Is environmentalism women's work?

Ellen Swallow Richards

In an Earth Day-themed op-ed, historian Nancy Unger writes for CNN a piece titled "When helping Earth was women's work." As a topic of interest for both academic interest, I had high expectations for an insightful piece connecting environmental history with contemporary debates. But after a first and subsequent reads, her point is lost and surprised at the lack of clarity in an article aimed at the public. I'd like to propose an alternative narrative about women's involvement in Progressive Era environmental and conservation movements and what it means for today's environmental science and politics.

Although today's most prominent climate change advocates are politically liberal men, women played an important role in the development modern environmental protection in America. At a time when the conservation and preservation of America's parks and wilderness was deemed a man's job due to the "frailty" of women, women became active in urban sanitation and environmental health projects. We now call this period the Progressive Era, the 1880s to 1920s, when a new set of social and scientific practices drastically changed America's urban landscapes for the improvement of human health.

Because I study the history of science, an important Progressive Era scientist was Ellen Swallow Richards (1842­­—1911), the first woman to attend MIT in 1871. Richards was a pragmatic-minded scientist, using science to improve public health issues from sanitation, nutrition, and the home and urban environment. This is a very different kind of "environmentalism" than we might ascribe to Teddy Roosevelt and Henry David Thoreau. Richards sharply focused on improving household efficiency and environmental sanitation, or in her words, “the larger household, the city” (Stage, 1997:30). Richards, however, is best known for founding the field of Home Economics.

Richards was also possibly the first scientist to introduce the word "ecology" into the American scientific discourse. She defined "Oekology" as “the science of teaching people how to live” safely in their environment, and specifically the built environment (Clarke, 1973:117). For most of her life she used science to advocate new ways of examine the environment and society, and to empower women as guardians of home health and practitioners of efficiency. Richards saw home efficiency as a way of bringing women out of their supposed frail health, as well as preventing the transmission of newly-discovered bacterial diseases. Among Richards' great scientific legacy include her training of Boston's first team of sanitary engineers and laying the groundwork for public health reform, as well as leading Boston's Pure Food Movement, nation's first laws in this area.

Her contemporary urban reformers of Richards included Jane Addams and Alice Hamilton, part of the Settlement House Movement for urban sanitation and workers’ rights. The echoes of Ellen Swallow Richards’ work can be seen in modern environmental leaders, such as Rachel Carson, Lois Gibbs, Majora Carter, Peggy Shephard, and Grace Lee Boggs. But despite Richards’ challenges as a woman scientist in a very male-dominate academy, she was no feminist, and would hardly describe protecting the environment as "women's work." Rather than falling back on stereotypes of Mother Earth, we should learn from Richards' pragmatic view of human and environmental health. While Richards was a Progressive Era reformer, she wasn’t a radical and was determined to improve human and environmental conditions through very practical means. Today's environmental leaders could learn from Richards' dedication to working within the system of existing societal values of efficiency, self-reliance, and protection of the home and urban environments.

Unfortunately, Unger's point about transcending partisan politics for environmental protection is lost in what many might view as a feminist view that essentially positions women as environmental protectors. I'm not sure if this was her point, but my argument here is that women do have a great legacy of environmental protection, and in particular we should consider the contributions of women like Ellen Swallow Richards to improving the public health of a great city like Boston. Richards wasn't a conservative and wasn't a radical, but she channeled her ideals into the pragmatic fields of sanitation science, nutrition, and home economics. Perhaps instead of arguing over climate models today, we could find a similar way of addressing our country's energy future and creating a new vision of sustainability.

Works cited:

Clarke, Robert, 1973. Ellen Swallow: The Woman Who Founded Ecology. Chicago: Follett Publishing Company.

Stage, Sarah, 1997. Ellen Richards and the Social Significance of the Home Economics Movement. In Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession. Sarah Stage and Virginia Vincenti, eds. Pp. 17-33. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Further reading:

Cravens, Hamilton, 1990. Establishing the Science of Nutrition at the USDA: Ellen Swallow Richards and Her Allies. Agricultural History 64(2):122-133.

