.

Beyond its contributions to social scientific scholarship, this study is relevant to contemporary policymaking. Through showing how gender and energy policy have shaped one another in the past, my work calls attention to the need to evaluate the gendered implications of energy transitions today. My dissertation insists that energy alternatives should not be seen as simply technological or scientific decisions, but as choices that both reflect and shape gendered relations of power.

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