Adam Rome

'political hermaphrodites': GENDER AND ENVIRONMENTAL REFORM IN PROGRESSIVE AMERICA

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

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

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.

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

The opponents of the Hetch Hetchy dam were typical of grassroots environmental activists generally. In the decades around 1900, middle-class women provided critical support in almost every campaign to preserve wild places and wild creatures. To ensure that their children and grandchildren would have the resources needed to build good homes, women worked to conserve the nation's forests. In cities, women were the most vigorous advocates for smokeless skies, clean water, pure food, and spacious parks. Women often justified their reform work as an extension of traditionally feminine responsibilities. That was especially true for women who aimed to improve the urban environment: They routinely described themselves as "municipal housekeepers."⁴

As the Muir cartoon suggests, the increasing prominence of women as advocates of environmental reform posed a challenge for men who supported wilderness preservation, resource conservation, anti-pollution, and urban beautification measures. How could they make their case without losing their masculine authority? How could they seek reform without being depicted as women or decried as "sissies"?

Those questions do not fit comfortably in the historiography on gender politics in the Progressive era. In a pioneering article published in 1990, Maureen Flanagan argued that men and women in Chicago's civic associations had very different visions of their city, and those visions led to important differences in their approaches to a variety of problems—including environmental issues. Historians of the period also have described gender divides in other arenas, from juvenile justice to municipal reform. Men thought one way about issues, the recent work argues, while women thought another way.⁵

But a closer look at the history of environmental reform makes clear that the gender politics of the Progressive era were not that neat. In every environmental controversy of the time, some men used a rhetoric that many contemporaries considered "feminine." When the arguments of men and women differed, the differences sometimes were more apparent than real: To avoid the taint of effeminacy, some men sought to hide how much they shared with women. Even when most men truly took a different approach to an issue than most women, the schism was the result of a historical process, not the inevitable working-out of universally accepted gender roles.

In the Progressive era, in other words, men who supported environmental causes could not take their masculine identity for granted. Their anxieties about gender affected the way environmental issues were framed. Though some men were comfortable arguing for environmental reform in the same terms as women, many were not. Because some issues were harder to describe in masculine terms, gender politics narrowed the reform agenda. The efforts of men to protect against the charge of effeminacy also influenced the institutional structure of environmental reform. Over time, many men became less willing to work with women, and the resulting gender divide had enduring consequences.

The story of the response of men to the gender anxieties of the decades around 1900 thus offers a new way of seeing a formative period in the history of American environmentalism. But the historiographic significance of the subject goes beyond the Progressive era. To understand the course of environmentalism throughout the twentieth century, historians need to consider changes in ideas about gender, not simply changes in attitudes toward the environment.⁶

THE CHALLENGE FACED by male environmental activists in the Progressive era was not unique. Kristin Hoganson demonstrates in Fighting for American Manhood that the charge of effeminacy dogged men who argued against imperialism. In the months just before the start of the Spanish-American War, a cartoonist depicted President William McKinley in a pose that almost precisely anticipates the Muir cartoon: McKinley is wearing a bonnet, and trying to sweep back the war tide. Men who supported the social gospel also were attacked as unmanly. But the masculinity problem was especially pronounced for environmental reformers, because so much of the environmental activism of this period involved issues that were strongly gendered. Beauty, health, future generations—all were traditionally the province of women.⁷

Indeed, women in the Progressive era devoted more energy to environmental issues than any other public concern, with the possible exceptions of temperance and children's welfare. That devotion was especially evident in the work of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. The federation had departments of forestry and public health. Federation members also worked on environmental issues in other departments, including civil service reform. When the leader of that department explained her mission, for example, she began by citing the role of government in protecting environmental quality: "We depend upon the civil service for the sanitation of our houses; the paving and cleaning of our streets; the quality of our drinking water; the purity of our foods; the efficiency of our schools; the decency and public morality of our communities."⁸

At the local level, club members rallied to the cause of municipal housekeeping. Many longed to talk about something more pressing than poetry, and the municipal-housekeeping ideal allowed them to justify greater involvement in politics at a time when women still lacked the right to vote. As one leader recalled in 1914, "club women became unwilling to discuss Dante and Browning over the teacups, at a meeting of their peers in some lady's drawing room, while unsightly heaps of rubbish flanked the paths over which they had passed in their journeys thither. They began to realize that the one calling in which they were, as a body, proficient, that of housekeeping and homemaking, had its outdoor as well as its indoor application.... It was this knowledge, the extension of the home making instinct of women and the broadening out of the mother instinct of women, that led them out into paths of civic usefulness."⁹

In some cities, women founded ad hoc organizations to address environmental problems. Like club women, the members of women's environmental groups often explained their mission in the language of municipal housekeeping. The first annual report of the New York Ladies' Health Protective Association, published in 1894, was typical. "It is an eminently proper thing for women to interest themselves in the care and destination of garbage, the cleanliness of streets, the proper killing and handling of meats, the hygienic and sanitary condition of the public schools, the suppression of stable nuisances, the abolition of the vile practice of expectorating in public conveyances and buildings, the care of milk and Croton water, the public exposure of foods, and in fact everything which constitutes the city's housekeeping," the report proclaimed. "It is the right of women to undertake these matters as they are brought into constant contact with the results of this housekeeping and will therefore be able to judge how it should properly be carried out."¹⁰

Women with professional ambitions also drew on traditional expectations about a woman's place in society to justify pioneering careers as environmental experts. Caroline Bartlett Crane became a nationally renowned sanitary consultant: She conducted sanitary surveys of cities, and then reported her findings at civic meetings. In the academic world, women tried to create new disciplines to address environmental problems. The first female professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—Ellen Richards—hoped to transform home economics into a far-reaching science that would address all the environmental factors shaping the well-being of communities. At the University of Chicago, the first female professor of sociology, Marion Talbot, similarly lobbied for a new department that would bring together the insights of many fields to counter "unsanitary physical conditions."¹¹

By 1910, the claim that urban environmental issues were essentially the concern of women had become a common argument for suffrage. To strengthen the case for the franchise, the editors of the Woman Citizen's Library commissioned a volume on "city housekeeping." The settlement-house leader Jane Addams argued often in speeches and articles that women needed the vote to fulfill their responsibilities as municipal housekeepers. "Without any accusation of men's motives," another suffrage advocate wrote, "we can say that much of our municipal and state and national housekeeping is a good deal like the housekeeping of a bachelor who is trying to run a house without the help of a woman." Since men could not be trusted to care for the environment, women needed the power to carry out that vital responsibility.¹²