Hunt, Caroline, 1918 [reprint]. The Life of Ellen H. Richards. Boston: Whitcomb & Barrows.

Hynes, H. Patricia, 1985. Ellen Swallow, Lois Gibbs, and Rachel Carson: Catalysts of the American Environmental Movement. Women’s Studies Int. Forum 8(4):291-298.

Melosi, Martin, 2008. The Sanitary City: Environmental Sciences in Urban America from Colonial Times to Present: Abridged Edition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Mitman, Gregg, 2005. In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History. Environmental History 10(2):184-210.

Rossiter, Margaret, 1982. Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.

Taylor, Dorceta, 2002. Race, Class, Gender, and American Environmentalism. United States Department of Agriculture.

Science on stage: experts and diversity (or lack thereof)

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is considered one of the most (if not the) prestigious groups of scientists in the US. The National Research Council, their research arm, produces reports that are ostensibly the pinnacle of objectivity and scientific rigor. But Steve Hilgartner, in his book Science on Stage, aims to show that even the pinnacle of scientific objectivity is still dependent on social processes. While the NAS are considered knowledge experts, you don’t see behind the curtain. Hilgartner uses the metaphor of stage management, where the NAS staff, scientists, and report contributors carefully manage the end products. Deciding something like what nutritional standards to recommend is obviously not only value-laden, but is also under pressure from politically motivated food lobby groups, as Marion Nestle shows in her book, Food Politics.

The NAS doesn’t use overt political rhetoric. Like most scientists, they strive to be as objective as possible. But Hilgartner shows that making knowledge claims is political. The NAS uses certain rhetoric to reify their role as sanctioned experts, and to eliminate sources of controversy. In an anthropology class I once took, we referred to this as impression management. Like Hilgartner’s “stage management,” we often consciously and unconsciously say and do things to create a certain impression of ourselves in different situations. Scientists engage in the same social process.

So is the NAS’s stage management technique problematic? Among STS scholars, the answer is “yes.” In fact, James Wilsdon and Rebecca Willis produced a booklet called “See-Through Science,” which calls of “upstream engagement” in science policy. As we discussed in class, this call for more transparent scientific processes and more space for public deliberation. Two topics we’ve discussed in class: community-based participatory research and Hispanic girls’ engagement in science and engineering, both seek to make science more open and transparent to diverse populations. And already, it’s obvious that the academy is slowly reacting to pressures to become more open.

In the recent past, most decisions about science policy have been made by a small group of people: mostly white, mostly male scientists. In 1975 at the recommendation of the NAS, eminent biochemist Paul Berg organized the well-known Asilomar conference to discuss the ethical implications of biotechnology. The conference was attended by almost entirely white male scientists. Wilsdon and Willis quote Sheila Jasanoff, writing, “Thirty years and several social upheavals later, the Berg committeeʼs composition looks astonishingly narrow: eleven male scientists of stellar credentials, all already active in rDNA experimentation” (p. 10). In other words, today we expect decisions about science policy to be made by not only experts, but also issue stakeholders of diverse interests and backgrounds.

Jasanoff’s words resonate with a current issue: the debate over insurance coverage of contraceptives. Many of my Facebook friends have posted responses to this photo, citing the injustice that not a single woman was able to testify to Congressional committee on this issue of contraceptive coverage and religion. The online commentary is very much along the lines of “what is this, 1950?” At a time where women do have expertise in areas such as law, science, and religion, they are still not allowed in front of the curtain.

Works referenced:

Stephen Hilgartner, Scienceon Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama (Stanford, 2000).

Kathy Wilson Peacock, GlobalIssues in Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering. (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2010).

Links I liked, plus some musings on modernization

It's been a busy, stressful week for me. the good news is I've begun contacting potential research hosts in India. The bad news is my last fellowship essay is due on Tuesday. I've applied for three large fellowships this year, and I'm hoping at least one of them will come through. 

