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“Waste: The New Pornography”: Gender and the 1970s origins of ecological homes

Fri, April 12, 10:30am to 12:00pm, Hyatt Regency Columbus, Union C

Abstract

Beginning in the 1960s, the earth came to be seen as a unified, closed system that needed to be managed through international governance. Concurrently, people came to envision their bodies and homes as permeable to ecological processes. These novel ideas of nature and humans’ place within it spurred a variety of responses, from constructing “ecology houses”, such as the Integral Urban House in Berkeley, to developing national conservation ethics, like the Conserver Society in Canada. Through such initiatives, homes became ecologically responsive, and responsible, spaces.

Using archival materials and publications from the United States and Canada, this paper will argue that gendered discourse underlay the conceptualization of a unified global environment that needed to be conserved through domestic architectures and lifestyle choices. Organizations used gendered imagery to indicate that their technological, architectural innovations allowed humans to live in closer concert with the non-human world. Many of these organizations offered a feminist stance, arguing that a balance between humans and nature required equality between the sexes. Contrary to this position, popular press reports of these architectures and conservation measures used gendered imagery to reaffirm traditional gender roles and women’s place in domestic life.

The centrality of gendered discourse to the formation of ecological homes indicates historians must connect environmental activism to debates over women’s labor and the relationship between domestic life and wider economic changes in the 1970s. Indeed, “Ecology Houses” and Canada’s Conserver Society could be seen as activist interventions that emphasized individual care for environmental devastation and removed responsibility from the state. The paper will conclude by moving beyond examining representations of ecological living to explore the tangible, gendered labor involved in maintaining these homes.

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