'Political hermaphrodites': Gender and environmental reform in progressive America

Environmental History

Volumn 11, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 440-463

  Rome, Adam ^a  

^a PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUE; GENDER RELATIONS; MASCULINIZATION; WOMENS STATUS;

EID: 33748964533     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/11.3.440     Document Type: Article

References (149)

1. I found the cartoon in Michael L. Smith, Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment, 1850-1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
2. The cartoon also is reproduced in Holway R. Jones, John Muir and the Sierra Club: The Battle for Yosemite (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1965), 183;
3. and Robert W. Righter, The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 94. I haven't seen the original - and the books that reproduce the cartoon identify the source only as the collections of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, without providing a publication date.
4. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 188-90;
5. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 270-74;
6. Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 23.
7. Susan R. Schrepfer, Nature's Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 94-95;
8. Polly Welts Kaufman, National Parks and the Woman's Voice: A History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 31-32.
9. The pioneering discussions of the environmental activism of women in this period are Suellen M. Hoy, "'Municipal Housekeeping': The Role of Women in Improving Urban Sanitation Practices, 1880-1917," in Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870-1930, ed. Martin V. Melosi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 173-98;
10. and Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare: Women and the Environment (New York: Routledge, 1995), 109-36.
11. In addition, see Maureen A. Flanagan, "Gender and Urban Political Reform: The City Club and the Woman's City Club of Chicago in the Progressive Era," American History Review 95 (1990): 1032-50;
12. Harold L. Platt, "Invisible Gases: Smoke, Gender, and the Redefinition of Environmental Policy in Chicago, 1900-1920," Planning Perspectives 10 (1995): 67-97;
13. Maureen A. Flanagan, "The City Profitable, the City Livable: Environmental Policy, Gender, and Power in Chicago in the 1910s," Journal of Urban History 22 (1996): 163-90;
14. Glenda Riley, Women and Nature: Saving the "Wild" West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999);
15. David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 37-60;
16. Angela Gugliotta, "Class, Gender, and Coal Smoke: Gender Ideology and Environmental Justice in Pittsburgh, 1868-1914," Environmental History 5 (2000): 165-93;
17. Harold L. Platt, "Jane Addams and the Ward Boss Revisited: Class, Politics, and Public Health in Chicago, 1890-1930," Environmental History 5 (2000): 194-222;
18. Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001);
19. Cameron Binkley, "'No Better Heritage than Living Trees': Women's Clubs and Early Conservation in Humboldt County," Western Historical Quarterly 33 (2002):179-204;
20. Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002);
21. and Susan Rimby, "'Better Housekeeping Out of Doors': Mira Lloyd Dock, the State Federation of Pennsylvania Women, and Progressive Era Conservation," Journal of Women's History 17 (Fall 2005): 9-34.
22. For Flanagan's argument, see "Gender and Urban Political Reform," "The City Profitable, the City Livable," and Seeing with Their Hearts.
23. In addition, see Elizabeth J. Clapp, Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998);
24. and Camilla Stivers, Bureau Men, Settlement Women: Constructing Public Administration in the Progressive Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).
25. For a revisionist view, see Eric Rauchway, The Refuge of Affections: Family and American Reform Politics, 1900-1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
26. In a pioneering collection of primary sources, Donald Worster was the first historian to describe this period of environmental reform as "formative." See Donald Worster, American Environmentalism: The Formative Period, 1860-1915 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1973).
27. For the attacks on the anti-imperialists, see Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 174-79. Hoganson reproduces the McKinley cartoon on page 104.
28. For the challenge faced by male religious leaders, see Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 78-83;
29. Karin E. Gedge, Without Benefit of Clergy: Women and the Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 198-201;
30. and Gail Bederman, "'The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough': The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911-1912 and the Masculinization of Middle-Class Protestantism," American Quarterly 41 (1989): 432-65.
31. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 360.
32. Mary I. Woods, "Civic Activities of Women's Clubs," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 56 (November 1914): 79.
33. For a similar discussion of the transformation of women's clubs, see Rheta Childe Dorr, What Eight Million Women Want (1910; reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint, 1971), 17-25, 41-43.
