Surviving Silicon Valley: Women's Labor and Environmental Activism in the Emerging Semiconductor industry, 1980-1995

Jeannette Estruth’s dissertation is a study of grassroots political movements in the Silicon Valley in the last half of the twentieth century. Her presentation to the panel at the Hofstra Berks will be centered on women’s struggles for occupational health in early semiconductor manufacturing plants California’s Bay Area.

From the 1970s onward, Silicon Valley semiconductor manufacturers employed thousands of women of color to painstakingly construct the hardware that formed the basis of the personal computing revolution. Billed as a “clean” industry, women performing this detailed labor for semiconductor firms worked with incredibly toxic substances that caused miscarriages, prenatal complications, irregular heartbeats, liver and kidney damage, cancer, anemia, and more. In response, workers organized on a local level for toxics legislation and environmental and economic justice, ultimately winning some of the strongest regulations of industrial chemicals in the United States.

This paper will ask: in what ways was the contemporary technology industry built on the bodies of these women workers? How did women workers respond, organize, and manage in response to their workplace hardships? What does their experience tell us about the Silicon Valley’s transformation from an agricultural economy to an industrial technology economy to a post-industrial “innovation” economy over the last 60 years?

Jeannette Estruth is a Doctoral Candidate and Henry M. MacCracken Fellow in the History Department at New York University. She is the former Associate Editor of the Radical History Review and an alumna of the Fulbright Program and Vassar College.