The University of Maine DigitalCommons@UMaine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Fogler Library 5-2021 Making Earth, Making Home: Technoscientific Citizenship and Ecological Domesticity in an Age of Limits Emma Schroeder University of Maine, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/etd Part of the Canadian History Commons, History of Gender Commons, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, Oral History Commons, Social History Commons, United States History Commons, Women's History Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Schroeder, Emma, "Making Earth, Making Home: Technoscientific Citizenship and Ecological Domesticity in an Age of Limits" (2021). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3360. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/etd/3360 This Open-Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UMaine. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UMaine. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MAKING EARTH, MAKING HOME: TECHNOSCIENTIFIC CITIZENSHIP AND ECOLOGICAL DOMESTICITY IN AN AGE OF LIMITS By Emma Schroeder B.A. Swarthmore College, 2006 M.S. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2011 A DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (in History) The Graduate School The University of Maine May 2021 Advisory Committee: Richard Judd, Professor Emeritus of History, Co-Advisor Mark McLaughlin, Assistant Professor of History and Canadian Studies, Co-Advisor Naomi Jacobs, Professor Emerita of English Anne Kelly Knowles, Professor of History Michael Lang, Associate Professor of History Copyright 2021 Emma Schroeder ii MAKING EARTH, MAKING HOME: TECHNOSCIENTIFIC CITIZENSHIP AND ECOLOGICAL DOMESTICITY IN AN AGE OF LIMITS By Emma Schroeder Dissertation Advisors: Dr. Richard Judd and Dr. Mark McLaughlin An Abstract of the Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (in History) May 2021 In the post-WWII era, concerns over Earth’s finite resources and technology’s destructive capacity shaped ideas of a global environment. This dissertation focuses on transnational grassroots social movements that attempted to find solutions to earthly vulnerability. It looks at women’s nuclear disarmament campaigns in the early 1960s, the Appropriate Technology movement of the 1970s, Canada’s conserver society program, and the emergence of feminist technoscientific critique and ecological activism in the early 1980s. In each case study, it shows how the ability to critique and produce technoscientific knowledge expanded women’s political identities, what I call technoscientific citizenship. Simultaneously, these groups promoted ecological domesticity, or the construction of white, middle-class, heteronormative domesticity as the correct way to care for a threatened earth. The tension between technoscientific citizenship and the privatization of care as represented in ecological domesticity forms the core of this work. The dissertation begins with a study of the Voice of Women’s anti-radiation activism, arguing that these women produced technoscientific knowledge for political ends. It then turns to the Appropriate Technology movement, which advocated for small-scale, ecologically-benign, participatory technologies. Women in AT claimed technoscientific acumen and formed activist communities to support their political work. At the same time, AT promoted its work through gendered images that reified white, heteronormative, middle-class domesticity. This construction of home facilitated the spread of ecological living into mainstream culture and assured people that inviting nature into homes would not overturn existing gendered social hierarchies. Black feminists, however, critiqued this construction of domestic care. Finally, it turns to feminist technoscientific critiques of AT and the emergence of ecofeminism, ending with a discussion of the Women and Life on Earth Conference. By linking the construction of specific kinds of homes to women’s expanding political power, this dissertation complicates conventional narratives of both feminism and environmentalism. Throughout, it blurs the boundaries between earth and home, feminism and environmentalism, ecology and technology. It asks how women’s political power can expand at the same time as it is limited by the continuation of specific domestic ideologies. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are more people to thank than I can list here. Thanks to my committee, Dick Judd, Mark McLaughlin, Naomi Jacobs, Michael Lang, and Anne Knowles for their support. Thanks especially to Dick for overseeing many chapter drafts and Mark for helping to arrange final dissertation requirements and reading some early chapter drafts. I could not have completed this research without financial assistance from a number of places. The University of Maine History Department provided me with three years of Teaching Assistantships. The Canadian-American Center at the University of Maine granted me research fellowships for three years, making the completion of this dissertation possible. I was able to travel to archives with the support of multiple grants. As a Research Fellow for the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (2019-2020) I was able to travel to several crucial archives, including the University of Toronto Archives. A Rockefeller Archive Center Research Stipend (2019) provided me the opportunity to explore the Rockefeller Brothers Fund records. The University of Maine History Department provided me with Charles J. Dunn Dissertation Grants in Summer 2017, Fall 2017, and Summer 2018. I also had the opportunity to present and receive feedback on this work at a number of conferences. These included Agricultural History Society Conference (Grand Rapids, 2017), Historians of Twentieth-Century United States (Cambridge, UK, 2018), Association for Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, Metaphysics, and Science Studies (Corvallis 2018), UMaine- UNB Graduate Student Conference (Orono, 2018), Oral History Association Annual Meeting (Montreal 2018), American Society for Environmental History (Columbus, 2019), and the National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference (San Francisco, 2019). Several iii organizations provided funding to support these conference presentations, including an ASEH travel grant, an NWSA travel grant, an Agricultural History Society travel grant, and a travel-to- present grant from the University of Maine Student Government. Several environmental history blogs provided me the chance to present my ongoing work to their audiences. I need to thank Brian Hamilton (EdgeEffects), Elizabeth Hameeteman (Environmental History Now and Historians for Future), and Andrew Watson (Network in Canadian History and Environment) for their willingness to include my work and for their editing. Members of the Women’s History Collective read portions of this work and provided me with insightful feedback. There are too many friends to thank, and their support has been beyond what I can convey. A few that saw me through include Amanda Criner, Liese Dart, Lucretia Grindle, Eileen Haggerman, Justus Hillebrand, Hannah de Keijzer, An Nguyen, Hazel Onsrud, Catharine Parnell, Elisa Sance, Andrea Steward, Sarah Witthauer. Thanks to John Welton for his patience, my parents Paul Schroeder and Mazie Hough for having been inspirations, editors, commentators, and thoughtful participants in the creation of this work, and to my sister, Greta Schroeder, for helping me more than she knows. Finally, this dissertation would not have been possible without the generous time and support given to me by all of the people I interviewed for this project. They welcomed my questions, and I left each conversation with deeper sense of the ways people dedicate themselves to social justice. Their ongoing activism for more just forms of life on earth form the basis for this work. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iii LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................................... viii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION: MAKING EARTH, MAKING HOME ...................................................1 Earth, Citizenship, Home .......................................................................................................4 Technoscientific Activists ....................................................................................................11 Chapter Outline ....................................................................................................................17 2. “AS DEVOID OF EMOTIONALISM AS POSSIBLE”: COLD WAR DOMESTICITY AND WOMEN’S TECHNOSCIENTIFIC CITIZENSHIP .......................21 Cold War Domesticity and Women’s Citizenship ................................................................23 The Voice of Women’s Radiation Brief ...............................................................................27 Women Strike for Peace, Race, and Women’s Difference ...................................................42 Conclusions and Beginnings: Reworkings of Cold War Domesticity in Counter-Conduct Technology Movements ...........................................................................45