Review: At Home in the World: California Women and the Postwar Environmental Movement, by Kathleen A. Cairns

Abstract

Kathleen Cairns’s At Home in the World: California Women and the Postwar Environmental Movement is a good book that adds new names to the long list of engaged citizens trying to right environmental wrongs in the mid-twentieth century United States. The book’s intention is to highlight the political activism of a handful of white, middle-class and elite women working to preserve California’s unique ecosystems.The book begins with the 1950s activism of several prominent women who sought to clean Southern California’s air. The book then turns northward to San Francisco and Sylvia McLaughlin’s campaign to save the San Francisco Bay. The next two chapters similarly focus on activists who anchor the history of efforts to save two other ecosystems, the Nipomo Dunes and the Santa Monica Mountains, respectively. In each chapter, Cairns deftly illustrates the ways in which these women “knew how to play the game” of formal politics and how they mobilized their socioeconomic connections to powerful men to achieve their aims. There are interesting details about the strategies the women utilized (from knocking on doors to letter-writing campaigns to attending county planning meetings). The “feminine warriors” that Cairns describes were not overly radical or creative in their efforts, but they were mostly effective at achieving changes that would have long-term benefits on California’s ecosystems (both marine and land).Cairns doesn’t do much to connect the mid-twentieth century activism (strategies and even causes) to that of the Progressive Era female reformers, and that’s curious as these California warriors borrowed much from their foremothers in the songbird conservation and the National Park advocacy campaigns of a half century before. The book is highly accessible in terms of style and vocabulary and thus could be widely assigned to learners from high school through undergraduate college level in classes about environmentalism and even second-wave feminism. While Cairns admits her subjects are all well-connected women with plenty of access to time and resources, her analysis falls a bit short in places. She seems not to want to discuss the ways in which these women’s classed positions contributed mightily to the pollution and shrinking open space they abhorred. Despite some of the weaknesses of the book, however, the research is sound and the activists that Cairns’s work highlights deserve to be in the historical record and now they are.