A 1913 cartoon perfectly illustrates that argument. The left side of the cartoon is a nightmarish vision of life in a city where women cannot vote. The sky is pitch black, and thick clouds of smoke stream skyward from unsanitary tenements and child-labor factories. The street is dark, too, except for the entrances to the Cheap Theater, the Sporty Venus Company, and the Red Light Dive. While the children work inside the factories, a crowd of men revels outside the saloon; the only women on the street are prostitutes. In contrast, the right side of the cartoon is stunningly bright, with beautiful white clouds in the clear sky. Trees line the walkway along the river that divides the two worlds. Near the gate to the public playgrounds, mothers point out flowers to children. The street is full of families, with children sitting by a fountain, rolling a hoop, and playing with a dog. The sanitary homes and factories produce no smoke. A school, a museum, and a library grace the hill. The bridge over the river is crowded with white slavers and child exploiters—but a woman's hand reaches down from the heavens to block the way with a ballot marked "Womans Vote."¹³

Figure 2. 'Barred Out / When Woman Has Her Vote.'

Life 62 (October 16, 1913), 646.

As this cartoon shows, many women in the Progressive era argued for suffrage by claiming that women cared more than men about the health and beauty of the environment.

Despite the strong identification of environmental issues with the concerns of women, the cause attracted many men. Some worked in what might be termed "hermaphroditic" professions, which required traditionally feminine qualities or served a largely female clientele: They were ministers, doctors, social workers, or writers. But the ranks of environmental reform also included many members of more conventionally masculine occupations. Scientists and engineers were especially active. Businessmen and workingmen sometimes supported reform campaigns as well.

Though some male reformers were oblivious to gender politics, many worried about seeming effeminate. Their anxiety often revealed itself in seemingly innocuous venues. Even book reviews could be hazardous for the unwary. In a review of Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer's Art Out of Doors in 1894, the landscape architect and park advocate Charles Eliot Jr. labored to ensure that readers would not misunderstand his praise of the book. He began by distancing himself from stereotypically feminine attitudes: He attacked the "sentimentalists" who considered all transformations of the natural landscape to be "vandalism." He also took pains to underscore the masculine elements of landscape architecture, which he argued that van Rensselaer had neglected. "Our only fear," he wrote, "is lest the author has inadequately warned these readers of the main facts, that good 'art out of doors' must be founded in rationality, purpose, fitness; and that its field is not only the garden, the shrubbery, and the park, but also the village, the factory, and the railroad yard. According to this book, landscape architecture is much like house-furnishing: a selecting of agreeably harmonizing elements in the shape of buildings, rocks, trees, climbing-plants, and so on. The essentially virile and practical nature of the art and profession is ignored, together with most of its greater and more democratic problems."¹⁴

Like Eliot, some environmental reformers simply asserted the virility of their cause. But many men tried to defuse the charge of effeminacy in more complicated ways. Some sought to redefine manhood. They argued that manly men could love natural beauty and feel compassion for other creatures. Other men went out of their way to avoid the rhetoric used by women. They sought to sound rational, practical, and—above all—unsentimental. To avoid guilt by association, some male reformers also excluded women from their organizations.

John Muir took the first approach. In A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, a revised version of a diary he kept while on a botanizing trip in the South after the Civil War, he describes an encounter with a blacksmith who challenged his masculinity. "These are hard times, and real work is required of every man that is able," the blacksmith said. "Picking up blossoms doesn't seem to be a man's work at all in any kind of times." Muir answered by quoting the Bible. He cited Solomon's interest in studying plants. Then he quoted Jesus: "Now, whose advice am I to take, yours or Christ's? Christ says, 'Consider the lilies.' You say, 'Don't consider them. It isn't worthwhile for any strong-minded man.'" According to Muir, that answer satisfied the blacksmith.¹⁵

Figure 3. John Burroughs and a Group of Female Naturalists.

Edward F. Bigelow, The Spirit of Nature Study (New York: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1907), facing 64.

In a 1907 nature-study text that argued for a more hermaphroditic understanding of gender roles, Edward Bigelow reproduced this photograph. Bigelow's caption was from nature writer John Burroughs: "I have unmistakably the feminine idiosyncrasy. Perhaps this is the reason that my best and most enthusiastic readers appear to be women. In the genesis of all my books, feeling goes a long way before intellection. What I feel I can express, and only what I feel. If I had run after the birds only to write about them, I never should have written anything that any one would have cared to read. I must write from sympathy and love, or not at all." At the time, most men interested in environmental issues were wary of such emotional language, because they did not want to seem "sentimental."

In a 1907 book about nature study, Edward Bigelow made a more extended argument for a new understanding of gender roles in a chapter entitled "Sissies and Tomboys." He wanted boys to feel free to make bouquets of wild flowers, take pleasure in bird song, and "exclaim over the beauties of a landscape as enthusiastically as a girl." Similarly, he wanted girls to be able to feel the full-blooded, sweaty excitement of the outdoors. "I am not going to argue that we want our boys to be sissies, nor our girls to be tomboys—nor to denounce the characteristics that often entitle them to those nicknames among their schoolmates," Bigelow wrote. "Sugar by the mouthful and acid by the glassful are not agreeable, but a little of both in a summer drink make a pleasing combination. A boy wholly or predominantly a sissy, or a girl a tomboy—would be unbearable and intolerable. But a real boy, or a really whole-souled girl is nicely flavored by a fair degree of tomboyishness, or sissyness. Or, perhaps, it would be better put if I should say that they would be nicely flavored by the characteristics of healthy heartiness and loving gentleness, which the terms tomboy and sissy of the old time vernacular maligned and misrepresented." At the end of the chapter, Bigelow repeated that he was not advocating that boys become sissies and girls become tomboys—and he threatened to punch out anyone who misrepresented his views! Instead, he wrote, he was arguing for a less rigid divide between the sexes, so that boys and girls each could gain by having some of the qualities traditionally associated with the other sex.¹⁶

In the decades around 1900, the most common way to emasculate a man was to call him "sentimental," and some environmental reformers confronted that pejorative head on. U.S. Representative John Lacey of Iowa was one. In congressional debate about the landmark bird-protection measure now known as the Lacey Act, Lacey argued that the legislation was justified on scientific and economic grounds: Birds helped farmers and horticulturists by destroying insects that ate crops. He even presented the Speaker of the House with a wormy apple to drive home that point. He also made clear that he did not object to all killing of animals. He was a hunter, he said. But Lacey did not just use traditionally masculine rhetoric. He was willing to argue in terms more often used by women. Though he denied that the act was "a strictly sentimental measure," he argued that emotion had a place in the making of public policy. "It is true," he said, "that there is some sentiment in the bill, and it is a proper, a legitimate, sentiment. The love of birds is something that ought to be taught in every school. Their protection is something that ought to be inculcated in the mind of every boy and girl." In Lacey's view, a feeling for birds was a sign of truly civilized character in both sexes. "I love people who love birds," he explained. "The man or the woman who does not love birds ought to be classified with the person who has no love for music—'fit only for treason, stratagem and spoils.'"¹⁷

