Mothers of Invention: Women in the Postwar Battle for Air Pollution Control and the
Emergence of Citizen Activism in Environmental Policy, 1945-1970
---Dr. Scott H. Dewey
During the past three decades, the environmental movement has come under sharp attack from critics on both ends of the political spectrum. Both conservatives and radicals have charged the environmentalists with being too affluent, too elitist in their attitudes, and too insensitive to the concerns of working people and ethnic or racial minority communities.
Conservatives charge environmentalists with being too radical and extremist, while radicals blast them for being too moderate on certain environmental issues and general matters of politics, economics, and social policy. Radicals, in particular, have chastized major environmental organizations and the movement in general for being too white, too middleclass, and too male in membership, attitudes, and priorities. Such critics further charge that these alleged transgressions against race, class, and gender date back to the earliest origins of the environmental movement.
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This latter claim is typically drawn from existing histories of established conservation organizations that have existed more than half a century, which were frequently concerned with wilderness preservation for recreational purposes and often grew out of hiking, sport hunting, or fishing clubs, such as the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation.
Although the Sierra Club included female members from early on, such early groups did often tend to reflect more the interests of middle-class outdoorsmen. Since many view these major, long-lasting organizations as synonymous with the environmental movement, the movement is correspondingly assumed to have long been generally masculine in orientation and prone to exclude or overlook women.
However, it is wrong to presume that the environmental movement and the major conservation groups are now or ever were wholly identical. While wilderness conservation was one highly important root of what would come to be known by the late 1960s as the environmental movement, it was not the only significant one by any means. If anything, the dominant root at the particular time when the modern environmental movement suddenly

took form around 1970 was the one concerned with environmental pollution, rather than more traditional wilderness preservation, leading some observers at the time to draw a distinction between conservation, associated with groups such as the Sierra Club, and environmentalism, a movement to end pollution. It is harder to trace the history of the antipollutionist wing of environmentalism, since before 1970 there was no overarching, nationwide pollution-control movement, but only an endless number of larger or smaller local anti-pollution crusades, many of which left little evidence of their existence; nevertheless, this fragmented early anti-pollution campaign was of crucial significance for the shaping of the environmental movement that followed.
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From early on, women were strongly represented, at times nearly dominant, in antipollution circles, particularly regarding the sort of pollution that would become one of the two dominant concerns of 1970-vintage environmentalists, air pollution. Women were already active on the issue around the last turn of the century, as Robert Dale Grinder pointed out thirty years ago and other scholars such as Maureen Flanagan and Harold L. Platt have rediscovered more recently. Women also remained active on the issue during the crucial period between the end of World War II and 1970, when the modern environmental movement was coalescing. Women activists of the postwar period tended to share many attributes with their earlier antecedents. They remained, for the most part, pre-feminist in their self-conception. Most were affluent clubwomen unwilling to challenge traditional gender roles who were content to be known in the “polite” form—by their husband’s name— as “Mrs. John Q. Public.” Their environmental activism was still grounded in the traditional, turn-of-thecentury ethic of “civic motherhood” or “municipal housekeeping,” which expanded women’s traditional duty to safeguard health and beauty within the home to include the wider neighborhood and community. Generally lacking scientific or technical expertise, these female reformers were often left urging reluctant male civic authorities, corporate officials, and engineers to do something about problems such as air, water, and noise pollution, rather than being able to serve up solutions of their own.
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Nevertheless, for all their pre-feminist self-understanding and acceptance of much of the established order, these early postwar crusaders against air pollution were tough and persistent, and despite all the opposition they faced, they made a significant difference regarding a worrisome issue. If they had difficulty providing solutions for the problem, they did manage to bring the matter forcefully to the attention of authorities and the general public. Although initially lacking expertise, the women mobilized and educated themselves about air pollution to become frequently among the most knowledgable, forceful, even radical champions of air pollution control in their communities. Although generally lacking careers or overt feminist ideology, these crusaders were determined to have a significant non-profit role, serving as the eyes and ears of their communities as well as the guardians of their own families in battling threats to public health and cleanliness through their individual and group efforts. Although these amateur reformers and community advocates frequently collided with official intransigence or delay and obfuscation from private interests and scientific and technical professionals who did not share their sense of urgency, in this, the early crusaders only faced the same difficulties encountered by later, more sophisticated environmental advocates. Moreover, while most female anti-air pollution activists may have been middle-class clubwomen enjoying relatively high levels of education and leisure, working-class women also joined in the effort to safeguard their communities.
In tracing the actions and rhetoric of these women, this paper will first focus on three significant examples -- Los Angeles County, New York City, and the state of Florida -- in which women clearly helped to lead the local fight against air pollution. These case studies will provide a foundation for an overview of the nationwide activities of these “mothers of invention” who saw the necessity of air pollution control and helped to invent the national anti-pollution movement and, in turn, modern environmentalism.
Los Angeles was, of course, the scene of the most famous postwar battle against air pollution after the initial appearance of eye-stinging photochemical haze in the early 1940s.
As the problem steadily grew worse over Los Angeles and neighboring foothill communities