34. In addition, see Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980);
35. and Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 141-58.
36. Almost every recent case study of women's activism in cities and states during this period discusses efforts by club women to improve the environment. See, for example, Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880-1911 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 130-46;
37. Sandra Haarsager, Organized Womanhood: Cultural Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1840-1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 251-84;
38. and Anastatia Sims, The Power of Femininity in the New South: Women's Organizations and Politics in North Carolina, 1880-1930 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 80-84, 109-14.
39. The report is quoted in Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye, eds., Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1991), 3.
40. Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (1991; reprint, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 59-68;
41. Linda J. Rynbrandt, Caroline Bartlett Crane and Progressive Reform: Social Housekeeping as Sociology (New York: Garland, 1999);
42. Sarah Stage, "Ellen Richards and the Social Significance of the Home Economics Movement," in Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, ed. Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 17-33;
43. Marion Talbot, "Sanitation and Sociology," American Journal of Sociology 2 (July 1896): 78;
44. Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 174-79.
45. In addition, see Agnes Hooper Gottlieb, Women Journalists and the Municipal Housekeeping Movement, 1868-1914 (Lewiston, Pa.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001).
46. The first scholar to highlight the tie between municipal housekeeping and suffrage was Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (1965; reprint, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1971), 52-55.
47. In addition, see Jane Addams, "Why Women Should Vote," Ladies Home Journal (January 1910): 21-22;
48. Jane Addams, "Why Women Are Concerned with the Larger Citizenship," in Woman and the Larger Citizenship: City Housekeeping [The Woman's Citizen Library, volume IX] (New York: The Civics Society, 1913), 2123-42;
49. Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Gender Indentities in Modern America, 3rd. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 40.
50. Life 62 (October 16, 19-13): 646.
51. I first saw the cartoon in Monika Franzen and Nancy Ethiel, Make Way! 200 Years of American Women in Cartoons (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1988), 38.
52. I described this cartoon in the same terms in an earlier article: See Adam Rome, "What Really Matters in History? Environmental Perspectives on Modern America," Environmental History 7 (April 2002): 312.
53. For other cartoons that tie suffrage and environmental reform, see "Meanwhile They Drown," Women's Journal (June 5, 1915);
54. and "Our Answer to Mr. Taft," Women's Journal (September 18, 1915).
55. Both are reproduced in Alice Sheppard, Cartooning for Suffrage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 108, 154.
56. Charles Eliot, Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect (1902; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 546, 547.
57. John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916; reprint, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), 15.
58. In addition, see Schrepfer, Nature's Altars, 64-65. Schrepfer does not discuss this passage, but she argues that Muir had an "androgynous relationship with nature."
59. Edward F. Bigelow, The Spirit of Nature Study (New York: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1907), 15, 24, 25, 26.
60. "The Lacey Bill," Forest and Stream 54 (May 19, 1900): 385-87.
61. Elsewhere, Lacey suggested that "sentiment and utility" ought to join hands. See John F. Lacey, "Forest Reserves as Breeding Places for Wild Life," Outing Magazine 48 (May 1906): 249.
62. For Lacey's contributions to the cause of environmental reform, see Mary Annette Gallagher, "Citizen of the Nation: John Fletcher Lacey, Conservationist," Annals of Iowa 46 (Summer 1981): 9-24.
63. The literature on masculinity in this period is extensive. See, especially, Joe L. Dubbert, A Man's Place: Masculinity in Transition (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 80-162;
64. Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 179-206;
65. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffin, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990);
66. Rotundo, American Manhood, 222-83;
67. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 111-27;
68. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 81-188;
69. and Filene, Him/Her/Self, 74-99.
70. Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), is one of the few works to counter the argument that middle-class men held to an especially macho view of masculinity in this period.
71. George Otis Smith, "The Nation's Playgrounds," American Review of Reviews 40 (1909): 44.
72. For a remarkably similar example, see the statement by George Kunz on "The Preservation of Scenic Beauty" in Proceedings of a Conference of Governors in the White House, Washington, D.C., May 13-15, 1908, ed. W J McGee (1909; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1972). 409-10.
