Week 4 Reflection

This week’s authors highlighted important women involved in the environmental justice movement and discussed the important contributions each of them has made to better the environment and in turn, help society as a whole. In her article, “Gender and Environmental Justice in Louisiana: Blurring the boundaries of public and private spheres,” Hilda Kurtz also addresses the idea of the public and private spheres and how these separated domains are also present in the environmental justice movement, especially as they relate to gendered activism (Kurtz 2007).

While I had not extensively learned about most of these important women, our discussions this week about Rachel Carson and Silent Spring brought back a lot of fond memories of the AP Environmental Studies class I took my junior year of high school. Much of this Climate Justice course has brought me back to elements of that Environmental Studies class, but I specifically remember the particular interest we took in learning more about Silent Spring, Rachel Carson, and the environmental issues caused by pesticides in high school. I think that it is really important that we continue to teach about these issues and the integral players, like Rachel Carson and the many others discussed in these week’s readings who played large roles in shaping early elements of environmental justice, many of whom were women.

Some key terms from this week’s readings include hysterical housewives, the National Farm Workers Association, and the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative. Hysterical housewives, “constructs women activists not only as external to the public sphere, but also people unconstrained by the rationality of public sphere identification and behavior, and vulnerable to excessive emotionality and clouded reason in the form of hysteria,” (Kurtz 2007:420). The National Farm Workers Association was started by Delores Huertas and Cesar Chavez in 1962 (Unger 2012:212). The California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, “set out to protect this almost exclusively female workforce facing a variety of cultural and linguistic barriers to building environmental awareness (Unger 2012:218).

Bibliography

Kurtz, Hilda E. 2007. “Gender and Environmental Justice in Louisiana: Blurring the Boundaries of Public and Private Spheres.” Gender, Place & Culture 14(4):409–26.

Unger, Nancy C. 2012. Beyond Nature's Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.