But you don't need me to get your fill of science policy news, right? Here's my round-up of links I liked this week.

• My new (to me) favorite blog: New Security Beat. All about environmental change and national security. Check out some of their latest posts about climate change and security.
• The New York Times has been running a series of articles on the dark side of Apple's manufacturing plants in China. For more on Apple and global markets, check out these posts by Pielke and Bellemare.
• XKCD tackles the sustainability of "sustainable."
• The Biology Files on "The science public information officer: it's complicated."
• Kate Clancy on "Blogging while female." Online harassment is, fortunately, something I haven't had to deal with on my blog, but Clancy's blogs and others in the female-scientist-blogosphere always keep me on my toes about gender and science issues.

The latest "Food for 9 Billion" radio program by Marketplace features the Philippines, and the transcript is worth a read. There's also a cool interactive graph and timeline to play with. Of course, my favorite part was the interview with Robert Zeigler, director of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), who begins by talking about IRRI's role in the Green Revolution.

Robert Zeigler: I think in many ways we're facing challenges that dwarf what we were facing in the 1960s. 

[narrator] That's Robert Zeigler, director of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. This is where those high-yielding rice strains were first developed. Zeigler says with climate change and an increasingly crowded planet, the huge increases of the past may be harder to come by this time around. 

Zeigler: I don't think there's any question that we will want to feed these people and we want them to be well fed and we want them to be well nourished and we want them to be healthy. At the same time, we have to do this in a way that once populations do stabilize that the world we live in is a place we want to live in. 

[narrator] And this is where things get tricky. Zeigler says the demand for rice is expected to grow anywhere from 50-70 percent in the coming years. Meeting that demand without jeopardizing the planet's remaining ecosystems will take a level of coordination and foresight unprecedented in human history. For him, the technological Holy Grail is a bioengineered, photosynthesis-supercharged, rice strain. But such a breakthrough is decades away, if at all. And in the meantime the Philippines, and much of the world, is losing productive farmland, not adding it.

Something I'm really interested in for my own research is how the narrative of the Green Revolution and technological breakthroughs is used to talk about climate change. It is a fairly obvious strategy for agricultural research organizations, despite critiques of the Green Revolution. The sense of urgency due to climate change recapitulates what historian Nick Cullather refers to as IRRI's “Manhattan Project for Food” [source].

Speaking of Nick Cullather, I've become quite interested in modernization theory and Cold War geopolitics lately. So my nerd alert went off when I came across this roundtable discussion of Michael Latham's
The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present. I will definitely have to check the book out.

Here is a particularly interesting excerpt from Corrina Unger's review of the book:

Development often served as an ideology, too, and ideas about development, especially about colonial development were often based on scientific discourses, theories, and concepts.3 There seems to be agreement that modernization was a scientized version of older development ideas, but Latham’s study does not fully explain which difference which kind of science made. Also, it would be worthwhile to inquire into whether we can identify a specifically American type of science behind modernization or if and how transnational and global experiences and encounters transformed its character. [see footnote below] 

Linked to this problem is the question of definitions, which, for an opaque term like modernization, is of course very difficult. Although Latham does not offer a precise definition, he does identify elements he considers characteristic of modernization: In his view, “the promise of acceleration” and the “perceived potential to link the promotion of development with the achievement of security” were what made American policymakers so enthusiastic about modernization. (3) This is in line with his thesis about the United States’ support of the “right kind of revolution”, a science-based revolution geared toward securing American global interests. Latham excels at contextualizing modernization and its many facets, thereby providing much more than a narrow history of modernization. His engaging account is of interest to anyone concerned with American intellectual, political, and international history.  

[footnote] For recent findings on the scientization of politics after 1945, see the contributions in Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 50 (2010). Also see Sheila Jasanoff, ed., States of Knowledge: The co-production of science and social order (London, New York: Routledge, 2004). On the United States’ transnational ties and its “looping effects”, see Ian Tyrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).  