Though the arguments of Muir, Bigelow, and Lacey are appealing today, they were hard sells in the Progressive era. The decades around 1900 were a time when many middle- and upper-class men felt insecure about their manhood. Indeed, some historians argue that the 1890s brought a masculinity crisis. The closing of the frontier, the growing importance of white-collar work, the intensifying violence of the conflict between employers and employees, the assertiveness of "the new woman," the renewed demand by women for the right to vote and the opportunity to enter male-dominated professions—all undermined the foundations of Victorian manhood. In response, many middle- and upper-class men sought to demonstrate macho qualities. Football, boxing, and war-mongering all became popular. To most environmental reformers, therefore, attempts to redefine manhood seemed unlikely to defuse the charge of effeminacy.¹⁸

Accordingly, many environmental reformers sought to maintain their manly authority by describing their goals in unequivocally masculine terms. They knew they could argue in other ways. But they chose to emphasize economic and scientific arguments, because business and science were overwhelmingly male worlds.

Instead of making claims about the moral or cultural value of places of natural beauty, for example, many men argued that the preservation of wild landscapes would help ensure that workers remained productive. George Otis Smith, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, made that argument in 1909. "The nation that leads the world in feverish business activity requires playgrounds as well as workshops," Smith wrote. "If we aspire to maintain industrial supremacy, we must perforce think of conserving not only minerals but men. Arguments for scenic preservation need not be limited to aesthetic or sentimental postulates." To the contrary, Smith argued, "the playgrounds of the nation are essential to its very life." Because outdoor recreation was so refreshing, parks in spectacular settings made "for increased and maintained efficiency."¹⁹

Theodore Roosevelt also sought to masculinize goals he shared with many women. Because he was so successful, many historians have misread his career: They have neglected his softer, more feminine side. From childhood on, Roosevelt often was driven by domestic values. As a boy, he wrote ecstatically in his journal about nursing and rearing three squirrels. He was unabashed in his love for the beauty of birds and bird song. Years later, as governor of New York and then as president, Roosevelt still appreciated that beauty. In an 1899 letter, for example, he praised the work of the Audubon Society, a bird-preservation organization supported largely by women:

I would like to see all harmless wild things, but especially all birds, protected in every way. I do not understand how any man or woman who really loves nature can fail to try to exert all influence in support of such objects as those of the Audubon Society. Spring would not be spring without bird songs, any more than it would be spring without buds and flowers, and I only wish that besides protecting the songsters, the birds of the grove, the orchard, the garden and the meadow, we could also protect the birds of the sea-shore and of the wilderness. The Loon ought to be, and, under wise legislation, could be a feature of every Adirondack lake; Ospreys, as every one knows, can be made the tamest of the tame, and Terns should be as plentiful along our shores as Swallows around our barn. A Tanager or a Cardinal makes a point of glowing beauty in the green woods, and the Cardinal among the white snows. When the Bluebirds were so nearly destroyed by the severe winter a few seasons ago, the loss was like the loss of an old friend, or at least like the burning down of a familiar and dearly loved house. How immensely it would add to our forests if the great Logcock were still found among them! The destruction of the Wild Pigeon and the Carolina Paroquet has meant a loss as severe as if the Catskills or the Palisades were taken away. When I hear of the destruction of a species I feel just as if the works of some great writer had perished; as if we had lost all instead of only part of Polybius or Livy.

Yet Roosevelt rarely was so poetic in public. In his speeches and messages to Congress, he always put the economic arguments for conservation first. Perhaps more importantly, he cultivated a hyper-macho image that protected him against any charge of sentimentality. He argued that rugged outings in the wilderness invigorated men in danger of becoming "overcivilized." As president, he hunted for wild animals, and he made his hunting expeditions into spectacles despite criticism from members of humane societies—another group largely composed of women. Their protests only reinforced Roosevelt's reputation as a man's man. Though he sought to protect beautiful birds, no one could question his masculinity.²⁰

For many men, however, a merely rhetorical or symbolic strategy for avoiding the stigma of effeminacy did not seem adequate. The men in charge of several environmental organizations excluded or marginalized women. They wanted the public face of their cause to be all male.

The American Forestry Association (AFA) exemplified that approach to the masculinity problem. At first, the association welcomed "representative men and women in every city and town" as members. Women could attend the AFA's annual meetings. Women also could contribute to the association's journal. In 1906, the editors invited the state forestry committees of the General Federation of Women's Clubs to submit reports on their activities. The organization saw women as a kind of grassroots auxiliary to the professional conservation movement, especially when club members made "utilitarian" rather than aesthetic arguments for forest conservation. For a brief time, the journal even published poems by women about forests. But the foresters stopped welcoming women in the early 1910s. The AFA leadership decided that the continued participation of women would harm the association's reputation. The first sign of the change came in a 1910 editorial in American Forestry on "The Women's Clubs and the Forests." Though suggesting that women could be "a powerful aid" to forestry, the editors warned that too much of the work of women's clubs was unsound and unhelpful. "Much harm has been done in the course of the forestry movement, and the same is true of all branches of conservation, by immature thought arising from insufficient knowledge," the editors argued. "Now, if we may venture suggestion, the women's clubs sometimes undertake too much and gain only that little knowledge which is a dangerous thing, on subjects they take up. This produces mental dissipation in the individual which is unfortunate, but when it is applied to the advancement of a great public cause resting on a scientific foundation, it really becomes serious." The next year, the journal stopped publishing reports on women's club activities.²¹

The AFA's decision to exclude women was partly a response to the debate about the future of Hetch Hetchy—a controversy that did much to reshape the gender politics of environmental reform. Hetch Hetchy was the first preservation battle to command wide attention in Congress and in the national media, yet that attention had a more complex effect than historians have acknowledged. The standard interpretation of the controversy is Whiggish: Though the preservationists lost, the controversy proved that wilderness preservation had become a great concern of many people. However, historians have failed to realize that the controversy also brought more attention to the charged issue of gender. The battle over Hetch Hetchy nationalized a challenge that before was local or regional. The proponents of the dam claimed that they were rational and practical—male traits—while their opponents were "sentimental"—a defining trait of the female sphere. Some San Franciscans were even more direct in questioning the gender identities of the "nature lovers." The city engineer derided the Muirites as "short-haired women and long-haired men." For the first time, therefore, many men who had never been accused of effeminacy could see the hazards of arguing for environmental reform in feminine terms.²²

