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Cold War, Silent Spring: Rachel Carson and the Gender Politics of the Postwar Environmental Movement

Updated: Sep 30, 2020

By: Claire Brovold


As we celebrate the accomplishments we have already made for the environment and look towards the future, it is important to remember those who got us to where we are today. Rachel Carson was an American biologist who lived during the first part of the Cold War. As a female scientist, Rachel Carson had to overcome many struggles during the Cold War because of the stereotypical gender roles that were placed on women during the time. For instance, her work was not always taken seriously and it was often criticized because she was a woman in a largely male dominated field. However, despite the struggles she encountered, Carson made a huge impact on the environmental movement and left a legacy that is still alive today.

During the Cold War, “traditional” gender roles were used as a way to distract families from the harshness of the Cold War and to re-assign women to the home, where they were expected to do the cooking, cleaning, and care for the children. In addition, it also meant that they were expected to not have a college education. In fact, some conservatives believed that, “college was only good for women if they found husbands there.” As a result, Carson’s attempt to carve out a space as an environmental scientist led many critics to doubt her work. In fact, her mostly male critics “dismissed her writing as ‘emotional’” and often cast her “as a hysterical woman.” Michael B. Smith, a writer for feminist studies says that “Carson posed a threat to her detractors not merely because she had marshaled a scientifically sound indictment of the indiscriminate use of chemicals in the United States and the world,” but also because she was a woman in a largely male dominated field, which came off as threatening to those who controlled the scientific community. However, despite the backlash that Carson encountered, she flourished without conforming to these gender stereotypes.

Carson wrote many books during her career, but she is best known for her book Silent Spring, which stimulated widespread public concern over the dangers of improper pesticide use and the need for better pesticide controls. Carson is largely credited for “igniting the environmental movement” with this book. Silent Springfocuses on the synthetic chemical Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or better known as DDT. DDT was used as an insecticide from its creation in the 1940s until it was banned in 1972 for the health problems that it caused for humans and for the negative effects that it had on the environment. If it were not for Carson writing Silent Spring, DDT may have not been banned until much later, which would have allowed it to cause more negative impacts to the environment than it already had.

Carson’s legacy lives on through the people that she has influenced and through the accomplishments that she made in her lifetime. My favorite quote from Carson comes from Silent Spring, where she exclaims, “We stand now where two roads diverge...the road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork in the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.” Of course, when Carson wrote this she was referring to DDT and how we need to stop the use of harmful pesticides, but this quote remains particularly urgent and relevant today in regards to our climate crisis. The path we have been taking is filled with harmful emissions, plastic pollution, deforestation, and many other factors that contribute to climate change and the destruction of our planet. However, we now have a choice to take the path of sustainability, to choose to live a more environmentally friendly way of life. Carson's story has inspired me to keep fighting for the environment, as I hope it has done for you as well. Although it will not be easy, we are in this together. Here's to a year full of making sustainable choices, and to a green future defined by clean and healthy living.


About the Author: Claire Brovold is senior Geology and Environmental Science major here at Adrian College. After graduation, Claire plans on attending graduate school to continue her education with the hopes of working in a laboratory.


Sources:

Elaine T. May, Homeward bound: American families in the Cold War era (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2017)

Michael B. Smith, "Silence, Miss Carson!" Science, Gender, and the Reception of "Silent Spring." Feminist Studies (Feminist Studies Inc., 2001)

Maril Hazlett, “Woman vs. Man vs. Bugs: Gender and Popular Ecology in Early Reactions to Silent Spring.” Environmental History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)

EPA. “DDT - A Brief History and Status.” Environmental Protection Agency (August 11, 2017)

Rachel L. Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Mifflin, 1962)




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