Women and Large - Scale Electricity Development by Wendy Hawthorne Energy

Many people believe that electricity development has been and continues to be beneficial to women. Early proponents of electrification of the United States, who included feminist visionaries, home economists, utility and transportation companies, and politicians, claimed that electrification would positively change the lives of women. While the vast majority ofthe United States is already electrified, many ofthe less developed countries (referred to collectively as the South in this paper) are not. Proponents of electrification of the South often use the same arguments that were used during the electrification of the United States. This paper shows that women in the United States have not significantly benefitted from electrification. The arguments are then extended to women in the South, where the negative impacts of electrification are often more severe. It is argued that women in the South are far less likely than women in the United States to realize benefits from electrification, and that, since they often rely directly on the local environment for their family's subsistence, they will likely suffer from the negative effects of electrification far more severely and directly than have women in the United States.