ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Domestic energy usage in trans-national context: a global reading of the women’s magazine The Electrical Age (1924-1986)

• In Event: Wires Across Borders: Transnational Perspectives on Electrical Histories

English Abstract

Paper abstract: Classical histories of electrical domestication often focus either on large scale stories of national supply systems or localised stories of consumption. Such accounts can tacitly assume the sufficiency (respectively) of national or local expertise for the process often teleologically represented as ‘electrification’. Yet recent research highlights that much knowledge and know-how in electricity is imported from multiple remote locations. We thus need to develop new trans-national maps of how domestication of electrical energy was accomplished during the 20th century. One new resource to facilitate this is The Electrical Age magazine (1926-1986), recently digitized to mark the centenary of the founding in 1924-25 of the UK’s Electrical Association for Women (E.A.W.). Far from being dedicated solely to British issues, this quarterly E.A.W. publication regularly reported on dialogic developments in electrical energy supply and consumption around the world; this included coverage of the sibling E.A.W.s launched in the Netherlands (1932), Australia (1934), New Zealand (1960), and Trinidad and Tobago (1961). Rigorous digital searches of the Electrical Age can highlight specific periods of dialogue between electrical services in the UK, those four nations’ EAWS and other major world hubs of electrical activity, such as China, Russia, Sweden, USA. The paper concludes by looking at the Electrical Age’s representations of electrical expertise in Trinidad & Tobago’s E.A.W., contrasting it with accounts in the Trinidad & Tobago’s Electricity Commission (TTEC) magazine, Watts Happening. We can thus understand why the T&T EAW (uniquely) is still operative today: while borrowing in part from the original UK model of consumer-run civic branches of EAW experts, the government-run TTEC acknowledges the T&T EAW as a key strategic platform for women’s expertise in shaping the practice of electrical energy delivery on those islands.

Author

• Graeme Gooday, University of Leeds