ABSTRACT
In the decades around 1900, middle-class women were indispensable in every environmental cause in the United States, and they often justified their activism as an extension of traditionally feminine responsibilities. The prominence of women as advocates of environmental reform posed a challenge for men who sought to stop pollution, conserve natural resources, and preserve wild places and creatures. How could they make their case without losing their masculine authority? Men responded to that challenge in several ways, and their responses shaped both the rhetoric and institutional structure of environmental reform for much of the twentieth century.
| ROUGHLY A CENTURY ago, in the midst of the now-famous controversy over the future of the Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park, a cartoon appeared in a San Francisco newspaper that offers rich insight into the history of American environmentalism. Like most San Franciscans, the newspaper editors supported the construction of a dam in the valley to provide water to the city. But the dam was opposed by many preservationists across the country. The most celebrated opponent of the dam was John Muir—the founder of the Sierra Club—and the cartoon depicted Muir as a woman.1 |
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The cartoon played on a well-established trope of political denigration. For decades, politicians and their spokesmen had described male reformers as effeminate. Reform men also were denigrated as sexless—they were eunuchs or neuters—or as members of a perverse "third sex." The genteel reformers of the 1870s and 1880s even were called "political hermaphrodites." But the Muir cartoon went further. He is not unmanly—he is not a man at all. He is wearing a dress and an apron, woman's shoes, and a bonnet with flowers; and he is trying to sweep back the dam with a broom marked "Sierra Club."2 |
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Figure 1. Cartoon Mocks John Muir.
San Francisco Call, date unknown, in the collection of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
In the early twentieth century, men who supported environmental causes often faced the charge that they were not truly men. This attack on John Muir appeared during the Hetch Hetchy controversy, which changed the way many men thought about the relationship between gender and environmental reform.
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The depiction was mean but not arbitrary, because Muir led a movement prominently supported by women. Though men accounted for two-thirds of the Sierra Club membership at the time, the club's women were especially active in the grassroots campaign to save Hetch Hetchy. Women's organizations across the nation also were indispensable to the preservationist cause. The General Federation of Women's Clubs rallied its approximately 800,000 members to oppose "the spoliation of this national reserve." Dozens of women's groups sent anti-dam petitions to Congress.3 |
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