This article describes a period when environmental organizations actively worked to achieve equal rights for women in the 1970s and 1980s. Using archival records from the Environmental Defense Fund and from women’s occupational health activists, I argue that a significant, if under-recognized, catalyst for environmentalists’ engagement with feminist politics was the emergence of workplace exclusion policies. Pushed to hire women by newly enforced sex discrimination statutes in the 1970s, industrial employers categorically excluded women from jobs with hazardous toxic substances. Environmentalists joined a coalition of labor and women’s rights advocates that together challenged exclusion policies in the courts and regulatory agencies. The coalition devised a litigation strategy that they hoped would raise environmental standards and end sex discrimination, issues that they saw as intrinsically related. They forwarded an equal protection approach to environmental hazards as part of a broader campaign to expand how regulators assessed toxic risks. They sought gender-neutral protection, and they challenged the gender biases in scientific research priorities and regulatory standards. Their litigation culminated in the US Supreme Court’s decision in United Automobile Workers v. Johnson Controls (1991), which prohibited sex-based exclusion policies. In the realms of women’s employment law and abortion rights, the case was a success. It was not, however, a milestone for environmental protection. It failed to achieve key coalition objectives since it did not raise environmental standards or require companies to remediate toxic workplaces. Ultimately, the ruling preserved equal risks in toxic jobs rather than asserting equal rights to environmental protection.
...More
Book
Haggett, Ali;
(2012)
Desperate Housewives, Neuroses and the Domestic Environment, 1945--1970
(/isis/citation/CBB001451580/)
Article
Rueß, Susanne;
(2011)
Die Bedeutung der jüdischen Krankenpflege im Ersten Weltkrieg am Beispiel des Stuttgarter jüdischen Schwesternheims
(/isis/citation/CBB001420796/)
Article
Laura Ettinger;
Nicole Conroy;
William Barr II;
(2019)
What Late-Career and Retired Women Engineers Tell Us: Gender Challenges in Historical Context
(/isis/citation/CBB259074456/)
Chapter
Rubio, D.;
P. Molina;
Cerezo, Eva;
Martinez, E.;
Sandra S. Baldassarri;
(1999)
An approach to the situation of Spanish women holding research/teaching positions based on the production/reproduction model
(/isis/citation/CBB977483921/)
Article
Gaard, Greta;
(2013)
Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies
(/isis/citation/CBB001201819/)
Book
Ceccarelli, Leah;
(2013)
On the Frontier of Science: An American Rhetoric of Exploration and Exploitation
(/isis/citation/CBB001550831/)
Book
Brian Jordan Jefferson;
(2020)
Digitize and Punish: racial criminalization in the digital age
(/isis/citation/CBB018434400/)
Book
Sarah A. Seo;
(2019)
Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom
(/isis/citation/CBB681494072/)
Book
Mia Bay;
(2021)
Traveling Black : a story of race and resistance
(/isis/citation/CBB818675288/)
Book
Benjamin Wiggins;
(2020)
Calculating Race: Racial discrimination in risk assessment
(/isis/citation/CBB498430122/)
Article
Vogel, William F.;
(2017)
"The Spitting Image of a Woman Programmer": Changing Portrayals of Women in the American Computing Industry, 1958-1985
(/isis/citation/CBB857910207/)
Article
Patton, Elizabeth;
(April 2019)
Where Does Work Belong? Home-Based Work and Communication Technology within the American Middle-Class Postwar Home
(/isis/citation/CBB146314393/)
Chapter
Brennan, J.;
(1999)
Workspace design, ergonomics and gender
(/isis/citation/CBB307277667/)
Book
Kit Hughes;
(2020)
Television at Work: Industrial Media and American Labor
(/isis/citation/CBB612692604/)
Article
Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler;
(October 2022)
Designing for Maintenance: Plant Care Technology in the Office
(/isis/citation/CBB769511669/)
Book
Joshua Benjamin Freeman;
(2019)
City of workers, city of struggle: how labor movements changed New York
(/isis/citation/CBB618026891/)
Thesis
Ethan Czuy Levine;
(2018)
Studying Rape: The Production of Scientific Knowledge about Sexual Violence in the United States and Canada
(/isis/citation/CBB208363097/)
Book
Finis Dunaway;
(2015)
Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images
(/isis/citation/CBB313032212/)
Book
Joseph A. Pratt;
Martin V. Melosi;
Kathleen A. Brosnan;
(2014)
Energy Capitals: Local Impact, Global Influence
(/isis/citation/CBB830622340/)
Article
Charles Halvorson;
(Spring 2019)
Deflated Dreams: The EPA's Bubble Policy and the Politics of Uncertainty in Regulatory Reform
(/isis/citation/CBB066968357/)
Be the first to comment!