73. Paul Russell Cutright, Theodore Roosevelt: The Making of a Conservationist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 28-29;
74. Frank M. Chapman, Autobiography of a Bird-Lover (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1933), 180-81.
75. The classic discussion of Roosevelt's gender ideology is Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 170-215.
76. In addition, see Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003);
77. Arnaldo Testi, "The Gender of Reform Politics: Theodore Roosevelt and the Culture of Masculinity," Journal of American History 81 (1995): 1509-33;
78. and Gerald F. Roberts, "The Strenuous Life: The Cult of Manliness in the Era of Theodore Roosevelt" (PhD dissertation, Michigan State University, 1970).
79. For the perception that most antihunting activists were women, see Lynn Tew Sprague, "Ethics and the Sportsman," Forest and Stream 58 (June 21, 1902): 484.
80. "Membership Campaign," Forestry and Irrigation 12 (June 1906): 255;
81. "Women's Clubs for Forestry," Forestry and Irrigation 13 (February 1907): 62-63;
82. "Work of the Women's Clubs," Forestry and Irrigation 13 (March 1907): 116;
83. Mrs. P. S. Peterson, "Report of the Forestry Committee," Forestry and Irrigation 13 (July 1907): 361-62;
84. "The Women's Clubs and the Forests," American Forestry 16 (June 1910): 363.
85. For examples of women's poetry, see Margaret E. Sangster, "In the Heart of the Woods," Forestry and Irrigation 14 (January 1908): 47;
86. Jane Taaffe, "The Peace of Quiet Aisles," Forestry and Irrigation 14 (February 1908), 89;
87. Anne McQueen, "The Cry of the Pine," Forestry and Irrigation 14 (May 1908), 278;
88. Marion Elza Dodd, "Trees", Forestry and Irrigation 14 (May 1908), 283;
89. Lillian H. Shuey, "The Death of the Forest," Forestry and Irrigation 14 (July 1908), 369;
90. Victoria Elisabeth Gittings, "The Dryad's Last Stand," Forestry and Irrigation 14 (July 1908), 404-05;
91. Marian Mead, "The Plea of the City Elm," Conservation 14 (September 1908), 492;
92. and Eleanor Van Allen, "Mother," Conservation 14 (December 1908), 678.
93. The poems appeared when the AFA was beginning to think about widening readership for the journal-the ambition was announced with a newtitle, Conservation. Then the journal was renamed again, and became more narrowly professional. Carolyn Merchant also discusses the exclusion of women from forestry activities. See Earthcare, 113-15, 131-33.
94. For the standard interpretation, see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 161-81.
95. In different ways, several scholars have discussed the gender politics of the Hetch Hetchy debate: See Smith, Pacific Visions, 177-85;
96. Merchant, Earthcare, 132-36;
97. and Righter, The Battle over Hetch Hetchy, 88-92.
98. Julian Willard Helburn, "Reaping Where We Have Not Sown," American Magazine 62 (1906): 247-48.
99. For a fine fictional depiction of a woman urging a lumberman to stay the ax, see Stewart Edward White, The Blazed Trail (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1902), 311-12
100. Gifford Pinchot, Breaking New Ground (1947; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1987), 27-29, 182;
101. Frederick Turner, Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours (1985; reprint, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987), 323;
102. Alexander Drummond, Enos Mills: Citizen of Nature (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1995), 186-92, 202;
103. Dorr, What Eight Million Women Want, 53-54.
104. Without discussing gender politics, historians long have argued that Pinchot sought to suppress "sentimental" conservation. See Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (1959; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1974), 197;
105. and Donald C. Swain, Federal Conservation Policy, 1921-1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 6, 124.
106. Jon A. Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840-1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 109-17, 235-59, 264;
107. Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 13-41.
108. The quotation is from Charles Mulford Robinson, Modern Civic Art, or the City Made Beautiful, 4th rev. ed. (1918; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970), 28.
109. In addition, see Susan Marie Wirka, "The City Social Movement: Progressive Women Reformers and Early Social Planning,in Planning the Twentieth-Century American City, ed. Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 57-75;
110. Bonj Szcygiel, "City Beautiful' Revisited: An Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Civic Improvement Efforts," Journal of Urban History 29 (2003): 107-32.
111. George F. Hoar, "Bird's Petition to the Massachusetts General Court," New England Magazine N.S. 16 (1897): 614-15;
112. "Senator Hoar and the Birds' Petition," Current Literature 22 (September 1897): 210;
113. George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, 2 vol. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903), 2: 274-77;
114. Kurkpatrick Dorsey, The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: U.S.-Canadian Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 187.