Boserup vs. Malthus: Hope or despair?

In contrast to the eternal pessimism of Thomas Malthus, Ester Boserup was a 20th century social scientist who offered a more hopeful view of the future, even in the midst of a neo-Malthusian resurgence. Whereas Malthus predicted catastrophe from overpopulation outstripping food production, Boserup came up with her theory of induced intensification. This states that under pressure for more production, humans will develop new technologies that allow them to grow more crops on the same amount of land. See my previous post on Malthus and agricultural technology for more background.

One of my ASU professors, Billie Turner, tested the Boserup vs. Malthus hypotheses in a historical study of agricultural change in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh has long been viewed as a Malthusian crisis in waiting, given its extreme land pressures and impoverished agrarian sector. Yet, the country’s small-holders in fact increased agricultural production significantly from 1950 to 1986 through the intensification process, and the percentage of the population below the poverty line decreased, according to some sources. (Turner and Ali, 1996)

What they found is that neither model worked exactly well- on one hand, technology has kept up with population, and on the other, just barely. But innovations such as tube well irrigation, high yielding varieties, and other technologies have meant that Bangladesh is largely self-sufficient in food production.

Boserup's theory is still very much relevant to agriculture today. One of my research questions (broadly) is whether technological change can keep up with climate change and its impacts on agriculture? It's a different "demand" than population, but an important one. Also, Boserup helped pioneer gender studies of agriculture (see Billie Turner's homage to Boserup here), pointing out that traditional Western models of agricultural development ignored women's role in farming. This has been a persistant problem with agricultural development. So yay for Ester Boserup, an inspiration to me and many others!

Women scientists and Home economics

This article, coincidentally by a professor of history at Michigan State University, calls for a revival of Home Economics as a response to widespread obesity. The first half of the article is about the foundations of Home Economics, which was a legitimate science, albiet one run almost entirely by women. The unequivocal founder of Home Economics was Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911), who began her graduate career as a chemist, coined the english version of "ecology" (based on Haekel's Oekologie), studied and taught at MIT, and was critical to the formation of no less than half a dozen applied science fields, such as sanitary science, nutrition science, domestic science, and human ecology.

Not coincidentally, I wrote a paper on Ellen Swallow Richards last fall and, dear reader, I'm happy to provide it to you. I was really interested in Richards' theories human-environmental interactions, so I mostly focused on that. But some of my main points will interest environmental, women's studies, and history of science scholars:

• Ernst Haeckel introduces Oekologie (ecology) in 1866, defining it as:

“knowledge concerning the economy of nature—the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and its organic environment… the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence.” (Foster, 2000:195)

• Richards envisions ecology as the science of the total environment (human and non-human, including the built environment), introducing it to America in 1892.
• As the "organismal" (and non-human) definition of ecology prevailed in the male-dominated sciences, Richards’ tries to re-brand her vision of ecology as domestic science, home economics, human ecology, and "euthenics"- as opposed to eugenics- as "the science of the controllable environment."
• Richards situates women as guardians of the home environment, emphasizing safety, efficiency, education and relief from drudgery. Rather than seeking to impose more housework on women, Richards saw scientific home economics as empowering.

Some scholars recognize Ellen Swallow Richards as a proto-feminist, or even ecofeminist. Philosopher of science Sandra Harding writes, "Might our understanding of nature and social life be different if the people who discovered the laws of nature were the same ones who cleaned up after them?” (Harding, 2001:27) Unfortunately, I believe that many of Richards' theories on the environment disappeared after her death. Although she was a prominent chemist at the time, even appearing in books such as American Men of Science, she was marginalized because of her gender and her progressive views on human-environment interactions. Her version of Home Economics was watered-down significantly over the next century. Nonetheless, I cautiously applaud the call for a reinvigoration of Home Economics- perhaps one that recognizes the role of men and women in the household.

This blog is cross-posted at my other, less updated blog, Her Story of Science. References available in my paper, linked above.