How ‘Traditional’ Masculinity Norms Drive the Climate Crisis

Rigid ideas of gender impact our world in more ways than we might realise

Katie Jgln
The Noösphere

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Image licensed from Shutterstock

The electric car, invented in the late 19th century, was initially branded as a vehicle for ‘the aged and infirm’ and for… women.

Although it was a woman, the German Bertha Benz, who took the first-ever long-distance car trip and whose contributions were pivotal to the development of the first engine-powered vehicle (and she was hardly the only female automotive inventor), women were deemed physically and intellectually ‘unfit’ to drive them. An electric vehicle, however, was apparently ‘feminine’ enough.

Still, despite being technologically superior — safer, easier to drive and producing fewer emissions (though that wasn’t known at the time) — electric cars, along with electric fire engines, taxis, and buses, failed to gain traction. And while other factors played a role, their lack of appeal to men, who were the primary decision-makers in family car purchases, likely contributed to their downfall, too. As one 1916 article from an American magazine on the electric car’s association with femininity noted:

The thing that is effeminate, or that has that reputation, does not find favor with the American man. Whether or not he is ‘red-blooded’ and…

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