Feminism and Toxicity, Essay Example

Taking Patriarchy Hostage: Women’s Activism Against Toxic Exposure and the Implications

Having Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, or Marsha Mason portray a real person in a major motion picture is not too shabby; having this media frenzy bring attention to the issues that concern the protagonists must be the cherry on top. These sultry women and others are the voice of the Ecofeminist movement who use their natural gifts to benefit nature.    Even where there is a regular occurrence of illegal toxic disposal, the government is not likely to become involved until after it becomes clear that they will get a Public Relations thumbs-up out of it. While there is war waging, men typically consider the environmental cause negligible at best. The ecological leaders of tomorrow are women. During the course of this paper, we will examine three specific cases of everyday women taking action on behalf of themselves, their families, their communities, and the natural world itself, as well as examine some principles which seamlessly merge the ecological and feminist movements into what has been dubbed Ecofeminism. Ecofeminism is “a branch of feminism and political ecology designed ‘to understand and resist the interrelated dominations of women and nature’” (as cited by Godfrey 1).

Lois Gibbs

Lois Gibbs was your average person. She was a mother trying to take care of her husband and children in Love Canal, New York, where safety was a lesser concern. This particular area was built for promise: Love had begun building a canal to reach from the town to Niagara Falls and provide inexpensive power. When the depression began, the big trench was abandoned and auctioned off to Hooker Chemical Company (Gibbs 1).

In 1953 this same land was sold (with a perfunctory warning attached) to the town’s Board of Education for the purposes of building an elementary school. In 1955 four hundred young children were learning about America atop one of the skeletons in its closet- chemical waste. Lois Gibbs was only twenty-one when her family settled in a house not far from the dumping ground, which allegedly hosted some of the chemical afterbirth of the Manhattan Project (Gibbs 1).  For some couples, settling in Love Canal meant that they would not be able to have kids at all. Many citizens throughout the community began to suffer from hyperactivity, urinary tract disorders, miscarriages, still births, crib deaths. Gibbs’ own son suffered from epilepsy and respiratory complications after he attended the school (“Lois Marie Gibbs” 1).

The government wouldn’t send money; the superintendent of the school wouldn’t transfer students; the locals wouldn’t have the option of selling their houses since word of the quandary had spread (“Lois Marie Gibbs” 1). the purchase the 239 houses nearest to the center, evacuation of the inhabitants in that vicinity, and fencing off the area as a biohazard (Gibbs 2).

However, the 239 houses were not the only ones adversely affected by the extent of the chemical pollution, and the entire community was stranded in the death-trap town. When the government continued to stall, they were infuriated by the state’s public assertions that the ill health was only present within the fenced-off area. After hope seemed to dwindle to none, a group of townspeople- led by Gibbs- took two Environmental Protection Agency officers hostage. Poetically enough, they had holed up in the offices of the Homeowners’ Association. (“Lois Marie Gibbs” 1). On Mother’s Day, the residents marched up to the state capitol hoisting tiny coffins (Gibbs 1).

Yet even after these measures and the presentation of credible evidence of the continuing health effects upon the rest of Love Canal, the state denied its obligation to further action, which they claimed was based upon “housewife data”. It was an election year in 1980, so when Gibbs very publicly denounced the federal government’s inaction during her appearance on a television show, Jimmy Carter hastily mandated that the federal government offer to purchase the homes of the left-behind residents (Gibbs 2).

Lois Gibbs had already undergone perdurable change. She was no longer a housewife; she was a chemical activist. She founded the Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ) in response to hundreds of letters requesting her help in towns facing similar dilemmas. Both Lois Gibbs and Love Canal left an indelible mark on the public consciousness. However, even the infamy of the Love Canal pollution did not prevent the federal government from declaring the houses in the outlying areas as “habitable” in 1988. The houses are still unsafe (Gibbs 4).

Erin Brockovich

From a simple vial of blood included in the files of a pro bono case sprang one of the most prominent examples of taking action on behalf of a community victimized by toxic chemical pollution. While the adage “Anything worth doing is worth doing right” comes to mind, this remarkable woman’s journey to provide for a town of strangers drew strength from her father’s words about persistence (Bio 1). Some would call it stubborn, but her refusal to relinquish her persistence set her on a revelatory and heroic journey.

