Guest blog by Madeleine Smith, Emily Raynor, and Isabella Fletcher from the University of Leeds.

This is the final in a series of blogs written by Liberal Arts students at the University of Leeds to celebrate the centenary of the Electrical Association for Women (EAW) in 2024. In our previous blogposts on the EAW, our key research resource was the fully digitized EAW journal, The Electrical Age, known initially (1926-1932) as The Electrical Age for Women. Our final post in the project will look at how others can use the fully digitised Electrical Age journal in their research.

Unlocking potential

We have all thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to read through The Electrical Age to gather and examine information on women’s changing roles and expertise at the dawn of Britain’s mass electrification. The journal covers such an immense collection of information, exploring all areas of electricity’s potential household usage, that it was necessary to examine the quarterly issues (January, April, July, October) in detail to truly grasp their significance. So our approach was systematically to read volumes 1 (1926-30) and 2 (1930-35) cover to cover to identify which themes and specific women we would highlight in our blog entries. Since the volumes were not at the time publicly available in digital form, we took care to report on them all carefully so that people without access to the journal would have as close of an experience to actually reading them as possible.

As we progressed through the first decade of The Electrical Age, we also saw a number of articles by EAW authors that covered topics still relevant today. These included both celebrations of women’s contributions to promoting electrical technology (an industry very much then dominated by men) and the persistent environmental risks associated with powering one’s home with fossil fuel alternatives to electrical power supply. Our previously published blog posts each cover only a very small range of the topics covered in The Electrical Age ­– we could only scratch the journal’s surface. This of itself demonstrates the sheer volume of further information contained in the digitised Electrical Age – exciting content readily accessible for all, with much scope for investigation on a wide range of topics.

How others can use the journals

The fully digitised Electrical Age allows anyone – including both students and the general public – to use its contents anytime and anywhere. Now available online on the IET Archives website, it can serve as an important resource for teaching and researching in social history, gender studies, and the history of technology – and many other areas, besides. ‘The Electrical Age’ journals offer a rich variety of previously hard to attain sources on women’s crucial role in 20^th century electrification (not just in Britain, but in other countries too). We hope that increased access to the journal issues, perhaps informed by our previous blog posts on the IET Archives blog, will bring further public awareness to the technical contributions of women who otherwise cannot easily be traced on the internet (some still traceable only under married names). Ideally, with full public access to the digitised journal the accomplishments of the Electrical Association for Women and the thousands of members it had during its lifetime will become familiar to a wider range of researchers. Even though this organisation closed down in 1986, having enabled the vast majority of British homes to be electrified, better knowledge of the EAW’s work could potentially motivate younger generations to delve deeper into the organisation’s history and what EAW member’s work represented for the development of electricity, both within households and beyond.

Why the journals matter

Our previous blog posts aimed to shine a light on the extraordinary contributions of specific women and or branches of the EAW. However, while researching more broadly our blog posts, we encountered difficulties in gathering further information on the women mentioned in the journals and their accomplishments. This was particularly the case for those who participated in regional EAW activities rather than at a national level. To address this, we meticulously used the index to each volume of the Electrical Age to trace all mentions of specific women.  Typically, biographical details were supplied in articles about women when they were appointed to administrative or leadership positions in the EAW, e.g. President, Vice-President, Regional Chairman. This helped us understand what work they had previously undertaken, and what broader public activities they (or their husbands) were involved in. Such organised information provided in the journals helped us to find leads for further research.

One particularly helpful strategy was indeed researching the husbands of married EAW women, and via biographical sources on those men we could collect information provided about their wives. We hope that as further online information is made available on EAW women form other sources, it will be easier to use The Electrical Age to create opportunities to research women we did not have time or scope to investigate more thoroughly. This highlights the importance of the Electrical Age journal, as they were the foundation of our research and contain apparently the only information available on some very active EAW women.

Beyond research, the journals are also a valuable resource for people looking into their family history. As mentioned, for many of these women, there is little to no published information. The open access version of the journals will, we hope, aid people in discovering more about their family history, which demonstrates the ongoing relevance of these sources.

Potential research themes

The Electrical Age’s continued value and relevance are further proven by their discussion of women in social activism. The primary reason that the EAW published this journal was to encourage women to engage in the electrical sphere, particularly by introducing this utility into their homes in place of coal or gas technology. This activism enabled many women to participate in the discussion of electricity’s potential benefits. Although the EAW members argued that adoption of electrical equipment in the home (washing machines etc) would lessen their burden of women’ performing household duties, discussion on this topic continues. Even a hundred years later, many women remain responsible for maintaining the domestic sphere, and some argue that labour-saving devices have only increased this burden by diminishing the perceived importance of their role. So, we could all productively draw upon debates in the Electrical Age to inspire us to adopt the spirit of the women in the journals and advocate that electricity should aid women, not confine them further.

The pages of the Electrical Age provide otherwise hard-to-find primary accounts of what life was like for EAW members in the early 20th century: a first-hand insight into the real experiences of women from a hundred years ago. As they wrote about different recurrent themes throughout the journals, readers can learn about which issues were most pertinent at the time of writing, and which in some cases are still important. ‘The Electrical Age’ regularly discussed the environmental dangers, especially pollution caused by burning coal, warning its readers and highlighting the consequences of using more traditional energy sources. On a similar note, the journals often included precautionary articles advising readers on how to use electricity safely. The importance of safety controls in using electricity in the home was regularly reiterated across all volumes of The Electrical Age. This came in the form of both EAW staff editorials and commercial advertising that alike emphasised the importance of using electricity to incur minimal risk of harm to domestic users. Readers will thus be able to see how the EAW campaign to show how electricity could be made safe to use was crucial in overcoming widespread fear of its harmful consequences.

Local stories

Finally, The Electrical Age journal can be used to help people learn about the history of electrification in their local area, giving them an opportunity to become more familiar with the places that matter to them personally. Throughout each volume of the journal, informative pieces can be found about every regional branch of the EAW and its activities since the publication of the previous quarterly issue. This allows readers to track the progress of individual branches, as well as to see the evolution of the Association as a whole. Furthermore, important women involved with the EAW on a local scale are spotlighted in these activity summaries; since there is little documentation found about them outside of ‘The Electrical Age’, the journals are an essential resource for the public to discover them. These sections of the journals are both educational and entertaining, as whilst they helpfully draw attention to influential women, discussions of local branches’ activities also often included amusing anecdotes about trips taken to visit all-electric houses, which were nearly always followed by afternoon tea breaks!

Access to the journals

As part of the EAW Centenary celebration the complete set of The Electrical Age journals have been digitised and are available for everyone to enjoy.

A selection of The Electrical Age front covers can be seen on the IET Archives Pinterest board.