to the north and east through 1955, horrified citizens started groups to protest the situation.
Pasadena was an early center of anti-smog agitation, and the first major anti-smog group there, the Citizens’ Fumes Committee, was led by a woman, Mrs. Fanchon Gary, who from
May 1945 onward wrote persistently to public officials and spoke before civic groups warning of the decline of the major local tourist industry if news continued to spread about
“the present pall, as inexcusable and as unpleasant as that of any Eastern Industrial City.”
Such arguments ultimately helped persuade the real-estate and tourism- conscious
Pasadena Chamber of Commerce to break ranks with the more industry-oriented LA
Chamber and advocate immediate strict pollution control measures. Gary’s group and other shorter-lived antismog organizations periodically marched on Pasadena’s city hall to demand relief during 1946.
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One key factor for a successful air pollution control campaign in any city was the active support of the local press, and the Los Angeles Times in particular made banishing smog a pet issue during late 1946 and 1947 after Dorothy Chandler, wife of Times publisher
Norman Chandler, was appalled by the vile atmosphere one day while driving back into the
LA Basin and thereafter sternly informed her husband, “Something has to be done.” The resulting public education campaign helped to rally citizen smog fighters throughout the region to put pressure on their elected officials, ultimately culminating in the passage of a
California state law authorizing the creation of a county-wide Air Pollution Control District, the APCD, in 1947.
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In spite of this achievement, and the significant efforts of the APCD, the local pollution problem only continued to grow worse, becoming a major -- sometimes dominant -- local political issue during the early 1950s. Citizens agitated for pollution control in growing numbers, and women continued to be prominent among them, as various local anti-smog groups arose and faded sporadically. For instance, during the terrible smog siege of
October, 1954, a group of Pasadena housewives calling themselves the “Smog-A-Tears” (in a spoof on Walt Disney’s Mouseketeers) paraded through downtown Pasadena wearing gas

masks and carrying signs. Such public ire ultimately drove the head of the APCD from office.
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The “Smog-a-Tears” aside, most of the women who had leading roles in the early fight against smog were relatively affluent, influential, club-woman types like Dorothy
Chandler and Mrs. Gary. This would remain true of the next great phase of the LA smog wars -- the fight against vehicular emissions. The next prominent anti-smog group would be an allwomen’s organization that long cooperated with the APCD in putting pressure on the auto makers who were beyond the reach of local authorities. This group was Stamp Out
Smog (SOS), founded in 1958 by Margaret Levee, a housewife from the posh neighborhood of Beverly Hills, along with nine other similarly affluent women, such as Mrs. Alfred
Bloomingdale, Mrs. John Forsythe, and Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. Levee and her group worked to contact and mobilize other organizations throughout the State of California, includin g garden clubs, home owners’ groups, local chambers of commerce, labor unions, public health associations, and religious congregations, to fight against air pollution. Levee quickly determined that success in swaying legislators went to those who could claim mastery of the facts and technical expertise, and consequently, she and her group set to learning the key data regarding automotive air pollution to offer interested lawmakers alternative information to that from auto industry lobbyists. The group helped shape the new
California Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board created in 1960, and Levee was one of the first members appointed, while the women of SOS went on to propose hundreds of other pieces of state and local legislation, some of these successful, and took nearly every conceivable opportunity to testify on the issue both in Los Angeles and Sacramento. Stamp
Out Smog, an organization with tough, committed leadership, was an unusually successful and persistent one, lasting from 1958 into the 1970s an d a new phase in citizens’ relations with air pollution and control authorities. By the late 1960s, the group claimed to be federated with more than five hundred other organizations including hundreds of thousands of members throughout the state endorsing its program.
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Along with such socially prominent women, however, more regular sorts of women also participated in the fight against smog in various ways, from participating in local groups to writing their elected officials. For instance, in early 1967, reflecting the more radical, antiestablishment spirit then taking root in the public mind regarding the environment and other issues, Mary Valleley fumed to her county supervisor, “Is Big Business or Industry that contribute to this poison gas so powerful that it is above our laws?” Later still, around
October, 1969, after the Nixon administration had generously settled an antitrust suit over
US auto makers’ alleged conspiracy to obstruct and delay the introduction of auto exhaust control devices, another local housewife, Martha R. Hemmer, expressed the sentiments of many Angelenos when she angrily wrote, “In my opinion the President’s decision in the
Smog case is the biggest sell-out since Pontius Pilate did his handwashing bit.” Around the same time, Virg inia L. Broach of Riverside vowed to make environmental pollution “the sole factor on which I will vote for any given candidate in the future”; she further called for stricter controls on vehicular and industrial emissions “even to the detriment of the economy.”
Among the newer, more radical local environmental groups that emerged around this time was Women for Clean Air. During the same period, Stamp Out Smog, still “the largest, most active, and most respected citizens’ group,” was also re-energized and somewhat radicalized, considering a consumer boycott of new automobiles to pressure Detroit and blasting the APCD for backsliding on control of local industrial emissions.
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Women, and women’s organizations, also took a key role in agitating for air pollution control in New York City during the early postwar period. After more minor prewar activism on the issue, the New York City Federation of Women’s Clubs and the Outdoor Cleanliness
Association were among the first civic groups to join the New York Times in pushing for the creation of an anti-smoke league of civic organizations in January, 1947. That March, Mrs.
John Weinstein and Dorothy Wagstaff, respective presidents of the two groups, were among the ten civic leaders on the executive committee of a civic alliance to combat smoke, and their organizations planned lectures and rallies for clean air during the next few years. As