Erin Brockovich was not the most likely heroine. She was a former beauty queen and divorced single mother of two children who received only a high school diploma. Before long, his constant desire to move took a toll on the family, and she divorced her husband and began working at a stock-broking company. Against all clichéd adages of mixing business and pleasure, Erin from married her then-boss after a short courtship. During a particularly rough period in her second marriage, she tried to keep her husband’s interest and salvage her marriage by getting breast implants. When that did not work, she became anorexic. When that marriage, too, began to fail, Erin found out that she was once again pregnant. Shortly after divorcing her second husband, Erin was struggling, pregnant, and injured in a car accident (Bio 1-2). Upon these regrettable events was built the character of an unstoppable woman- Erin Brockovich. Roth (2004) said of Erin: “her suffering legitimates her public voice and activism… allows her to challenge discriminatory and dangerous patriarchal forces” (4). In Lois Gibbs’ struggle, “the man” was comprised of the local education system and the state and federal government, whereas, in Erin Brockovich’s struggle to aid the citizens of Hinkley, California, was with the Pacific Gas & Electric Corporation (Bio 2).

In what might be considered a banner statement for the Ecofeminist movement, the character of Erin repeatedly told the world, “I just want to be a good mom, a nice person, a decent citizen” (Roth 4). Admittedly, a good portion of the efficacy of her investigation of the improper waste disposal at Pacific Gas & Electric Corporation (PGEC) was due to her considerable sex appeal, but the advantages that she utilized so successfully in the pursuit of truth had also kept her from achieving her full potential before: her marriages, her children, her financial and working-class status, her voluptuous figure, and her vivacity (Bio 2). Joseph Campbell laid out extensive guidelines for following the “heroic cycle”. Erin Brockovich’s journey fulfills every step along the way with one very crucial difference: she is a real hero- or heroine rather.

Karen Silkwood

It is amazing how something as dire as plutonium contamination can define a person. Silkwood’s first meal- after she was exposed to plutonium at the Kerr- McGee plant in which she worked- was a bologna and cheese sandwich, which showed unheard-of levels of contamination. At work she was repeatedly given tests during the first few days and met with a union representative to negotiate for the financial terms for her care. One week and one day after her exposure to the plutonium, she was walking to a meeting with a New York Times reporter when her car was run off the road (Annas 1). Silkwood had intended to hand over to the reporter the evidence of Kerr-McGee’s active record doctoring and inexplicable misplacing of enough plutonium to make three atomic bombs, but she was killed on her way to meet him. She inexplicably crashed into a culvert, and the evidence disappeared. What is more, informal allegations credited her untimely death to the work of the local Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU) on behalf of their long-time allies, Kerr-McGee (Rathke 1-3). These allegations showed how important these allegations were to the victim and her family, the defendants, and the public.

Karen Silkwood’s father, Bill Silkwood, continued to pursue her financial settlement on behalf of her three children. The suit included the contamination’s damage to her personal goods and to Karen herself and also included a ten million dollar punitive sum. This sum was later changed to seventy million dollars. The court informed the jury that punitive damages are “allowed as a punishment to the offender for the general benefit of society, both as a restraint upon the transgressor and as a warning and example to deter the commission of like offenses in the future” (Annas 2). California had no authority over biohazardous and/or nuclear safety at that time, so such large punitive damages were the only such social censure which was supported by the state laws (1).

After the Silkwood plaintiffs won, Kerr-McGee appealed the decision. The appeals court ruled in favor of Kerr-McGee and further supported the company’s claim that Karen Silkwood would only have been entitled to Worker’s Compensation on the grounds that such large awards were simply a ploy to supersede the laws against the dictation of safety in nuclear plants (Arras 2). They would not take into account Silkwood’s discovery of the Kerr-McGee’s doctored records (Baltakis 1). The US Government sided with the company and filed amicus curiae “friend of court” paperwork, presumably because they had delegated such monitoring to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which was later proven to have prior knowledge of the large quantities of missing plutonium and which further chose not to take any action whatsoever (Arras 2; Baltakis 2). The final decision was to be made by the Supreme Court, and they were split almost evenly- but ultimately ruled in favor of Kerr-McGee (Arras 2).

In such a dramatic case, even the supreme judicial body in the land would not go unchallenged. Several dissenting argued that a) the jury consideration overrules federal safety standards and b) that in such a complicated legal and ethical case, the trial should have been tried by a jury of experts (Arras 2). In the end, Silkwood’s punitive damages were awarded to her family (Baltakis 2). This close call for the deep corporate pockets was the first clear indication of the downward trend of the Supreme Court’s favoritism of nuclear plants (Arras 3). The case has also called into question the use of juries of lay people in highly-specialized legal cases. Nonetheless, the legacy of the Silkwood case has been the personal right of each person to question what appears to them to be unjust.

