4-22-13
Nancy Unger: When Helping Earth was Women's Work
Roundup: Historians' Taketags: CNN, feminism, Nancy Unger, Earth Day
Nancy Unger is professor of history at Santa Clara University and the author of "Beyond Nature's Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History."
(CNN) -- Earth Day is the time of year to hear the usual polarized debates between liberals who lament humanity's reckless use of natural resources and conservatives who deny any human role in climate change and echo Sarah Palin's call for industry to "drill, baby, drill."
This division is familiar, but it hasn't always been this way. After all, it was President Nixon who established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act. Long before that, social conservatives were in the vanguard of environmental activism in the United States, in part because of their traditional views about women.
Lydia Adams-Williams, conservationist and writer, summed up a widely held belief when she proclaimed in 1908, "Man has been too busy building railroads, constructing ships, engineering great projects and exploiting vast commercial enterprises to take the time necessary to consider the problems which concern the welfare of the home and the future." It fell to women, she declared, "to educate public sentiment to save from rapacious waste and complete exhaustion the resources upon which depend the welfare of the home, the children, and the children's children."...
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel