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- Convenors:
-
Fabian Zimmer
(TU Berlin)
Tiia Sahrakorpi (Aalto University)
Julie Sze
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Creativity, Sensibility, Experience, and Expression
- Location:
- Room 21
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 20 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
The household as environment has seen transformations in energy and material flows, alongside work and gender relations. This panel looks at the complex experiences of these transitions. The micro perspective challenges historical methodologies and thinking about current household transformations.
Long Abstract:
The house, the household, the home – traditionally seen as a refuge from the outside world – has recently begun to catch the attention of environmental historians. Taking the notion of the “domestic environment” literally, this panel explores the household as part of the “indoor biome” (Martin et al. 2015) which has undergone profound transformations and transitions – in energy regimes, material flows and in work and familial relations – over the last 250 years. Households were not only deeply entangled with adjacent ecosystems, they themselves formed ecosystems, putting everchanging requirements on residents to maintain liveability and habitation standards.
In exploring the myriad ways in which households, traditionally managed by women, have transformed over time, our panel combines historical cases with methodological and transdisciplinary reflection. We are especially interested in explorations of experiences, senses, emotions, and narratives in all kinds of households. Women’s experiences in the household have been analysed, for example, through the lens of technological change (Cowan 1983), the neurotic housewife (Cowman and Jackson 2005), and the “professional” housewife (Giles 2004; Harrison Moore and Sandwell 2021). This panel expands such histories by focusing on everyday intimate encounters within domestic environments. These encounters are often gaps in the archival record and are therefore missing in more recent histories of consumption. Here, the panel elicits a reflection of methodology and transdisciplinarity: How can we, as environmental historians, make these voices heard? And how can knowledge of past transformations inform current perspectives on sustainable transitions and environmental justice?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 20 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
Our 'interdisciplinary conversation' combines the critical questions we ask in the 'Intimate Energies' project with a consideration of how we creatively use different archives and different participatory methods to find the hidden histories of women making energy decisions in the home.
Paper long abstract:
Our paper will explore methods for recovering the histories of energy in the home, centering on two questions; How do we research women’s experience and emotion in the histories of energy in the home? And why is an interdisciplinary approach to both archives and methods vital in this work? Energy history to date has focused almost exclusively on technologies of extraction and production and the demands of economic growth. However most people experience energy in a much more intimate setting, in the routine domestic actions of cooking, cleaning, heating, and lighting, and their energy decisions in this context are guided by a range of factors that go beyond a simple desire for energy efficiency and ease of use. Our ‘Intimate Energies: Negotiating Power in Domestic Spaces’ project draws on historical sources available in archives, libraries and museums to reveal lived experiences of energy in the home at moments of energy transition to reinstate both the agency of women in negotiating energy transitions and the centrality of the household tasks to the energy economy. Women and home-makers played a vital role in the process of adopting and normalising new forms of energy, yet we barely see them in the existing literature. Our ‘interdisciplinary conversation’ will combine the critical questions we ask in our project with a consideration of how we creatively use different archives and different participatory methods to find the hidden histories of women making energy decisions in the home.
Paper short abstract:
This paper complements conventional interpretations of the English transition to coal as arising from a population-resource crisis or rapid commercialization, by considering climate cooling, heating technologies, and changing institutional and socioeconomic relations between 1300 and 1600.
Paper long abstract:
If the immediate cause of the fossil energy transition in early modern England is the bifurcation of coal and wood-fuel real prices in the late 16th century, the standard underlying explanations—Malthusian population pressure or Smithian commercialisation—are insufficient: populations of (especially eastern) England and London’s supply area were greater in 1300 than in 1550–1600. The Marxian historiographical supermodel has remained silent, focusing on agrarian and industrial relations of class and production, where the transition to coal was quintessentially urban and domestic. Instead, climate cooling between 1300 and 1600 affected both supply and demand via shifting growing and heating degree days. Reduced supply of wood fuels is indicated by coppicing cycles increasing from 4–8 to 10–20 years between 1300 and 1540. On the consumption side, customary attachment to open fires, higher urban land prices and post-plague consumer standards led to the introduction of the fireplace, flue and chimney in cities from the 14th century onwards (London), and in the countryside from the 16th century. This did not raise heating efficiency but rather allowed—homeostatically—burning more fuel in inclement weather without the smoke becoming unbearable: the invention of comfort. It also facilitated the shift from wood/charcoal to coal as late 16th-century winters grew longer and colder. Coal was not affected by climate other than via increasing demand, but production and marketing also had institutional support from the Tudor state and municipal authorities fearing social unrest. The increasingly common hedgebreaking for fuel was not an option for city-dwellers, who instead opted for cheap coal.
Paper short abstract:
This paper uses diaries and other ego-documents to carve out everyday experiences of comfort in Wilhelmine Germany. Treating comfort from an environmental perspective, this inquiry gives insight into motivational structures fueling the unfolding modern consumer society around 1900.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focusses on everyday experiences of comfort in Wilhelmine Germany. Using diaries and other ego-documents, I trace how people reflected on the sensory and emotional experience of their everyday domestic environments. Focusing a period of rapid and profound change in the urban built environment, I aim to show how notions of Komfort, which had been adopted from the English Language in the early 19th century, and the older concept of Behaglichkeit shaped experiences and expectations of domesticity.