with Stamp Out Smog in California, the New York clubwomen taking an interest in the air pollution issue included some of the wealthiest and most socially prominent women in the whole city: Mrs. Edna Woolman Chase, Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, Mrs. William K.
Vanderbilt, Mrs. William Fellowes Morgan, and Mrs. Herbert H. Lehman, among others. Also as with Los Angeles, Iphigenia Ochs Sulzberger, wife of the publisher of the New York
Times, was active in the local smoke control movement, helping to guarantee the leading newspaper’s unflagging interest. The major women’s groups were at the forefront of calls for the creation and reform of New York’s first smoke control agency, the Bureau of Smoke
Control, or BSC, during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
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Not only prominent social register types agitated against smoke, though. Other women wrote angry letters to the city’s newspapers, such as various anonymous housewifes who worried over respiratory effects and declared local smoke and soot “a menace to all of us.” Women also complained to their elected representatives. When
Councilman Joseph Sharkey, the city’s leading legislator for smoke control, initially submitted a bill to create a new smoke control agency in October, 1947, he explained,
“For months I have received many complaints. Letters come in continually. Mothers buttonhole me on the street and say smoke in the air makes it risky for them to take their babies out in go-carts. Housewives complain of damage done to wash on the line.
Wherever I go to speak ... people plead with me to do something now that the war is over.” 10
Other women participated in other ways. For instance, they were prominent in the
Parent-Teacher Associations and neighborhood associations that strongly backed smoke control in the face of stubborn opposition from business and industry in October, 1948. A more dramatic incident illustrating the frustration and anger of ordinary housewives and mothers happened at a public meeting on proposed new smoke control rules and regulations in August, 1950. While representatives of business and industrial interests were lengthily complaining about how the proposed rules would hurt them economically, two
Yorkville housewives, Mrs. Daniel Dolan and Mrs. Robert Wood of the Parent-Teacher

Association of Public School 158, mounted the rostrum, said their neighborhood had suffered long enough from the smoke nuisance, and demanded action. Complaining bitterly about the situation, they graphically pulled soot-stained clothes out of a brown shopping bag to show what happened to fresh laundry hung out to dry, winning a burst of applause from the audience.
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During this early period, New York ’s single most aggressive, visible citizen smoke fighter was a woman, the fiery Elizabeth Robinson, a Queens housewife and clubwoman who in late 1950 became head of the new Committee for Smoke Control [CSC], for a time the dominant local group on the issue. She promptly sent a letter to the mayor demanding to know why “not a single court summons [had] been issued to smoke violators” since the city’s new smoke ordinance was passed in early 1949. She also warned that her organization would “serve as a public watchdog on all phases of air pollution.” Later in 1951, challenging official claims of progress, Robinson polled New York City women regarding air pollution, finding general agreement that it was as bad as ever or getting worse. She further challenged ind ustries’ complaints regarding the costs of cleanup, arguing that local housewives could save five million dollars a year just on window and floor coverings if the smoke were controlled. She resoundingly rejected local authorities’ policy of cooperation and persuasion toward industrial polluters, proclaiming, “[O]ne stiff fine will stop more smoke and soot than 1,000 paragraphs in any document of rules and regulations” and urging fellow citizens to monitor and report violations. Under her leadership, the CSC released 10,000 pamphlets blasting the BSC for their “education and cooperation” approach with polluters and urging strict enforcement and penalties; New Yorkers received these with enthusiasm.
Robinson spoke to women’s groups throughout the New York area and claimed to have the solid support of “Women’s clubs, individuals and parent-teacher associations.” As she explained, air pollution “hits home in the two most vulnerable places for a housewife, her children and her pocketbook. ... Women are thinking of the health of their children, and where that is at stake, a woman will fight as primitively as any tiger in the jungle.” Ultimately,

in her drive for stricter enforcement, Robinson got into a full-scale war with hesitant local control authorities, ultimately suing and winning the right to review BSC records to check the bureau’s efficiency and responsiveness.
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Yet as awareness of the scientific complexity of air pollution grew, Elizabeth
Robinson and other early New York women smoke-fighters were pushed aside by monochromatically male scientific and technical experts. For example, in early 1952, New
York authorities began considering changes and clarifications in their vague existing legal definition of “smoke.” Robinson suspected this was part of a plot by business interests to gut smoke control and demanded disclosure of the names of those proposing new definitions.
Later, at a scientific panel meeting on the issue, Robinson angrily fumed, “We know what smoke is ... It’s that nasty, horrible, stinking, unhealthy stuff that comes out of chimneys and smokestacks. And you fellows better help shut it off.” She charged, with some justification, that endless scientific discussion about the nature of air pollution was only a delaying tactic, concluding, “[W]e are fed up with this internal ‘discussing’ of the problem. ... We women want the discharge of smoke into the atmosphere stopped. We don’t care how, so long as it’s done.” The male scientists “squirmed or smiled weakly,” then rejected Robinson’s fundamentalist approach to the air pollution issue, questioning the evidence of health impacts “in any but the most exceptional circumstances,” noting that it would be impossible to eliminate smoke entirely, and observing that “a certain amount” was “part of the price of an urbanized, industrialized society.” One panel member protested that “hysteria” like
Robinson’s only hindered, not helped, the cause of air pollution control. This word choice, with its historically demeaning gender connotation, was not entirely coincidental as the professional male experts dismissed the amateur female activist.
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Thereafter, Robinson, like most other early activists in New York City, faded from view. Ironically, for all their professional pretension, the new technocrats of the city’s
Department of Air Pollution Control made little progress on the issue through the early
1960s. Excepting hard-hit Staten Island, where the leading air pollution fighter was also a

