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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways women narrated their involvement in the alternative technology movement. Women from the US, UK, and Canada connected their work for just technological transitions to social justice demands, connecting grassroots movements often held separate in historical narratives.

Paper long abstract:

From the early 1960s on, women joined and formed grassroots environmental organizations focused on stemming ecological devastation and protecting human health. While women’s participation in anti-nuclear activism may be most noted by historians, women also became active in the alternative technology (AT) movement, a transnational grassroots movement whose proponents wanted to find safe alternative technologies to provide food, energy, and shelter. Women’s work in the AT movement was crucial to its success yet is rarely discussed by historians. This paper draws on oral history interviews with women involved in the AT movement in the US, UK, and Canada to argue that their views of just technological transitions foregrounded social as well as environmental justice issues. They worked for gendered justice alongside ecological concerns. They saw their work as integrally linked to women’s activist labor that preceded their own, including personal mentors who lived in ways outside of traditional gender norms. These women also narrated the ways social changes supported their activism, including new access to higher education as well as a mobile lifestyle. Finally, their stories suggest the deep connections between activist movements usually held separate in historical narratives, as these women often continued their work in places beyond the AT movement, including feminist science studies, the organic agriculture movement, and ecofeminism.