Even if comfort is routinely defined as “satisfaction with the relationship between one’s body and its immediate physical environment” (following John Crowley’s 2001 study The Invention of Comfort), comfort has rarely been considered from a decidedly environmental perspective. This perspective not implies considering the more obvious environmental effects of a comfortable lifestyle (such as escalating energy use or waste production by households), but also what one could call its environmental affects: it treats humans themselves as biological organisms, which strive to fulfil certain vital needs from their environments in order to thrive, becoming agents of human niche construction in the process (Odling-Smee / Laland / Feldman 2003). In this light, an inquiry into historical experiences of comfort during the height of industrialization in Germany promises to give us critical insights into motivational structures fueling the unfolding modern consumer society. At the same time, carving out these mundane experiences from ego documents comes with methodological challenges, which I also address in this paper.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses how people remember domestic heating related experiences in their childhoods and youth using oral history interviews. The paper argues that heating practices changed significantly when mothers began to work outside the home or when families moved to suburbs, altering lifestyles.
Paper long abstract:
Domestic heating is one of the largest domestic energy sectors in national energy consumption in Finland, and energy consumption has grown through the building of the district heat network since the 1970s. From the 1960s, many people left rural areas for urban regions to find work, but also women's role began to change as many began to seek employment beyond the home. Domestic heating rituals began to change as a result of this structural transition. This paper analyses how people remember domestic heating related experiences in their childhoods and youth using oral history interviews. Interviewees recall experiences of warmth, sleeping close to the hearth, or feeling the winter chill in their cottages. Many also actively rejected the concept of feeling cold as a child, indicating how family loyalty ties into feelings of physical comfort inside the home. Overall, the paper argues that heating practices changed significantly when mothers began to work outside the home or when families moved to suburbs, altering the experience of home heating and what it meant to experience warmth or feel comfort from the hearth.
Paper short abstract:
In my presentation, I will discuss the evolution of heating practices in residences during the interwar period and the 'great acceleration' after WWII. This intricate development can be encapsulated by the concept of 21 degrees culture, which exerted a significant impact on everyday life.
Paper long abstract:
The establishment of the 21 degrees culture was part of the modernization of everyday life that took place during this period. The context was the suburbs and the new single-family houses designed by modernist architects and the new understanding of ‘home’ that followed from this. Central and district heating were the two important breakthroughs for a convenient indoor climate.
With the 21 degrees culture, the materiality of energy was moved out of the dwelling, i.e. the residents did no longer have to do any work to heat the home. It relates to significant changes in the infrastructures linked to the heating, both inside and outside the dwelling.
Next, the 21 degrees culture is characterized by the possibility of even heat throughout the dwelling, in contrast to the previous zone-divided radiant heat. It was of great importance both for the floor plan, which became far more flexible, for clothing, where light textiles, especially cotton, became commonplace, and for the interaction between the residents.
In my presentation, I will briefly present the process of immaterialization and especially discuss the improvements to everyday life that came with the 21 degrees culture. In conclusion, I will discuss what factors promoted the introduction of and changes in this culture.
Paper short abstract:
Emotions have been, and still are, central in our desitionmaking. Also when deciding to buy harmful,and dangerous, substances to use as tools for combatting non-human "enemies". This paper explores the complex emotions that have influenced centuries of Scandinavian poison purchases and practices.
Paper long abstract:
Emotions have been, and still are, central in our desitionmaking. Also when deciding to buy harmful,and dangerous, substances to use as tools for combatting non-human "enemies". After quantifying over 30 000 individual poison sales from Scandinavian pharmacies from Tromsø in the north and Copenhagen in the south, Stavanger in the west and Visby in the east, it has become clear to me that emotions have influenced environmental history also inside private homes. Emotions have been been among the strongest provocateurs when private citizens have decided to obtain different poisons to use against living organisms that caused negative feelings like shame, fear, disgust or even hatered - something that had to be eliminated at all costs. Some feelings came from individual experiences, others were generated by peer pressure. Feelings snd practices that led to mass consumption of, and exposure to, arsenic, lead, mercury and modern chemicals like DDT, most of which are now recognised as harmful carsinogens and EDCs.
This paper explores the complex emotions that have influenced centuries of Scandinavian poison purchases an poison practices.
Paper short abstract:
The American home cellar in the late 1800s was reportedly “a damp, dark, musty, foul-smelling place…the unrelenting enemy of the family physician.” After decades of envirotechnical developments co-piloted by homemakers and cement, the basement became instead a welcoming amenity of suburban life.
Paper long abstract:
Enmeshed technical and cultural developments underneath American homes led to a new domestic ideal. Modern basement living became recognizable across the U.S. by the middle of the twentieth century, even though basements were not found in every region of the country. This paper is an account of that massive cultural change, in which the physically uncomfortable and socially condemned experience of living underground became an enviable component of everyday life. The account follows basements as an evolving entanglement of technology and culture and in particular considers the role of modern cement in changing American domesticity.
