‘Political Hermaphrodites’: Gender and Environmental Reform in Progressive America

Abstract

In the decades around 1900, middle-class women were indispensable in every environmental cause in the United States, and they often justified their activism as an extension of traditionally feminine responsibilities. The prominence of women as advocates of environmental reform posed a challenge for men who sought to stop pollution, conserve natural resources, and preserve wild places and creatures. How could they make their case without losing their masculine authority? Men responded to that challenge in several ways, and their responses shaped both the rhetoric and institutional structure of environmental reform for much of the twentieth century.