Seadrift, Texas, was a little town where the two major sources of income were shrimp-fishing and working at one of several local chemical plants. When dolphin and fish cadavers were hauled up in mass numbers, citizens began to worry- but were unaware that the county was among the most toxic in America. Formosa Plastics was busy planning their expansion in the area, while one citizen, Diane Wilson, was organizing to the formation of Unreasonable Women (UNrW), an Ecofeminist group which soon gained an international following (Godfrey 1-3).

There are an abundance of examples of everyday women taking action against the abuse of a plant’s chemical, nuclear, and/or biohazardous resources and disposal and safety considerations. However, these three have spear-headed the movement, and so we will concentrate our attention upon the analyses of these specific cases.

There are several differences among the cases and the women themselves. Gibbs was an insider and a survivor, and Brockovich was not. However, Brockovich’s case involved the leakage of Chromium 6, which caused very, very severe adverse health effects, such as cancer and death. Gibbs’ were governmental and educational establishments; Brockovich’s antagonists were corporate representatives; Silkwood’s family brought the lawsuit on her behalf after suspicions of murder fell on the defendants.

Four Laws of Ecology

Barry Commoner’s Four Laws of Ecology consisted of four simple, universal concepts: Everything is connected to everything else; Everything must go somewhere; Nature knows best; and There is no such thing as a free lunch (Commoner 1971). (Some have also added that everything has limits.)

It was once written that we should “ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”. Poeticism aside, some theorists have gone one step further and proposed that the beating of a butterfly’s wings could start a chain reaction which would eventually produce a tsunami on the other side of the world. “Everything is connected to everything else” is an old premise which reaches many different fields of study.

To find allegiance, one only has to follow the money. Commoner’s second law of ecology, “Everything must go somewhere”, is a concept which applies not only to ecology but to the world at large. Ecologically speaking, though, the government, the Army, and the corporations knew that there would be severe consequences to their actions and inaction. The people near their plants were not white-collar. They were “working-class, low income… and communities of color” (Krauss 247). In the Silkwood case, the local inhabitants earned an average of ten to twenty-five thousand dollars per year (Arras 3). Granted, it was the seventies, but they typically had no lawyer on retainer, no savings, and no way out.

Ecofeminism seeks to fight essentialist notions that ‘‘biology is destiny’’; Commoner perpetuated this patriarchal ecological belief by writing that “nature knows best” (Godfrey 2; Commoner). Patriarchal, mainstream perspectives have interpreted the feminists’ assertion of the woman-nature construct as ‘‘their reproductive biology and culturally defined roles as nurturers” (as cited by Godfrey 5). This is the primary point of dissension for many Ecofeminists, because it emphasizes a perspective which supports the suppression of women and nature and also the liberal use of warfare as an intended solution to diplomatic crises. Brockovich answered many unspoken turn-of-the-century questions about a mother’s place at home and/or work, where a corporation’s allegiances lie, and common symptoms of toxicological poisoning.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. As was suggested in “Man of the Year”, power comes with a price: loyalty to others’ agenda. The “I’ll scratch your back; you scratch mine” rationale applies at the highest and lowest levels of society. As an organization becomes more powerful, their loyalties are promised. The company owes their investors; the investors owe their debts; the debtors owe the government; the government owes a lot of people. With the examination of Commoner’s fourth law of ecology comes an understanding of the relationship which binds everything, as illustrated by Commoner’s first law.

Five Feminist Ways of Knowing

The Five ways of knowing are comprised of cultural gender asymmetry, the acknowledgement of interrelation of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender, awareness, the relationship between the subject and conductor of research, and change on multiple levels (Richardson 2004).

The cultural gender asymmetry is obvious in the action taken by each of the three women and the way in which their methods would be received. Gibbs’ utilization of the strong, traditional ethos appeal of women successfully navigated the tricky world of stereotypical gender and social roles; she overturned the belief that her suspicions about her son’s health were not paranoid maternal delusions, as the Board of Education had insinuated. Brockovich’s utilization of her attractive appearance and quick wit were a surprising one-two punch.

Although the interrelation of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender are not specifically relevant to ecology, they are a fundamental component of Ecofeminism. Contrary to common knowledge, feminism has reiterated its intent to not “be taken as involving a commitment to gender as the primary axis of oppression, in any sense of ‘primary,’ or positing that gender is a theoretical variable separable from other axes of oppression and susceptible to a unique analysis” (as cited by Grasswick 1). In other words, the feminist concern for well-being extends beyond their own personal desires to reach a global desire to aid in bringing an end to oppression wherever it is found.

