My dissertation, “Living Clean and Shopping Green: Environmental Domesticity and the Nineteenth-Century Roots of Ecoconsumption,” traces current ideas of green capitalism and ecoconsumption back to nineteenth-century domestic ideology. I structure this prehistory around a concept I call “environmental domesticity”—a collection of ideologies and practices that treat domestic space as an environment in and of itself that can stand apart from, blend with, or absorb natural, outdoor space. Using “environmental domesticity” as an analytical lens, I examine an archive of texts that defined the model American woman as a white, middle-class domestic sentry, responsible for controlling the purity of the American domicile in its many forms, from the southern plantation to the urban metropolis. Using excerpts from domestic manuals, memoirs, fiction, and ad campaigns, my project elucidates how classist and racist theories of purity merged with consumer practices over the course of the nineteenth century to form a new kind of home economics based on purchasing, rather than production. This fusion, I argue, helped establish the myth that white femininity and the environmental control it promised could be achieved by purchasing specific, “ethical” products (such as “free produce”) or by shopping at union-friendly, “white label” stores. Building on critiques of white femininity from Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Ida B. Wells, and other women who publicly recognized that such power was ultimately—and, indeed, purposefully—unattainable for the average American woman, my project illuminates how the impossible standards laid out in white women’s directives ultimately trapped the female shopper in a perpetual cycle of consumption and shame that is mirrored in modern ecoconsumption. By establishing this prehistory of ecoconsumption, my dissertation ultimately explodes the scholarly binary between environmental studies and domesticity studies, illustrating how domestic literature can help inform and disrupt extractive capitalism’s seemingly endless loop or production and consumption.