Americans did not set out to live beneath their homes and then employ cement in that mission. Rather, homeowners first cemented cellars to keep rats away from vegetables and keep moisture away from coal. Cement was quite successful in those tasks, limiting an array of odors, organisms, and other matter and creating the possibility of clean, congenial space. Over decades, people and cement cooperated to regulate basement environments and develop attendant cultures. Cement not only aided existing domestic practices but also guided new practices. Middle-class white women, increasingly tasked with managing both home and family, took the lead in co-creating basement cultures. With cement, housewives created new methods of keeping their homes presentable, raising children, and recreating as a nuclear family. Basements were touted as a convenience to homemaking even as they generated new expectations for American women that allowed basement living to become a fixture of the ideal suburban single-family home.
Paper short abstract:
The paper investigates the way that the vigorous twentieth-century anti-tuberculosis campaign cleaned up the home, transforming the domestic microenvironment and the roles and duties of the female housekeepers in the process.
Paper long abstract:
One of the priorities of the twentieth-century anti-tuberculosis campaign was to stop early childhood infections, which were particularly dangerous and which mainly took place at home. This made the domestic environment a central target for tuberculosis-related public health efforts. In the militaristic rhetoric of the day, mothers were called to arms to defend their children against the germ, with cleanliness as their main weapon. Cleaning became an emotionally loaded duty with the children’s lives at stake. It is well known that the threat of tuberculosis influenced housing, domestic architecture and furnishings. What has received less attention is the impact of the campaign on the ”domestic microbiome” (Martin et al. 2015). Three commonplace prescriptions in particular influenced the latter: to remove any visible dirt and dust, to apply germicidal chemical substances like Lysol on the surfaces at home and to keep the home well-ventilated at all times. While the former impoverished the domestic microbiome, the latter enriched it by opening the domestic space up and connecting it with the natural environment. While there is no way to measure the exact impact of the transformation biologically, we can grasp some of its the social and experiental aspects by means of historical narrative sources, which in this paper are mainly printed cleaning education material produced by the anti-tuberculosis campaign and two major collections of written first-hand reminiscences, one focusing on the personal experiences of nurses and the other on the experiences of people who suffered from tuberculosis.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines socio-ecological transformations of the domestic environment in mid-20th century Copenhagen by approaching and analysing encounters and conflicts between rats, urban residents and governmental authorities as negotiations of everyday welfare and citizenship.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates transformations of the domestic environment in mid-20th century Copenhagen through the lens of rats. In this period, Copenhagen underwent significant spatial and architectural changes as new urban legislation for planning, housing, slum clearance and pest control were passed in context of the emerging welfare society. This development entailed a transformation of the bio-social conditions of domestic and urban life. Increasingly, urban authorities and urban dwellers identified and experienced dysfunctional infrastructures, sanitary shortcomings and pervasive nature in the form of animals, dampness and mould as intolerable ‘nuisances’. Rats, in particular, became a contentious issue within this context, transcending the porous socio-spatial boundaries between public and private. This found expression both in the centralization of urban pest control and in several public rat extermination campaigns.
Taking its starting point in the physical attributes, behaviour and resilience of rats, this paper aims to examines encounters and conflicts between rats, residents and governmental authorities in the urban domestic environment. Focusing on inspection reports of condemned housing from the Copenhagen Health Police and the Municipal Housing Commission, the paper pursues two interrelated objectives. First, analyses the sensory and emotional experiences of rats in the context of rapidly changing expectations regarding urban housing standards. Secondly, it links these experiences to broader questions of citizenship and welfare. The inspection reports, the paper argues, exhibit how domestic space came to work as a socio-ecological arena for everyday political negotiations where questions of welfare and citizenship intertwined with categories such as family, gender, hygiene and privacy.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates how post-war British egg consumption shaped gender roles within the domestic sphere. It explores key moments of change in public understanding of eggs, revealing how marketing and public health messaging enforced and reshaped women's roles in maintaining a healthy household.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates how post-war British egg consumption shaped gender roles within the domestic sphere. It will look at three significant inflection points in the history of egg consumption in post-war Britain: the intensification of egg production in the 1950s and 1960s, public health messaging linking dietary cholesterol with coronary heart disease in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Salmonella in eggs crisis of the late 1980s. Each of these events marked a transition in everyday understandings of eggs and marked a point of conflict between the consumer and ‘experts’ regarding what was appropriate, healthful, and safe food.
The figure of the ‘housewife’ was often the target of marketing and health messaging in this period and women bore the responsibility of ensuring a healthy household by shopping sensibly and deploying safe cooking practices. Through analysing the representation of women in public health messaging and marketing – and the points of conflict between the producers of this content and its recipients – this paper will provide new insights into the gendered aspects of the interaction between health and food. It will argue that gender roles in in the domestic space were constructed and enforced in public health messaging and marketing with the burden of responsibility often falling on women. Through this, the paper will reveal the need to account for and mitigate the gendered presentation of responsibility when translating necessary changes in the food system to the everyday domestic sphere.