woman, Anne-Marie Crookall, who called persistently for federal intervention to end the plague of New Jersey industrial emissions, 14 major citizen activism did not revive in the area until Hazel Henderson, like Robinson an immigrant from England and a committed amateur, founded the Citizens for Clean Air in the mid-1960s and rekindled public awareness and concern through public education and media savvy.
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During the postwar years up to 1970, air pollution was often wrongly presumed to be strictly a big-city problem. However, between 1948 and 1970, emissions from the phosphate industry in rural central Florida, which processed raw minerals into chemical fertilizer and released large amounts of contaminants into the air, caused serious damage to surrounding cattle ranchers and citrus farmers and became one of the most notorious air pollution problems in the nation.
16 Also in this case, perhaps the leading citizen activist confronting the pollution was a woman, Harriet N. Lightfoot, wife of a retired engineer and the
“Chairman” of both the Community Improvement and Air Pollution Committees of the
Woman’s Club and the Division of Health of the Chamber of Commerce of Lakeland,
Florida. During 1963 and 1964, Lightfoot joined angry local livestock and citrus growers in complaining to state authorities about the local situation and demanding action. When state officials proved unwilling to confront the issue, Lightfoot, writing on behalf of the present and future mothers of the nation, persistently sought federal intervention. This was still a relatively radical position at a time when states’ rights attitudes remained stronger than today, though the federal government long remained reluctant to antagonize the states or their industries by going over their heads to regulate pollution. Later in the 1960s, Lightfoot launched a major petition drive against the phosphate industry emissions and served as a public advocate for hard-hit, poorer neighbors.
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Florida had other air pollution problems beyond the phosphate industry. An even larger industry in the state, second only to tourism, was the paper pulp industry. By 1959,
Florida was the largest woodpulp producer in the nation, with pulp plants scattered

throughout the northern peninsular and panhandle counties, belching out foul, largely unregulated air and water pollution.
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Paper plants, along with power generating stations, shipbuilding, chemical processing, and other industries, had brought serious air pollution to Jacksonville, then still
Florida’s second largest metropolitan area. It was in Jacksonville where sulfuric acid emissions had first dramatically eaten away the nylon stockings of women on their way to work in early 1949, not long after the notorious, lethal air pollution disaster of Donora,
Pennsylvania. It was also in Jacksonville where one of the most striking anti-pollution crusades of the postwar years would emerge.
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As in various other places, the leading postwar activist against air pollution in
Jacksonville was a woman, Ann C. Belcher. Unlike most of her counterparts in other cities and towns, though, Belcher was not an affluent clubwoman. Rather, she came from a poor, working-class community -- Jacksonville’s Talleyrand district -- and was barely literate.
Nevertheless, Belcher took the lead in mobilizing her working-class neighborhood to fight against the severe emissions from ne arby industrial plants and became known as the “the crusading mother from Talleyrand.” On October 8, 1963, Belcher took a petition signed by a thousand neighbors to the City Council to demand immediate action against air pollution.
She also led a delegation of 100 women from the Talleyrand area to complain to the City
Council in person about the way in which the “air in their neighborhood destroyed their homes, their cars, their clothing, and their health.” Belcher brought a stained sheet and a sickly potted plant as exhibits to demonstrate the effects of air pollution on vegetation and previously clean laundry. She was joined by Ulysses Cook, a spokesman for black residents in the Talleyrand neighborhood, who angrily told how the pollution corroded metal and had caused one of his children to develop chronic respiratory trouble. The appearance of
Belcher and her neighbors at the City Council meeting to demand cleaner air goes against the common assumption that environmentalism is and always was strictly a white, middle-

class professional pastime. Still more striking is the implication of a biracial, working-class neighborhood coalition against air pollution in the still-segregated South.
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When this campaign brought sympathetic rhetoric but little significant action from local officials, Jacksonville citizens attempted to go over their heads to higher authorities.
On December 5, 1963, despite the fact that writing was clearly a struggle for her, Belcher wrote an angry letter to Florida Governor Farris Bryant complaining mostly of the property damage from the corrosive air pollution in her neighborhood and the unresponsiveness of the local government. When this brought no results, she sent a follow-up letter to the bestknown pollution fighter in the federal gove rnment, Maine’s Senator Edmund S. Muskie.
However, despite the efforts of Belcher and her neighbors, authorities took little action, and
Jacksonville suffered from further serious air pollution through the 1960s, including yet another episode of nylon stockings dissolving in 1966.
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These examples from California, New York, and Florida illustrate a wider, nationwide pattern of women’s mobilization on the air pollution issue during the postwar years, especially the 1960s. Already at the first National Conference on Air Pollution in late 1958,
Miss Chloe Gifford, President of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, noted air pollution’s serious impacts on health and property and women’s particular concern over the pressing issue. She predicted that sooner or later, “[T]he American woman is bound to make certain that the air her family breathes is clean.” At a later such conference in 1966,
Mrs. B. Brand Konheim, then president of New York’s Citizens for Clean Air, discussed esthetic damage from air pollution and how it demoralized and economically harmed afflicted city centers. To help educate its members, the General Federation promoted study groups on air pollution and printed articles in its magazine, Clubwoman, while other masscirculation women’s magazines similarly sounded the alarm.
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Outside of infrequent national conferences and countrywide magazines, women throughout the nation were active at the local level. For instance, at field hearings of the
U.S. Senate subcommittee on air and water pollution in Denver in 1964, Mrs. Chester W.