In the case of the American Forestry Association, the decision to marginalize women was tied to a campaign to professionalize the organization. Though a handful of women who supported forest conservation had professional credentials, the overwhelming majority did not. Women also were "unprofessional" in a more subtle way. They often were more concerned about the beauty of forests than the resource value of trees. To succeed as a profession, the leaders of the AFA concluded, foresters needed to focus on the economic benefits of scientific management. As one advocate explained, "practical forestry" had to be distinguished from "sentimental preservation." Foresters could not expect to win over the nation's lumbermen if they seemed sympathetic to the oft-quoted preservationist demand: "Woodman, spare that tree!" That was a woman's argument. Instead, foresters needed to insist that forestry was about "dollars and cents," not scenery. "Indeed, the youthful graduate of a school of forestry sometimes takes perverse pride in his ability to stand unmoved in a magnificent grove and figure on its stand per acre," the author argued. "His own ideal tree is a glorified telegraph pole with leaves on its arms: one long, straight piece of lumber and as little else as possible."²³

The nation's chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, took a similar stance. A shrewd politician, Pinchot was keenly concerned about popular perception of the U.S. Forest Service. He wanted people to see forestry as scientific and practical. From early in his career, he sought to distance himself from those who wanted to preserve trees for aesthetic or spiritual reasons. He termed the preservationists "denudatics," because they recoiled in "sentimental horror" at the idea of cutting timber on public reservations. But Pinchot initially saw women as important allies. He even hired Enos Mills—a prominent proponent of national parks—to rally audiences of women to the cause of scientific forestry. Mills was well suited to the task. He preferred to speak to women. Though he was happy to make the case for conserving forests as a vital natural resource, he also spoke with great emotional force about the beauty and spirit of trees. After the Hetch Hetchy battle began, however, Pinchot decided that he no longer could tolerate a hermaphroditic representative of the agency: The qualities that made Mills so successful became liabilities. In 1908, Pinchot fired Mills and canceled the outreach program to women's organizations.²⁴

The early history of city planning provides a more complex example of the tie between gender politics and professionalization. The planning ideal grew out of the City Beautiful movement of the turn of the century, and women were instrumental in those campaigns. In the early 1900s, the leading exponents of planning lauded the work of women in lobbying for city parks, clean water, street cleaning, and anti-smoke regulations. The national civic-improvement organizations welcomed women. In 1903, the membership of the American Park and Outdoor Art Association—a group founded by landscape architects and city officials—was evenly divided between men and women. Several women helped to organize the first National Conference on City Planning in 1909. But the door soon closed. The association of planning with City Beautiful rhetoric allowed opponents to charge the new profession with sentimentality. To defend against that charge, some planners explicitly argued for the manliness of their cause. "It is not merely a bit of aestheticism," proclaimed one pioneer in the field. "There is nothing effeminate and sentimental about it,—like tying tidies on telephone poles and putting doilies on cross-walks,—it is vigorous, virile, sane." Though some planners continued to argue that urban beautification had direct economic benefits, most members of the profession abandoned City Beautiful rhetoric in the 1910s. Instead, they began to tout their contributions to "the City Practical." The profession also shut out women from its national conferences. That decision was prompted in part by a struggle over the proper goals of planning. But a desire to free the profession from the taint of sentimentality strengthened the resolve of the men who sought to exclude women.²⁵

THE REJECTION OF WOMEN by men in the forestry and city-planning professions speaks to a critical point: The gender politics of the Progressive era were fluid. As women became more aggressive in claiming a public role as protectors of the environment, the effeminacy issue became more pressing for men who supported environmental causes. Events also reshaped the gender dynamic. Though some men remained steadfast in their approach to the masculinity problem, others changed tactics in response to changed conditions. From the late 1890s to the early 1910s, the changing politics of gender had two broad consequences.

One consequence was a narrowing of the debate over environmental issues. Though John Muir, Edward Bigelow, John Lacey, and other men sought to increase the range of acceptable masculine concerns, their efforts ultimately failed. As a result, some issues were marginalized. So were some potential solutions to environmental problems.

Bird protection is a good example. In the late nineteenth century, many men were willing to make the case in unabashedly sentimental terms. U.S. Senator George Frisbie Hoar adopted the voice of song birds and "their playfellows" in a petition to the Massachusetts legislature in 1897. The petition was signed by roughly forty birds, from the Yellow Throat to the Lark, with each bird represented by a drawing as well as a handwritten signature. (The drawings were done by a woman, Ellen Hale.) The birds promised the legislators that they would "destroy the wicked insects and worms that spoil your cherries and currants and plums and apples and roses." But the heart of their petition was a more traditionally feminine argument. "We will give you our best songs and make the spring more beautiful and the summer sweeter to you," they wrote. "We will teach your children to keep themselves clean and neat. We will show them how to live together in peace and love and to agree as we do in our nests. We will build pretty houses which you will like to see. We will play about your gardens and flowers beds—ourselves like flowers on wings." The state passed a bird-protection law a few weeks later, and Hoar's petition soon was published in several magazines. Current Literature even praised the petition as "a most graceful example of the union of dexterous persuasion with sentimental argument and literary charm." But that sort of praise soon would become unwelcome. By 1910, most men sought to downplay the aesthetic and emotional arguments for bird protection. Instead, they focused on the value of birds in destroying agricultural pests. Again and again, they cited the dollar value of crops lost to pest damage. According to one advocate, "birds have been, are, and will be without question one of the most important agencies in staying the inroads of insect devastation." That argument worked, but at a cost: Not all birds were "useful" to farmers, so not all birds were protected.²⁶

Especially after the Hetch Hetchy controversy, many men similarly disavowed aesthetic arguments for preserving wild places. To win future battles, they concluded, preservationists needed to use more masculine rhetoric. Even some of the strongest believers in the preservation of natural beauty ultimately felt compelled to make their case in new ways. That was especially clear in the debate in the 1910s about whether to create a National Park Service. The agency's advocates argued that preserving places of sublime beauty encouraged patriotism. They also described parks as public-health measures that would help maintain the nation's workforce. Again and again, they claimed that recreation in the great outdoors helped to make people more efficient at work. As J. Horace McFarland explained, "the park idea ... has come to be the idea of service and efficiency, not an idea of pleasure and ornamentation at all." By arguing in those terms, the agency's advocates made development of recreational facilities in national parks more likely.²⁷

