Class, gender, and coal smoke: Gender ideology and environmental injustice in Pittsburgh, 1868-1914

Abstract

Gender, class, and race are standard analytical categories that structure much of contemporary social and cultural history. Environmental historians have employed these categories to trace differential impacts of pollution across social divisions in studies concerned with 'environmental justice.' With class and race, it is easy to see disproportionate impacts-pollution burdens are distributed along spatial lines, and residential segregation has, in varying degrees, historically characterized American cities. The relevance of gender to environmental justice is less clear. How then do we talk about environmental justice and gender? Did gender differences influence concern about environmental justice with respect to race or class? Can we treat women or men as social groups who suffered unjust pollution burdens? How can we use 'gender as a ... category of historical analysis' to treat the articulation of the power relations that gave rise to differential pollution burdens? These three dimensions of gender and environmental justice intersect in the history of air pollution (smoke) in Pittsburgh. Changing conceptions of values, virtues, and the human good determine the meaning that 'environmental justice' can have in differing historical contexts.