Rose of the Colorado Federation of Women’s Clubs served as the primary representative of citizens’ concerns in offering an intelligent, well-prepared statement discussing the deterioration of local air quality and wondering why America’s vast technological prowess was not being used more aggressively on that front. In Chicago, the visiting Senators heard from Mrs. Chauncey D. Harris of the Clean Air Committee of Hyde Park-Kenwood-
Woodlawn, originally founded in 1959 by Laura Fermi, widow of the famous physicist, and six other women from the neighborhood around the University of Chicago. This unusually activist organization had grown to include some two hundred members, mostly housewives, who had translated the local air pollution code into everyday language and had trained as volunteer smoke-spotters to use the Ringelmann Chart to monitor smoke density over 125 city blocks, though they still faced public officials reluctant to confront industry.
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By the later 1960s, as general public concern over environmental issues spread and deepened, women joined other early environmentalists in adopting more radical views on air pollution. One hotbed of such radicalism was the hard-hit city of St. Louis, Missouri. As in so many other place s, the chairman of the local Citizens’ Clean Air Committee was a woman,
Mrs. J. H. Kerstetter. Rejecting the typical, dilatory testimony of industrial representatives that the subject always required further research before action could be taken, Kerstetter reflected the newer, more radical, anti-corporate attitudes [and echoed Mrs. Robinson] when she observed, “We don’t need research by an expert to tell us our air is bad. We can see it, feel it, smell it, and even taste it.” Reflecting a growing understanding of environmental quality as a basic human right, Kerstetter continued, “The cost of clean air must become a cost of doing legitimate business. ... [I]t is the quality of our life in terms of air and water and those things that make life really worth l iving.” Mrs. Richard E. Kuster, Missouri State
Division Director of the American Association of University Women, similarly observed, “If a company pleads that this added cost will put it out of business, we should remember that the death-dealing air is putting a rapidly growing number of breathers out of business every year.” She declared that consumers were ready to pay for cleaner air as a necessity; she

also noted worries that all the efforts of her fellow mothers to raise healthy children might be undone by new poisons in the air and water. With a radical flourish, Kuster emphasized how environmental issues were ultimately more fundamental than other worthy goals, concluding, “We may find world peace, rebuild our cities, stop inflation, give all our children a quality education, but to what avail -- if we have overturned the balance of nature and destroyed the biosphere.” Kerstetter and Kuster were joined in their concerns by various other women’s groups from the Girl Scouts to the local chapter of the Ninety-Nines
International Organization of Women Pilots.
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St. Louis may have been somewhat unusual in its radicalism on air pollution, but other women’s voices chimed in from more out-of-the-way places. During the late 1960s, women in Missoula, Montana formed GASP, or Gals Against Smog and Pollution, to protest against local paper pulp industry emissions. Although the South has never been known as a particular hotbed of radical environmentalism, women in Jacksonville, Arkansas and
Nacogdoches, Texas wrote federal officials to demand prompt action against air pollution, one of them observing impatiently, “[T]he most and the quickest that can be done is too slow and not enough.” 25
By the 1970s, the onset of the feminist era brought a gradual transformation of women’s role in environmental issues along with other aspects of life as more women gained careers and professional status. For example, in Denver in 1970, visiting federal legislators heard testimony from Dr. Ruth Weiner, President of the Colorado Citizens for
Clean Air. Weiner, a professor of chemistry with a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins, discussed at length the details of atmospheric chemistry and control options with professional expertise most of her predecessors had not enjoyed. By so breaking into the formerly mostly masculine realm of the hard sciences while remaining a public advocate rather than a corporate representative, Weiner and others like her moved away from the
“Mrs. John Q. Public” model of female citizen activist that had generally typified earlier years.
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As before, many of the female air pollution activists of the later 1960s, whether professional or not, were affluent and white. However, like Florida’s Ann Belcher, other sorts of women also took action in various ways. The protesters at the 1969 Senate field hearings on air pollution in St. Louis included Martha Blacksher, a schoolteacher and the wife of a white warehouse worker from Madison, Illinois who joined a local labor delegation in requesting stricter emissions controls and greater federal intervention to clean up nearby steel mills. Blacksher recounted the sufferings of her severely asthmatic son, and the helpless feeling of the parents who could not afford to move farther from the industrial smokestacks. Another local woman spoke on behalf of local children and foundry workers with respiratory illnesses in blasting polluters for trying to hide behind states’ rights to avoid cleanup and calling for new federal legislation “with both stiff criminal and civil sanctions” to fight air pollution.
27
Elsewhere, the story was similar. In early 1969, Rose Owen of Philadelphia wrote to
Senator Edmund S. Muskie with an even worse tale of local and state authorities’ nonfeasance, as well as a striking story of local mobilization in a poor neighborhood. She noted that she and her neighbors had been “in and out of court” for six months due to “Coke
Dust, Fumes, & Noise from the Phila. Coke Company” and resulting health impacts on the neighborhood’s children. Owen and her neighbors sought help from state authorities and even picketed the plant, but the company got an injunction against them. The local judge promised that corrective action would be completed by March 1, 1968, and that if not, “he himself would close the plant,” but “the state never lived up to their promises.” As Owen concluded in frustration, “The people are desperate and feel it will take a ... death to make the City Officials wake up to what is going on here, we are living in a Hell. Please help us!” 28
Though evidence can be difficult to find, in some cases, concern about air pollution penetrated beyond the white population as well as beyond the affluent. For instance, in
September of 1966, Emma Kai, wife of a restaurant cook in New York City’s Chinatown, wrote to Senator M uskie after seeing the CBS television broadcast, “Poisoned Air.” Noting

how she had “been concerned about ‘Air Pollution’ for a very long time” and had previously written New York Senator Jacob K. Javits, she begged Muskie to “do something constructive and immediate about ridding N.Y.C. of Air P. We need Quick Action, not something two three years later. Human lives are at stake.” 29
Thus, like the earlier smoke-fighters at the turn of the century, women were active participants in the postwar anti-air pollution crusade that helped to shape the environmental movement in the years before 1970. Working-class women overcame even greater obstacles to mobilization to join their more affluent sisters in this campaign. Working without pay or professional training, t hese “mothers of invention” nonetheless made meaningful careers out of their stubborn fight for public health and against economic and aesthetic damage on behalf of their families and communities. Their determined efforts in the face of heavy odds offer good examples for present-day environmentalists and community activists facing similar situations.