The field of nature writing also was narrowed by gender anxieties. In the early 1900s, the nature writer John Burroughs attacked men who wrote sentimentally about animals. Theodore Roosevelt soon joined the attack on the "nature fakers." So did many scientists and naturalists. The charge of nature-fakery was gender specific. Roosevelt's hall of shame included only men: Women were expected to write sentimentally, so no one criticized women's nature writing. But when men "humanized" wolves and salmon and birds—when men tried to inspire sympathy for the rest of creation by giving animals the thoughts and feelings of people—that was different. The nature fakers threatened to destroy the authority of all men who wrote about nature. "When sentiment gets overripe," Burroughs argued, "it becomes sentimentalism. The sentiment for nature which has been so assiduously cultivated in our times is fast undergoing this change, and is softening into sentimentalism toward the lower animals. Many a wholesome feeling can be pushed so far that it becomes a weakness and a sign of disease. Pity for the sufferings of our brute neighbors may be a manly feeling; and then again it may be so fostered and cosseted that it becomes maudlin and unworthy." To encourage true appreciation of the non-human world, Burroughs concluded, nature writing needed to regain "its firm edge."²⁸

A similar battle raged in the schools. Courses in "nature study" became part of the curriculum in the late nineteenth century, and educators soon began to debate how to teach the subject. Was the goal a scientific knowledge of the workings of nature, or a humanistic appreciation of the non-human world? Though the issue was framed in disciplinary terms, the debate often was gendered. According to advocates of scientific nature study, teaching that aimed to encourage a love of nature was "sentimental." "The teacher who aims chiefly at leading her scholars to feel affectionately toward plants and animals is not aiming at a justifiable end," one critic argued. "As the sole or predominant attitude of a human being toward nature, this loving interest is an atrocity. Nature is quite as truly 'red in tooth and claw,' quite as truly an unchanging machine, quite as truly a master against whom our revolt is beginning to succeed, quite as truly a collection of things to be turned to the service of our conscious ends. It is above all, on any reasonable ground, a thing to study, to know about, to see thro, and one can readily show that the emotionally indifferent attitude of the scientific observer is ethically a far higher attitude than the loving interest of the poet." At a time when many male commentators were lamenting the "feminizing" of education, attacks of that sort were bids to reclaim a subject increasingly taught by women. But the attacks on "sentimentality in science teaching" also were successful efforts to rope in wayward men. In the mid-1890s, many men supported the humanistic approach to nature study, but that soon changed: After 1900, almost all the men in the field upheld the scientific ideal.²⁹

The second great consequence of the changing politics of gender from the late 1890s to the early 1910s was the increasing reluctance of many men to join women in environmental reform coalitions. At first, cross-gender alliances were not uncommon. Two stand out. The first was the campaign to ban the interstate trade in bird feathers, which culminated in the passage of the Lacey Act in 1900. The second was the City Beautiful campaign in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the early 1900s. In both cases, women were especially active. But the success of both efforts also depended on the leadership of men willing to work closely with women—the ornithologist Frank Chapman and the businessman J. Horace McFarland. Chapman even was depicted in one sympathetic cartoon leading an army of women. In the Harrisburg campaign, McFarland asked one of the city's most prominent women, reformer Mira Dock, to arrange for him to speak to the women's Civic Club. In turn, McFarland arranged for Dock to address the all-male Board of Trade, and her speech caused a sensation.³⁰

Over time, however, many men rejected the example of Chapman and McFarland and instead pursued the strategy of the American Forestry Association and the city planning profession. The result was not simply a growing divide between men and women. Because the environmental activism of many men was tied to their work while a majority of the women who supported environmental reform were volunteers, professional reformers grew increasingly separated from grassroots activists.

The history of anti-smoke activism is perhaps the most telling example. In several cities, women's clubs joined with engineering organizations in the 1890s to attack smoke—and the engineers often made the same arguments as the women. But coalitions of that sort became less common in the early twentieth century. In public discussion of air pollution, the arguments of women and men diverged. Though women sometimes argued that pollution was an economic problem, the heart of their argument involved health, aesthetics, and morality. They argued that every city resident had a right to breathe pure air. They decried the depressing ugliness of smoke, and they argued that smoky cities were uncivilized. By 1910, only a few men were willing to follow women in arguing against air pollution in those terms. Instead, men defined the smoke issue as a problem of "waste," to be solved by better engineering. Women and men also divided over the best way to clean up smoky cities. Women generally favored aggressive municipal enforcement of anti-smoke regulations, while men argued that experts should instruct business owners about new techniques for reducing smoke production from furnaces, railroad engines, and factories. That division of opinion led to the break up of some anti-smoke coalitions. But the growing institutional chasm between men and women was not due only to disagreements about strategy and tactics. Because business, labor, and political leaders often dismissed the smoke problem as a women's issue, many men concluded that a successful reform organization needed to be all male. That was true nationally as well as locally. The founders of the first national smoke-prevention organization effectively excluded women by requiring that members have a professional interest in the issue. Of course, that decision was not simply about gender: The members of the organization hoped to increase their power and prestige by securing a professional identity. But, like the foresters and city planners, the men involved in the smoke-prevention cause also hoped that excluding women would protect them against the disabling charge of sentimentality.³¹

Figure 4. Ornithologist Frank Chapman Leads an Army of Women.

The Condor 3 (March 1901), 55.

In 1901, when this cartoon appeared in an ornithology journal, men often were willing to accept the help of women in advancing environmental causes. The ornithologist Frank Chapman certainly was. By the 1910s, however, many male environmental leaders had begun to fear that working with women would undermine their efforts.

FOR MEN INTERESTED in environmental reform, the masculinity challenge did not end with the Progressive era. That means that historians of environmentalism need to pay more attention to gender. Indeed, even a preliminary reconsideration of events after 1920 suggests that changing attitudes about gender affected the trajectory of environmental reform throughout the twentieth century.

