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'Woman vs. Man vs. Bugs': Gender and Popular Ecology in Early Reactions to Silent Spring
Maril Hazlett
| TODAY, ENVIRONMENTALISTS hail Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) as one of the major inspirations for contemporary environmentalism.1 Her bestseller on the dangers of synthetic chemical pesticides introduced the public to ecological principles and argued that humans could not and should not try to dominate nature. Carson communicated these ideas through striking portrayals of humans as ecological creatures, their bodies physically entwined with their surroundings. Thus, she put words to an evolving strain of environmental thinking that caused significant changes in how members of the public—including conservationists—viewed nature.2 Since its beginnings around the turn of the century, the conservation movement had focused on the environment primarily in terms of resource management or wilderness preservation.3 In contrast, Carson used ecology to define people's homes, gardens, and health as part of the natural world. |
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Roy Attaway, a particularly articulate outdoorsman and columnist for the Charleston (S.C.) News-Courier, represented a typical grassroots conservationist swept up in the early steps of the transition from conservation to environmentalism.4 As Attaway wrote shortly after Silent Spring's publication: "It is not pleasant to realize that your child will be born with small doses of lethal poisons stored in its tissues. It is not pleasant to realize that you and I and every citizen of the United States have lethal poisons stored in our tissues. It is particularly unpleasant to realize that we have no control over the extenuating circumstances. I have known, or half-suspected, these things for a long time. And yet the dreadful realization did not come home to me, it did not sink in."5 Not, that is, until Attaway read Silent Spring. Such realizations were certainly unsettling. Many people, including conservationists, disagreed bitterly over Carson's work. Gender was one element of the divide. The initial chapter of the debate—which lasted from the book's publication in 1962 to Carson's death from breast cancer in 1964—was rife with gender stereotypes. Carson's detractors, for example, often cast her as a hysterical woman. Evidently, traditional gender roles provided an important pillar of support for the schizoid vision of nature and society that Carson had challenged.6 |
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What are the connections between gender ideology and the rise in popular ecological thought—as well as resistance to it? How did gender—as a specific historical system, categories of masculine and feminine in tension with each other, as well as in flux internally—help to shape the roots of environmentalism?7 Neither the current scholarship on environmentalism nor on Carson clearly answers these questions; either it incorporates women's history yet lacks a sustained gender analysis, or it defines gender as primarily involving women. The role of masculinity in the debate usually escapes acknowledgement and systematic analysis.8 |
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The example of Roy Attaway, however, reveals an important clue. Because of his identity as a hunter and outdoorsman, many would have perceived Attaway as close to the epitome of masculinity. However, this manly man was also deeply concerned with the pesticides that—without consent—penetrated the flesh of he and his family. Intimate issues such as body, children, and health traditionally belonged to the province of women, the subordinate private sphere. Attaway's ecological sentiments belonged to no clearly gendered category. In the context of the early 1960s, Attaway presented a loaded and potentially revolutionary image. |
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