NOTES
1 Regarding the environmental movement’s allegedly excessive maleness, whiteness, middle-classness, or preoccupation with wilderness through history, see, for example,
Marcy Darnovsky, "Stories Less Told: Histories of US Environmentalism," Socialist Review, volume 22, number 4 (October-December 1992), pp. 11-54; Mark Dowie, Losing Ground:
American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1995), pp. 1426 and generally; William Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness; or,
Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the
Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1996), pp. 69-90; William C.
Tucker, Progress and Privilege: America in the Age of Environmentalism (Garden City, New
York: Anchor Press, 1982); Aaron Wildavsky, "Aesthetic Power or the Triumph of the
Sensitive Minority Over the Vulgar Masses: A Political Analysis of the New Economics," in
Roger Revelle and Hans H. Landsberg, eds., America's Changing Environment (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970), pp. 147-160.
2 Regarding the differences perceived at the time between traditional, wilderness-oriented conservation and new, pollution-oriented environmentalism, see Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce
Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), pp.
116-120; Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement,
1962-1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), pp. 14-23; Alan P. Carlin and George E.
Kocher, Environmental Problems: Their Causes, Cures, and Evolution, Using Southern
California Smog as an Example (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, Report Number R-
640-CC/RC, May, 1971), p. 3; John C. Esposito and Larry J. Silverman, Project Directors,
Vanishing Air: The Ralph Nader Study Group Report on Air Pollution (New York: Grossman
Publishers, 1970), p. 299. Critics of environmentalism on both the right and left of the political spectrum who attack various mainstream environmental groups for their allegedly
"elitist" focus on wildlife and wilderness preservation frequently assume that the environmentalism of the 1970s grew directly out of the postwar conservation movement, but this assumption is somewhat inaccurate. Observers or participants in the late 1960s and early 1970s frequently drew a distinction between conservation and environmentalism.
Shabecoff notes how young environmental radicals concerned about pollution somewhat disparaged traditional conservationists as "the birds and squirrels people," while members of conservation organizations were surprised by the sudden emergence of the new sort of anti-pollution environmentalism (Shabecoff, pp. 118-119). The student radicals of the Nader
Study Group on Air Pollution contemptuously announced, "'Clean air buffs' who fail to recognize this fact of economic and political life [air pollution as the product of "concentrated and irresponsible corporate power"] had best begin organizing nature walks or collecting butterflies" -- the sorts of activities traditionally associated with mainstream conservationists.
Gradually, though, with the spread of overarching ecological ideas, these two different wings of the environmental movement would increasingly accept the legitimacy of each other's issues. By 1971, Carlin and Kocher explained,
"Broadly speaking, the conservation movement in the United States has until recently been primarily concerned with preserving and protecting unique natural phenomena, particularly wilderness, while the present environmental movement was initially mainly concerned with

pollution problems. These two movements have now largely merged, however, so that the environmental movement's concerns can be said to include both categories."
Since major conservation groups have persisted for up to a century or more and have organized records, it is of course much easier to study their history, helping to lead to the assumption that the conservation groups and environmentalism were directly identical among historians.
3 The fullest discussion of turn-of-the-century smoke control efforts in the United States, and the first historical study to recognize women’s crucial and relatively radical role in air pollut ion control, is Robert Dale Grinder, “The Anti-Smoke Crusades: Early Attempts to
Reform the Urban Environment, 1893-
1918” (doctoral dissertation, history, University of
Missouri, 1973), which can be found in a very shortened form in Grinder, “The Battle for
Clean Air: The Smoke Problem in PostCivil War America,” in Martin Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870-1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), pp.
83-103. More recent studies making similar discoveries regarding the role of women in air pollution control, both of which focus on the city of Chicago around the last turn of the century, are Maureen A. Flanagan, “The City Profitable, The City Livable: Environmental
Policy, Gender, and Power in Chicago in the 1910s,” Journal of Urban History, volume 22, number 2 (January 1996), pp. 163-
190, and Harold L. Platt, “Invisible Gases: Smoke,
Gender, and the Redefinition of Environmental Policy in Chicago, 19001920,” Planning
Perspectives, volume 10, number 1 (January, 1995), pp. 67-97. There are few if any studies discussing the role of women in air pollution control after the Second World War. One helpful exception is Joel A. Tarr, “Changing Fuel Use Behavior and Energy Transitions: The
Pittsburgh Smoke Control Movement, 1940-1950 -- A Case Study in Historical Analogy,”
Journal of Social History, volume 14, number 4 (Summer, 1981), p. 566. For more general background on women’s early participation in other environmental battles, see also Suellen
M. Hoy, “‘Municipal Housekeeping’: The Role of Women in Improving Urban Sanitation
Practices, 1880-
1917,” in Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870-1930, pp. 173-
198; Carolyn Merchant, “Women of the Progressive Conservation Movement, 1900-
1916,” Environmental Review, volume 8, number 1 (Spring, 1984), pp. 57-85; Raymond W.
Smilor, “Toward an Environmental Perspective: The Anti-Noise Campaign, 1893-1932,” in
Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870-1930, pp. 135-151. For good information regarding notable early women reformers of the urban environment such as Dr.
Alice Hamilton and Jane Addams, see Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The
Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Covelo, California: Island Press,
1993), pp. 47-51, 59-67. Regarding t he notion of “civic motherhood” and its relation to environmental and other reforms, see Grinder dissertation, pp. 22, 33, 95-102. For more general information on the ideology of civic motherhood and women's participation in reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Carl N. Degler, At
Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 279-361.
4 Marvin Brienes, “The Fight Against Smog in Los Angeles, 1943-1957” (doctoral dissertation in history, University of California at Davis, 1975), pp. 12, 23-24, 32-37, 39-40,
48-53, 69-73, 79-81, 102, 105-108, 116-117, 132-136; James E. Krier and Edmund Ursin,
Pollution and Policy: A Case Essay on California and Federal Experience with Motor Vehicle
Air Pollution, 1940-1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 52-54; Harold
Kennedy, The History, Legal and Administrative Aspects of Air Pollution Control in Los
Angeles County (Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, 1954), p. 7. The threat to