The gendered divide between grassroots activists and professional reformers that began in the Progressive era helps to explain the seeming quiescence of environmentalism in the period from the early 1920s through the late 1950s. In that period, a variety of professions made dramatic progress in understanding environmental problems. Both university and government researchers learned much more, for example, about the health hazards of air pollution, water pollution, and exposure to toxic chemicals. Yet those advances did not inspire an environmental "movement." Why not? Gender politics undoubtedly is one reason: The male professionals in universities and government bureaucracies rarely joined with female activists to press for reform.³²

In the 1960s, however, the situation changed. Men became much more willing to work with women in addressing environmental problems. That was true even though women at the time often justified their activism in terms very similar to those used by the municipal housekeepers of the Progressive era—and even though opponents of environmental reform continued to question the manhood of male environmentalists.³³

The willingness of President Lyndon Johnson to champion the cause of "natural beauty" is one example. By the end of the Progressive era, few men were willing to argue for preservation in aesthetic terms. The planning profession also had rejected the rhetoric of the City Beautiful. In the 1960s, "beautification" still made many men uneasy. As one presidential adviser wrote, the word has "sort of a feminine aura to it, you know, and it's something sissy-like." But Johnson supported his wife's beautification campaigns, even though that word invited derisive comments and scared some men. He convened a White House conference on natural beauty that brought together male professionals and representatives of women's organizations. He created a presidential task force on natural beauty. Johnson also inverted the Progressive-era strategy of seeking to masculinize goals that might seem feminine: He used the rhetoric of beauty to justify a host of environmental initiatives, including efforts to clean up polluted lakes and rivers.³⁴

The controversy over Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is another example. Even within the world of wildlife conservation, men who supported Carson worried that they would be dismissed as unmanly—"birds and bunny boys," as one put it. But many male scientists nevertheless were willing to form alliances with female activists to challenge indiscriminate use of pesticides. Many men also were willing to make the case against pesticides in language that stretched gender conventions. They wrote about their fears for the health of their unborn grandchildren. They also expressed outrage at the unwanted penetration of their bodies by chemical poisons.³⁵

The rhetoric of natural-resource conservation also changed. In the 1970s, the most compelling advocate of a new way of thinking about energy, Amory Lovins, used rhetoric that would have made Gifford Pinchot cringe. Lovins labeled the traditional approach to meeting energy needs—development of large-scale, environmentally destructive technologies, especially nuclear power—"the hard path." In contrast, he called his strategy of using renewable sources and encouraging conservation "the soft path." For a man to favor the soft over the hard was a dramatic break with traditional notions of masculinity.³⁶

If these examples are representative, then scholars have missed part of the story of the rise of the modern environmental movement. The growing affluence of the decades after World War II, the popularization of ecological ideas, the unprecedented hazards of new technologies, the sprawl of suburbia, the resurgence of liberalism, and the rise of the counterculture all helped to make environmental activism a powerful social force. So, apparently, did the growing willingness of many men to take stands that might be considered effeminate.³⁷

Adam Rome is associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University and author of The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, 2001), which won the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Award. He is working now on a book about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, tentatively titled New City, New Country: Environmental Reform and the Emergence of Modern America, under contract to Cambridge.

NOTES

I first discussed this subject at a 2004 American Historical Association session on gender and political culture in Progressive America, and I appreciate the insights of everyone at that session, especially my co-panelists Kristin Hoganson, Rebecca Edwards, Robyn Muncy, and Maureen Flanagan. Audiences at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Utah, and Oregon State University also provided thoughtful comments. In addition, I thank Donald Worster, Amy Greenberg, Mark Cioc, Eve Munson, and the two anonymous readers for Environmental History. Jan Logemann helped greatly with the initial research. A 2005 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend aided my work, as did a 2005–2006 Visiting Research Fellowship at Oregon State University's wonderful Center for the Humanities.

^1. I found the cartoon in Michael L. Smith, Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment, 1850–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). The cartoon also is reproduced in Holway R. Jones, John Muir and the Sierra Club: The Battle for Yosemite (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1965), 183; and Robert W. Righter, The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America?s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 94. I haven't seen the original—and the books that reproduce the cartoon identify the source only as the collections of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, without providing a publication date.

^2. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 188–90; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 270–74; Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 23.

^3. Susan R. Schrepfer, Nature?s Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 94–95; Polly Welts Kaufman, National Parks and the Woman?s Voice: A History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 31–32.

^4. The pioneering discussions of the environmental activism of women in this period are Suellen M. Hoy, "'Municipal Housekeeping': The Role of Women in Improving Urban Sanitation Practices, 1880–1917," in Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870–1930, ed. Martin V. Melosi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 173–98; and Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare: Women and the Environment (New York: Routledge, 1995), 109–36. In addition, see Maureen A. Flanagan, "Gender and Urban Political Reform: The City Club and the Woman's City Club of Chicago in the Progressive Era," American History Review 95 (1990): 1032–50; Harold L. Platt, "Invisible Gases: Smoke, Gender, and the Redefinition of Environmental Policy in Chicago, 1900–1920," Planning Perspectives 10 (1995): 67–97; Maureen A. Flanagan, "The City Profitable, the City Livable: Environmental Policy, Gender, and Power in Chicago in the 1910s," Journal of Urban History 22 (1996): 163–90; Glenda Riley, Women and Nature: Saving the "Wild" West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881–1951 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 37–60; Angela Gugliotta, "Class, Gender, and Coal Smoke: Gender Ideology and Environmental Justice in Pittsburgh, 1868–1914," Environmental History 5 (2000): 165–93; Harold L. Platt, "Jane Addams and the Ward Boss Revisited: Class, Politics, and Public Health in Chicago, 1890–1930," Environmental History 5 (2000): 194–222; Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Cameron Binkley, "'No Better Heritage than Living Trees': Women's Clubs and Early Conservation in Humboldt County," Western Historical Quarterly 33 (2002): 179–204; Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Susan Rimby, "'Better Housekeeping Out of Doors': Mira Lloyd Dock, the State Federation of Pennsylvania Women, and Progressive Era Conservation," Journal of Women?s History 17 (Fall 2005): 9–34.

^5. For Flanagan's argument, see "Gender and Urban Political Reform," "The City Profitable, the City Livable," and Seeing with Their Hearts. In addition, see Elizabeth J. Clapp, Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); and Camilla Stivers, Bureau Men, Settlement Women: Constructing Public Administration in the Progressive Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000). For a revisionist view, see Eric Rauchway, The Refuge of Affections: Family and American Reform Politics, 1900–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

^6. In a pioneering collection of primary sources, Donald Worster was the first historian to describe this period of environmental reform as "formative." See Donald Worster, American Environmentalism: The Formative Period, 1860–1915 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1973).

^7. For the attacks on the anti-imperialists, see Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 174–79. Hoganson reproduces the McKinley cartoon on page 104. For the challenge faced by male religious leaders, see Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 78–83; Karin E. Gedge, Without Benefit of Clergy: Women and the Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 198–201; and Gail Bederman, "'The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough': The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911–1912 and the Masculinization of Middle-Class Protestantism," American Quarterly 41 (1989): 432–65.

