Abstract

Selling Conservation: The Transformation of Electricity Promotion in a Decade of Energy Crisis

In December 1970, employees of the Pennsylvania Power & Light Company's Marketing Department received a strange memo: they were no longer marketers. Starting in 1971, they would become the department of Consumer and Community Affairs. Electricity demand had outpaced PP&L's ability to finance infrastructure to supply power; looming concerns about fuel shortages signaled the end of an era of cheap energy. So what was a marketer to do? One-time kilowatt salesmen and women found themselves tasked with selling a new kind of energy identity, that of the conscious consumer who conserved electricity. This paper traces how this change impacted the relationship between PP&L and their customers, and how it shaped energy practices in their service area. These changes revealed much about the character of the relationship between private utilities and the communities they served, in particular, how behind the exchange of dollars for kilowatts, both utilities and consumers relied on norms of practice, a shared set of expectations about the quality of their energetic lives, and the responsibilities they had to one another. At the same time, the energy crisis placed both the economic exchange and the wider energy system under intense strain. I bring feminist labor history, business history, and energy history together to unsettle and rethink histories of the energy crisis. As the energy crisis intensified, the Consumer and Community Affairs department’s efforts to shape new conservationist identities sometimes sounded more like the disciplining of gender norms, focused on reorganizing women’s work to allow more “productive” forms of consumption to continue apace, and even grow. These efforts revealed the gendered paradox at the heart of PP&L’s conservation efforts: what appeared as energy conservation from one angle could be seen as shoring up a fracturing industrial system supported by single-earner households in a deindustrializing region.