tourism was seen as very real and serious. In 1949, area hotel owners were warned that smog would probably reduce tourist revenue by as much as $73 million a year. See Richard
D. Cadle and Henry C. Wohlers, “Smog Lore,” Air Repair: The Journal of the Air Pollution and Smoke Prevention Association of America, volume 1, number 4 (May, 1952), p. 32.
5 Brienes, pp. 118-125; Krier and Ursin, pp. 57-61. Traditionally, due to the geography of the
Los Angeles basin, the smog was particularly striking as one drove into the area through one mountain pass or another from a place with a cleaner atmosphere and then was suddenly submerged in smog, as happened to Mrs. Chandler. Now, though, since the LA urban sprawl has spread into the desert areas to the north and east of the LA basin, the smog pall spreads further without the same crisp dividing line.
6 Brienes, pp. 239-241; Krier and Ursin, pp. 113-115; Los Angeles Daily News, October 16,
1954, p. 1; Los Angeles Examiner, October 20, 1954, p. 1; “6,000 at Meet Ask Smog War --
Pasadena Citizens AntiSmog Action Committee,” Los Angeles Examiner, October 21,
1954, p. 1; Los Angeles Times, October 21, 1954, pp. 1-2; Los Angeles Times, October 21,
1954, pp. 1-2; Los Angeles Daily News, October 16, 1954, p. 1; “SMOG -- Poison Air
Showdown,” Los Angeles Daily News, October 15, 1954, p. 1, and Los Angeles Mirror,
October 21, 1954, p. 1; various newspaper articles in Hahn MSS Box 266, file 3.6.3 --
“Air
Pollution Control Department, 1952-195
4”; “6,000 Citizens Demand Action on Smog
Menace,” Pasadena Independent, October 21, 1954, p. 1, in Hahn MSS Box 266, file 3.6.1 -
- “Air Pollution Control Department, 1952-1954”; New York Times, March 1, 1953, p. 64:1;
New York Times, July 8, 1954, p. 16:3; New York Times, October 16, 1954, p. 22:6; New
York Times, October 17, 1954, p. 34:1; New York Times, October 21, 1954, p. 1:3; New
York Times, October 23, 1954, p. 1:3; New York Times, October 24, 1954, p. 61:1; New
York Times, October 31, 1954, p. 73:8; New York Times, December 5, 1954, p. 78:3.
7 Thomas Raymond Roberts, “Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control in California: A Case
Study in Political Unresponsiveness” (Unpublished baccalaureate honors thesis,
Government, Harvard College, March, 1969), pp. 48-50; statement of Mrs. Hilard Kravitz,
President, Stamp Out Smog, in Clean Air: Hearings Before a Special Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution of the Committee on Public Works, United States Senate, Eighty-Eighth
Congress, Second Session -- Field Hearings Held on Progress and Programs Relating to the Abatement of Air Pollution, Los Angeles, January 27, 1964, pp. 76-79; letter from Mrs.
Sherman Slade to Vernon G. MacKenzie, 1967, in National Archives and Records
Administration Record Group 90, Accession Number 70-A-4011: National Center for Air
Pollution Control, 1967-
1968, Carton 11, File “OCC -- Citizens Committee Groups”; Who’s
Who in America, volume 35, 19681969 (Chicago: Marquis Who’s Who, Inc., 1969).
8 Letter from Mary Valleley to Kenneth P. Hahn, February 14, 1967, in Hahn MSS Box 266-
3, file 3.6.13 -- “Air Pollution Control District, 1967”; letter from Martha R. Hemmer to Hahn, undated, in Hahn MSS Box 266/267, file 3.6.18 --
“Air Pollution Control District, 1967”; letter from Virginia L. Broach to Senator Edmund S. Muskie, October 29, 1969, U.S. Senate:
Senate Office (624-3), Edmund S. Muskie Collection, The Edmund S. Muskie Archives,
Bates College, Lewiston, Maine; Roberts, pp. 50-
51; Robert Adam Doty, “Life Cycle
Theories of Regulatory Agency Behavior: The Los Angeles Air Pollution Control District”
(doctoral dissertation in political science, University of California at Riverside, June, 1978), pp. 92-94, 106-107; Robert A. Doty and Leonard Levine, Profile of an Air Pollution
Controversy, Volume II (The LAAPCD is an SO2) (Riverside, California: Clean Air Now,
1973), pp. 1-8.