^8. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 360.

^9. Mary I. Woods, "Civic Activities of Women's Clubs," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 56 (November 1914): 79. For a similar discussion of the transformation of women's clubs, see Rheta Childe Dorr, What Eight Million Women Want (1910; reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint, 1971), 17–25, 41–43. In addition, see Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980); and Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women?s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 141–58. Almost every recent case study of women's activism in cities and states during this period discusses efforts by club women to improve the environment. See, for example, Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women?s Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 130–46; Sandra Haarsager, Organized Womanhood: Cultural Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1840–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 251–84; and Anastatia Sims, The Power of Femininity in the New South: Women?s Organizations and Politics in North Carolina, 1880–1930 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 80–84, 109–14.

^10. The report is quoted in Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye, eds., Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1991), 3.

^11. Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (1991; reprint, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 59–68; Linda J. Rynbrandt, Caroline Bartlett Crane and Progressive Reform: Social Housekeeping as Sociology (New York: Garland, 1999); Sarah Stage, "Ellen Richards and the Social Significance of the Home Economics Movement," in Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, ed. Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 17–33; Marion Talbot, "Sanitation and Sociology," American Journal of Sociology 2 (July 1896): 78; Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 174–79. In addition, see Agnes Hooper Gottlieb, Women Journalists and the Municipal Housekeeping Movement, 1868–1914 (Lewiston, Pa.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001).

^12. The first scholar to highlight the tie between municipal housekeeping and suffrage was Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (1965; reprint, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1971), 52–55. In addition, see Jane Addams, "Why Women Should Vote," Ladies Home Journal (January 1910): 21–22; Jane Addams, "Why Women Are Concerned with the Larger Citizenship," in Woman and the Larger Citizenship: City Housekeeping [The Woman's Citizen Library, volume IX] (New York: The Civics Society, 1913), 2123–42; Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Gender Identities in Modern America, 3rd. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 40.

^13. Life 62 (October 16, 1913): 646. I first saw the cartoon in Monika Franzen and Nancy Ethiel, Make Way! 200 Years of American Women in Cartoons (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1988), 38. I described this cartoon in the same terms in an earlier article: See Adam Rome, "What Really Matters in History? Environmental Perspectives on Modern America," Environmental History 7 (April 2002): 312. For other cartoons that tie suffrage and environmental reform, see "Meanwhile They Drown," Women's Journal (June 5, 1915); and "Our Answer to Mr. Taft," Women's Journal (September 18, 1915). Both are reproduced in Alice Sheppard, Cartooning for Suffrage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 108, 154.

^14. Charles Eliot, Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect (1902; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 546, 547.

^15. John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916; reprint, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), 15. In addition, see Schrepfer, Nature's Altars, 64–65. Schrepfer does not discuss this passage, but she argues that Muir had an "androgynous relationship with nature."

^16. Edward F. Bigelow, The Spirit of Nature Study (New York: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1907), 15, 24, 25, 26.

^17. "The Lacey Bill," Forest and Stream 54 (May 19, 1900): 385–87. Elsewhere, Lacey suggested that "sentiment and utility" ought to join hands. See John F. Lacey, "Forest Reserves as Breeding Places for Wild Life," Outing Magazine 48 (May 1906): 249. For Lacey's contributions to the cause of environmental reform, see Mary Annette Gallagher, "Citizen of the Nation: John Fletcher Lacey, Conservationist," Annals of Iowa 46 (Summer 1981): 9–24.

^18. The literature on masculinity in this period is extensive. See, especially, Joe L. Dubbert, A Man's Place: Masculinity in Transition (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 80–162; Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 179–206; Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffin, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Rotundo, American Manhood, 222–83; George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 111–27; Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 81–188; and Filene, Him/Her/Self, 74–99. Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), is one of the few works to counter the argument that middle-class men held to an especially macho view of masculinity in this period.

^19. George Otis Smith, "The Nation's Playgrounds," American Review of Reviews 40 (1909): 44. For a remarkably similar example, see the statement by George Kunz on "The Preservation of Scenic Beauty" in Proceedings of a Conference of Governors in the White House, Washington, D.C., May 13–15, 1908, ed. W J McGee (1909; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1972). 409–10.

^20. Paul Russell Cutright, Theodore Roosevelt: The Making of a Conservationist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 28–29; Frank M. Chapman, Autobiography of a Bird-Lover (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1933), 180–81. The classic discussion of Roosevelt's gender ideology is Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 170–215. In addition, see Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Arnaldo Testi, "The Gender of Reform Politics: Theodore Roosevelt and the Culture of Masculinity," Journal of American History 81 (1995): 1509–33; and Gerald F. Roberts, "The Strenuous Life: The Cult of Manliness in the Era of Theodore Roosevelt" (PhD dissertation, Michigan State University, 1970). For the perception that most anti-hunting activists were women, see Lynn Tew Sprague, "Ethics and the Sportsman," Forest and Stream 58 (June 21, 1902): 484.

^21. "Membership Campaign," Forestry and Irrigation 12 (June 1906): 255; "Women's Clubs for Forestry," Forestry and Irrigation 13 (February 1907): 62–63; "Work of the Women's Clubs," Forestry and Irrigation 13 (March 1907): 116; Mrs. P. S. Peterson, "Report of the Forestry Committee," Forestry and Irrigation 13 (July 1907): 361–62; "The Women's Clubs and the Forests," American Forestry 16 (June 1910): 363. For examples of women's poetry, see Margaret E. Sangster, "In the Heart of the Woods," Forestry and Irrigation 14 (January 1908): 47; Jane Taaffe, "The Peace of Quiet Aisles," Forestry and Irrigation 14 (February 1908), 89; Anne McQueen, "The Cry of the Pine," Forestry and Irrigation 14 (May 1908), 278; Marion Elza Dodd, "Trees," Forestry and Irrigation 14 (May 1908), 283; Lillian H. Shuey, "The Death of the Forest," Forestry and Irrigation 14 (July 1908), 369; Victoria Elisabeth Gittings, "The Dryad's Last Stand," Forestry and Irrigation 14 (July 1908), 404–05; Marian Mead, "The Plea of the City Elm," Conservation 14 (September 1908), 492; and Eleanor Van Allen, "Mother," Conservation 14 (December 1908), 678. The poems appeared when the AFA was beginning to think about widening readership for the journal—the ambition was announced with a new title, Conservation. Then the journal was renamed again, and became more narrowly professional. Carolyn Merchant also discusses the exclusion of women from forestry activities. See Earthcare, 113–15, 131–33.

