The Gender Disadvantage: Understanding Women in Industrialization

• In Event: Women and Energy

Abstract

While evidence abounds that men, as labourers, scientists, politicians and financiers both dominated the transition to fossil fuels and hydro-electricity and disproportionately benefited from it, energy historians have paid little attention to the ways that gender structured and informed Euro-American transitions. Detailed research by an earlier generation of social historians, however, established a broad consensus that industrialization – today identified pointedly as the transition to fossil fuels in the context of expanding capitalist relations – sharpened gender distinctions in ways that disadvantaged women, starting as far back as the shift from musclepower to waterpower. Industrialization moved productive labour outside the home and into increasingly mechanized workshops and factories, and men’s waged labour increasingly replaced the wide variety of economic activities by which households had traditionally wrested a living from local environments. As fossil fuels facilitated increased urbanization, women still performed the ‘non-economic’ activities (‘shadow work’) needed to support their households and communities. As a ‘separate spheres’ ideology constrained and marginalized, (though it never eliminated) women’s waged work, women became identified more narrowly with their nurturing roles as wives and mothers in the non-productive home. From the later nineteenth century on, women’s inferior status relative to men became a topic of heated debate. Early reformers sought equality by improving the status and reducing the drudgery of women’s home-based labour, bringing the household within the modernizing promise of new forms of energy. By the mid-twentieth century, however, this quest had been largely abandoned, replaced by women’s conviction that they could only achieve equality by entering the workforce in the same capacity as men. As Nancy Fraser has recently argued, this strategy too has largely failed: gender continues to be a major determinate of inequality. Given the profound gender implications of past energy transitions, how might gender be included in deliberations about future energy transitions?

Author

• R.W. Sandwell, University of Toronto