Energy, Ecology and Gender in the Middle-Class Home of the Eighteenth-Century Low Countries

During the long eighteenth century, middle-class households in the Low Countries increasingly relied on fossil fuels to heat their homes. While providing greater thermal comfort, these fuels also introduced new discomforts: more smoke, more soot, more odours – and more work cleaning up the mess. Who took care of the heavier workload that fossil-fired comfort required? This article brings together early modern histories of energy, ecology and gender by examining how the transition to fossil fuels placed a growing burden on housewives and maidservants, whose labour has hitherto remained largely invisible. Based on probate inventories, narrative sources and visual evidence, it explores the gendered dimensions of the home’s new heating regime. Following the ecofeminist work of Carolyn Merchant, it is argued that the fossil-fuel transition triggered a ‘death of nature’ which not only obscured the comfortable home’s intensified demands on nature, but also the domestic labour needed to sustain it.