^22. For the standard interpretation, see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 161–81. In different ways, several scholars have discussed the gender politics of the Hetch Hetchy debate: See Smith, Pacific Visions, 177–85; Merchant, Earthcare, 132–36; and Righter, The Battle over Hetch Hetchy, 88–92.

^23. Julian Willard Helburn, "Reaping Where We Have Not Sown," American Magazine 62 (1906): 247–48. For a fine fictional depiction of a woman urging a lumberman to stay the ax, see Stewart Edward White, The Blazed Trail (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1902), 311–12.

^24. Gifford Pinchot, Breaking New Ground (1947; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1987), 27–29, 182; Frederick Turner, Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours (1985; reprint, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987), 323; Alexander Drummond, Enos Mills: Citizen of Nature (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1995), 186–92, 202; Dorr, What Eight Million Women Want, 53–54. Without discussing gender politics, historians long have argued that Pinchot sought to suppress "sentimental" conservation. See Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (1959; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1974), 197; and Donald C. Swain, Federal Conservation Policy, 1921–1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 6, 124.

^25. Jon A. Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 109–17, 235–59, 264; Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 13–41. The quotation is from Charles Mulford Robinson, Modern Civic Art, or the City Made Beautiful, 4th rev. ed. (1918; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970), 28. In addition, see Susan Marie Wirka, "The City Social Movement: Progressive Women Reformers and Early Social Planning," in Planning the Twentieth-Century American City, ed. Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 57–75; Bonj Szcygiel, "'City Beautiful' Revisited: An Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Civic Improvement Efforts," Journal of Urban History 29 (2003): 107–32. For a good example of a man trying to make the City Beautiful ideal seem more masculine, see Henry Oyen, "The Awakening of the Cities: Beautification and Business," World's Work 22 (1911): 14612–18.

^26. George F. Hoar, "Bird's Petition to the Massachusetts General Court," New England Magazine N.S. 16 (1897): 614–15; "Senator Hoar and the Birds' Petition," Current Literature 22 (September 1897): 210; George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, 2 vol. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903), 2: 274–77; Kurkpatrick Dorsey, The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: U.S.-Canadian Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 187. Dorsey concludes that bird advocates increasingly emphasized utilitarian rather than sentimental arguments in this period—see page 237—but he does not consider the role of gender anxieties in explaining that change. Conversely, Jennifer Price offers a provocative analysis of the gendered discourse of bird protection but does not consider the possibility that men's views of the issue changed over time: See Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 57–109.

^27. Ernest Morrison, J. Horace McFarland: A Thorn for Beauty (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1995), 181–82, 187–88. For a similar comment by a longtime park supporter, see Enos A. Mills, Your National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 379, 382. Alfred Runte points to the shift in park rhetoric in the 1910s, but does not consider the role of gender in the shift: See National Parks: The American Experience, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 83, 105.

^28. John Burroughs, Ways of Nature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 59–60; Edward B. Clark, "Roosevelt on the Nature Fakirs," Everybody's Magazine 16 (June 1907): 77074; Theodore Roosevelt, "Nature Fakers," Everybody's Magazine 17 (September 1907): 427–30. In addition, see Ralph H. Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science & Sentiment (1990; reprint, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001). For the expectation that women would write sentimentally about nature, see Amy Green, "'She Touched Fifty Million Lives': Gene Stratton-Porter and Nature Conservation," in Seeing Nature Through Gender, ed. Virginia J. Scharff (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 228–30.

^29. Edward Thorndike, "Sentimentality in Science-Teaching," Educational Review 17 (January 1899): 58, 61–62. Liberty H. Bailey was one of the few men to continue to challenge the purely scientific approach to nature study: See The Nature-Study Idea: Being an Interpretation of the New School-Movement to Put the Child in Sympathy with Nature (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1903). I am indebted to an unpublished manuscript on nature study and poetry by Robin Schulze of Pennsylvania State University. Kim Tolley also discusses the gendered debate about nature study in The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), 127, 182–84, 193–96. The most famous critique of the feminization of education is Earl Barnes, "The Feminizing of Culture," Atlantic Monthly 109 (June 1912): 770–76. In addition, see Victoria Bissell Brown, "The Fear of Feminization: Los Angeles High Schools in the Progressive Era," Feminist Studies 16 (1990): 493–518. The noted educator G. Stanley Hall specifically lamented the "effeminization" of books about nature in the introduction to Clifton F. Hodge, Nature Study and Life (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1902), xv.

^30. For the campaign against the feather trade, see Price, Flight Maps, 57–109. The best discussion of the Harrisburg campaign is Morrison, McFarland, 68–87. In addition, see William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 126–46. The Chapman cartoon was published in The Condor 3 (March 1901): 55. I first saw the cartoon in Price, Flight Maps, 66.

^31. I am drawing here on the work of a number of scholars, though I come to somewhat different conclusions: Robert Dale Grinder, "The Anti Smoke Crusades: Early Attempts to Reform the Urban Environment, 1893–1918" (PhD dissertation, University of Missouri, 1973); Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 85–137; Gugliotta, "Class, Gender, and Coal Smoke," 165–93; Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 468–91; Adam W. Rome, "Coming to Terms with Pollution: The Language of Environmental Reform, 1865–1915," Environmental History 1 (July 1996): 15.

^32. The interwar period has received little attention from historians of environmentalism. See, for example, Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993). For the role of professionals in advancing the environmental agenda from the 1920s to the 1950s, see Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 153–81; Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron: University of Akron Press, 1996), 354–84; and Christopher C. Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

^33. For the activism of women in the 1960s, see Adam Rome, "'Give Earth a Chance': The Environmental Movement and the Sixties," Journal of American History 90 (September 2003): 534–41.

^34. Lewis L. Gould, Lady Bird Johnson and the Environment (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), 61. In addition, see Martin V. Melosi, "Lyndon Johnson and Environmental Policy," in The Johnson Years: Vietnam, the Environment, and Science, ed. Robert A. Divine (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987), 119–20.

^35. Maril Hazlett, "'Woman vs. Man vs. Bugs': Gender and Popular Ecology in Early Reactions to Silent Spring," Environmental History 9 (2004): 701–02, 711, 713, 714.

^36. Amory B. Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (San Francisco: Friends of the Earth, 1977).

^37. The standard explanations for the rise of the environmental movement after World War II are summarized in Rome, "'Give Earth a Chance.'" For a provocative reconsideration of ideals of manhood in the postwar period, see James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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