Women's Labor, Environmental Justice, and Daily Life in Urban and Domestic Space

This paper connects historic and contemporary examples from Baltimore, New York, and Chicago to show how women have labored to protect environmental health and aesthetics at the scale of the household and the urban neighborhood. In Baltimore, examples include community clean-ups focused on pest control in both the 1940s and the 2010s. In New York, examples focus on women speaking out about unhealthy housing environments in Harlem in the 1950s and the 2010s. In Chicago, examples examine the African-American physician Mary Waring in the 1910s and housing activists in the 1990s. Women’s environmental labor includes the very physical labor of domestic hygiene, community clean-ups, and gardening, but also the labor of coordinating political resistance, demanding government intervention, and organizing beautification activities. Women did not perform household and community sanitation only to gain respectability according to white, middle-class standards of hygiene and beauty, though respectability politics certainly tinges some local sanitation campaigns. Drawing upon the writing of the philosopher bell hooks and the historian Rhonda Williams, I argue that women deploy such labor in ways that creatively redraw lines between the “public” and the “private.” Women of color and other environmental justice activists sought to defend families from daily the health and aesthetic insults of racism, and also constructed their own ideas of the healthy, safe local environment. At the same time, the demands of making homes and neighborhoods healthy and comfortable for everyday life has created double- (and sometimes triple-) burdens upon women who often already engage in paid work.