115. Dorsey concludes that bird advocates increasingly emphasized utilitarian rather than sentimental arguments in this period-see page 237-but he does not consider the role of gender anxieties in explaining that change. Conversely, Jennifer Price offers a provocative analysis of the gendered discourse of bird protection but does not consider the possibility that men's views of the issue changed over time: See Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 57-109.
116. Ernest Morrison, J. Horace McFarland: A Thorn for Beauty (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1995), 181-82, 187-88.
117. For a similar comment by a longtime park supporter, see Enos A. Mills, Your National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 379, 382.
118. Alfred Runte points to the shift in park rhetoric in the 1910s, but does not consider the role of gender in the shift: See National Parks: The American Experience, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 83, 105.
119. John Burroughs, Ways of Nature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 59-60;
120. Edward B. Clark, "Roosevelt on the Nature Fakirs," Everybody's Magazine 16 (June 1907): 770-74;
121. Theodore Roosevelt, "Nature Fakers," Everybody's Magazine 17 (September 1907): 427-30.
122. In addition, see Ralph H. Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science & Sentiment (1990; reprint, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).
123. For the expectation that women would write sentimentally about nature, see Amy Green, "'She Touched Fifty Million Lives': Gene Stratton-Porter and Nature Conservation," in Seeing Nature Through Gender, ed. Virginia J. Scharff (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 228-30.
124. Edward Thorndike, "Sentimentality in Science-Teaching," Educational Review 17 (January 1899): 58, 61-62.
125. Liberty H. Bailey was one of the few men to continue to challenge the purely scientific approach to nature study: See The Nature-Study Idea: Being an Interpretation of the New School-Movement to Put the Child in Sympathy with Nature (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1903).
126. am indebted to an unpublished manuscript on nature study and poetry by Robin Schulze of Pennsylvania State University. Kim Tolley also discusses the gendered debate about nature study in The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), 127, 182-84, 193-96.
127. The most famous critique of the feminization of education is Earl Barnes, "The Feminizing of Culture," Atlantic Monthly 109 (June 1912): 770-76.
128. In addition, see Victoria Bissell Brown, "The Fear of Feminization: Los Angeles High Schools in the Progressive Era," Feminist Studies 16 (1990): 493-518.
129. The noted educator G. Stanley Hall specifically lamented the "effeminization" of books about nature in the introduction to Clifton F. Hodge, Nature Study and Life (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1902), XV.
130. For the campaign against the feather trade, see Price, Flight Maps, 57-109.
131. The best discussion of the Harrisburg campaign is Morrison, McFarland, 68-87.
132. In addition, see William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 126-46.
133. The Chapman cartoon was published in The Condor 3 (March 1901): 55.
134. first saw the cartoon in Price, Flight Maps, 66.
135. am drawing here on the work of a number of scholars, though I come to somewhat different conclusions: Robert Dale Grinder, "The Anti Smoke Crusades: Early Attempts to Reform the Urban Environment, 1893-1918" (PhD dissertation, University of Missouri, 1973);
136. Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 85-137;
137. Gugliotta, "Class, Gender, and Coal Smoke," 165-93;
138. Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 468-91;
139. Adam W. Rome, "Coming to Terms with Pollution: The Language of Environmental Reform, 1865-1915," Environmental History 1 (July 1996): 15.
140. The interwar period has received little attention from historians of environmentalism. See, for example, Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993).
141. For the role of professionals in advancing the environmental agenda from the 1920s to the 1950s, see Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 153-81;
142. Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron: University of Akron Press, 1996), 354-44;
143. and Christopher C. Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
144. For the activism of women in the 1960s, see Adam Rome, "'Give Earth a Chance': The Environmental Movement and the Sixties," Journal of American History 90 (September 2003): 534-41.
145. Lewis L. Gould, Lady Bird Johnson and the Environment (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), 61.
146. In addition, see Martin V. Melosi, "Lyndon Johnson and Environmental Policy", in The Johnson Years: Vietnam, the Environment, and Science, ed. Robert A. Divine (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987), 119-20.
147. Maril Hazlett, "'Woman vs. Man vs. Bugs': Gender and Popular Ecology in Early Reactions to Silent Spring," Environmental History 9 (2004): 701-02, 711, 713, 714.
148. Amory B. Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (San Francisco: Friends of the Earth, 1977).
149. The standard explanations for the rise of the environmental movement after World War II are summarized in Rome, "'Give Earth a Chance.'" For a provocative reconsideration of ideals of manhood in the postwar period, see James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950S (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).