Certainly the examples of these three women have brought much awareness to the problems of toxicity that are often assumed to happen in some far-off place. It happens anywhere and everywhere. Gibbs’ case occurred in New York; Brockovich’s case occurred in California; Silkwood’s case occurred in California; Wilson’s case occurred in Texas. Action was taken in each of these cases after one woman called for community involvement to put pressure on the culpable person(s) and initiate change.

In particular, on the subject of the relationship between the people doing the research and the people being researched, Gibbs and Brockovich are on a different plane on this aspect than Silkwood. For Lois Gibbs, the researchers were written off as providing “housewife data” that was surmised to be too ignorant and stilted to be considered reliable. The government had all of the facts and chose to take only the minimalist course of action to avoid a scandal (Gibbs 2). The throwaway, pro bono Brockovich case included a subtle acknowledgement of the problem, but no indication of what exactly the nature and extent of the problem was. The facts were known to the corrupt corporation, who chose to conceal them in an effort to prevent lawsuits. The educational system chose a blind deniability of the unusually high number of ill children (Gibbs 1).

The researcher/ researched aspect is different in the case of Silkwood, because her effects were in the early stages when her claim was made and also because they were considered posthumously on behalf of her family. The researched, Karen Silkwood, was deceased, and several key pieces of evidence in her case against the apprehensible policies of Kerr-McGee went mysteriously missing when she was killed in an automotive accident.

Nonetheless, in all three cases, change was affected. The woman involved in the case was changed, as was her community, state, federal, and international influence and perception. Both Gibbs and Brockovich went on to establish organizations which dealt with various aspects of toxic pollution. Although Silkwood herself has passed away, the discrepancies between federal and state regulations of nuclear plants was brought to light by her family and continues to inspire debate over the rights of the federal government and the selection of a jury in highly-specialized and scientific cases.

Like the fight for equal treatment for women, the fight on behalf of nature cannot be successful if it is submissive. Just as confrontational tactics were essential to the furthering of the women’s rights (as presented in the case studies of Gibbs, Brockovich, Silkwood, and Wilson), so have they been for the furthering of Mother Nature’s rights and the combination of these two powerful entities has culminated in what has been dubbed Ecofeminism. The maternal image of the Earth goddess archetype is an ancient and recurrent theme which has taken many forms, and thus it is easy to make the leap from ecological research to feminism. The time for suppression is over when everyone and everything has a voice. Most fear change; Ecofeminism embraces it as promise.

Works Cited

“Erin Brockovich Biography.” Bio.. N.p., 2008. Web. 18 Jul 2010.<http://www.thebiographychannel.co.uk/biographies/erin-brockovich.html>.

“Lois Marie Gibbs.” Environmental Encyclopedia. Online. Gale, 2009. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2010. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC

Annas, George J. “The Case of Karen Silkwood.” American Journal of Public Health 74.5  (1984): 516. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. Web. 18 July 2010.

Baltakis, Anthony. “The Killing of Karen Silkwood: The Story Behind the Kerr-McGee Plutonium Case, Second Edition (Book).” Journal of Labor Research 25.1 (2004): 184-186. Business Source Complete. EBSCO. Web. 19 July 2010.

Barry Commoner. The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and Technology. New York: Knopf, 1971. Print.

Gibbs, Lois. “Love Canal: The Start of a Movement.” Boston Univeristy School of Public Health, 2008. Web. 18 Jul 2010. <http://www.bu.edu/lovecanal/canal/index.html>.

Godfrey, Phoebe. “Diane Wilson vs. Union Carbide: Ecofeminism and the Elitist Charge of “Essentialism”.” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 16.4 (2005): 37-56. Environment      Complete. EBSCO. Web. 19 July 2010.

Grasswick, Heidi E. “From Feminist Thinking to Ecological Thinking: Determining the Bounds of Community.” Hypatia 23.1 (2008): 150-160. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 17 July 2010.

Krauss, Celene. “Women and Toxic Waste Protests: Race, Class and Gender as Resources  of Resistance.” Qualitative Sociology 16.3 (1993): 247. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 16 July 2010.

Richardson, Laurel, Verta A. Taylor, and Nancy Whittier. Feminist Frontiers. 4th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004. Print.

Roth, Elaine. “I just want to be a decent citizen.” Feminist Media Studies 4.1 (2004): 51-66. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 16 July 2010.