“Brave New Home”: Gendering Alternative Technology in the 1970s

Abstract

In the 1970s, people involved in the alternative technology movement embraced small-scale, ecologically benign, low-capital, and democratically controlled technologies of food, energy, and shelter. While alternative technology first emerged in the global South, people in the global North soon adopted its tenets to solve problems of overdevelopment: pollution, suburban sprawl, meaningless work, and access to political power. One alternative technology group, the New Alchemy Institute, built bioshelters, homes that incorporated ecologically derived agriculture into living spaces. This article tells the story of the New Alchemy Institute and its major bioshelter project, an “Ark” on Prince Edward Island. In doing so, it focuses on the gendered discourses alternative technology groups used to describe and promote their ecological technologies. It contends that in alternative technology groups, people saw overturning gendered social relationships as essential to their home-based technological innovations. However, while alternative technologists connected feminism to their techno-scientific environmentalism, their radical views dissipated when their technologies moved into the mainstream, carried by images of white, heteronormative, middle-class domesticity.