9 New York Times, January 10, 1947, p. 23:3; New York Times, March 4, 1947, p. 51:7;
New York Times, September 21, 1948, p. 26:6; New York Times, November 15, 1948, p.
27:3; New York Times, November 18, 1948, p. 26:3; New York Times, November 19, 1948, p. 48:7; New York Times, November 28, 1948, p. 81:7; New York Times, March 23, 1949, p.
4:7. Mrs. Hearst, Mrs. Vanderbilt, and Mrs. Morgan of course had married into some of the city’s greatest fortunes. Mrs. Chase was leading female professional journalist and the editor of Vogue magazine, while Mrs. Lehman was the wife of one of New York’s most distinguished statesmen, a past governer of New York State and a future U.S. Senator.
10 New York Times, January 8, 1947, p. 22:5&6; New York Times, October 22, 1947, p.
31:5. More than a decade later, babies in strollers in New York City were still getting covered with soot.
11 New York Times, October 22, 1948, p. 27:1; New York Herald Tribune, October 22, 1948, p. 18:7; New York Times, October 23, 1948, p. 14:2; New York Times, October 28, 1948, p.
28:6; New York Times, August 4, 1950, p. 23:5; New York Times, August 9, 1950, p. 28:3.
12 New York Times, January 31, 1951, p. 18:7; New York Times, February 1, 1951, p. 24:3;
New York Times, April 18, 1951, p. 30:8; New York Times, January 11, 1951, p. 22:7; New
York Times, May 30, 1951, p. 66:1; New York Times, July 25, 1951, p. 22:1; New York
Times, July 27, 1951, p. 21:8; New York Times, July 29, 1951, p. 50:8; New York Times,
July 31, 1951, p. 23:1; New York Times, August 1, 1951, p. 18:6; August 2, 1951, p. 1:1;
New York Times, August 10, 1951, p. 22:7; New York Times, November 17, 1951, p. 19:6;
New York Times, December 16, 1951, p. 71:5. Although a naturalized American citizen and
Queens housewife, Robinson had been born and raised in a smoky suburb of Liverpool,
England, where the atmospheric contamination had given her a chronic bronchial cough that sometimes kept her out of school, and where her father, a physician, had researched respiratory illnesses. Having later married an American international exporter, she had gotten a chance to live in “‘some of the most beautiful spots of the world’” and had learned what truly clean, healthful air was like. Like many other refugees to suburban Queens only more so, Robinson had seen different conditions and would not accept the steady worsening of New York’s air sitting down.
13 New York Times, March 26, 1952, p. 31:5; New York Times, April 5, 1952, p. 20:1; New
York Times, February 4, 1953, p. 25:2; New York Times, October 8, 1953, p. 31:1.
14 See angry letter from AnneMarie Crookall, President, Staten Island Taxpayers’
Association, to New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., July 11, 1964, U.S. Senate:
Senate Office (101-1), Edmund S. Muskie Collection, The Edmund S. Muskie Archives,
Bates College, Lewiston, Maine; statement of Mrs. Charles V. Crookall, Chairman, Civic
Congress of Staten Island, in Clean Air: Hearings Before a Special Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution of the Committee on Public Works, United States Senate, Eighty-Eighth
Congress, Second Session -- Field Hearings Held on Progress and Programs Relating to the Abatement of Air Pollution, New York City, February 18, 1964, pp. 660-662.
15 New York Times, November 6, 1953, p. 29:1; New York Times, May 20, 1966, p. 49:5;
New York Times, June 17, 1966, p. 35:1; New York Times, May 1, 1967, p. 46:2; New York
Times, May 24, 1967, p. 43:1; New York Times, October 24, 1968, p. 23:3; Constance
Holden, “Hazel Henderson: Nudging Society off Its Macho Trip,” Science, Volume 190
(November 28, 1975), pp. 862-864.
16 The air pollution problem of the central Florida phosphate belt became serious and notorious enough that it was included on the agenda of the 1964 field hearings of United
States Senator Edmund S. Muskie’s Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution along with

better-known problem areas such as Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, and the New York City metropolitan area. Indeed, central Florida had the distinction of being the only rural area included among a list of big cities, at a time when air pollution was generally presumed
(incorrectly) to be a problem only of urban areas. Later, in 1969, when Life magazine reflected the growing national anxiety over the environment by publishing shocking photographs of some of the nation’s most notorious air pollution problems, central Florida was again featured along with the big cities. See “Air Pollution,” Life, Volume 66 (February
7, 1969), pp. 38-50.
17 Letter from Senator Edmund S. Muskie to Mrs. E. N. Lightfoot, June 11, 1964, U.S.
Senate: Senate Office (98-9), Edmund S. Muskie Collection, The Edmund S. Muskie
Archives, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine; letter from Harriett A. Lightfoot to Florida Air
Pollution Control Commission, August 13, 1963, in National Archives and Records
Administration Record Group 90, Accession Number 70-A-4011: National Center for Air
Pollution Control, 1967-
1968, File “OCC: Florida Air Pollution Commission”; letter from
Harriett Lightfoot to Florida Governor Farris Bryant, October 12, 1963, in ibid.; letter from
Lightfoot to Governor Bryant, February 10, 1964, in ibid.; letter from Harriett Lightfoot to
United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, February 11, 1964, in ibid.; letter from
Harriet A. Lightfoot to the Florida State Board of Health and the Florida Air Pollution Control
Commission, February 11, 1966, in ibid.; letter from Lightfoot to Vernon G. MacKenzie, May
14, 1966, in ibid.; letter from Lightfoot to the Florida Air Pollution Control Commission, April
15, 1966, included as Addendum Number 8 in Minutes -- Meeting of the Florida Air Pollution
Control Commission, April 15, 1966, p. 13, in ibid.; letter from Vernon G. MacKenzie to
Lightfoot, May 27, 1966, in ibid.; Minutes -- Meeting of the Florida Air Pollution Control
Commission, Tampa, Florida, April 15, 1966, p. 6, in ibid.; letter from K. K. Huffstutler to
Lightfoot, May 31, 1966, in ibid.; letter from W. R. Lamb to the Florida State Board of Health and the Florida Air Pollution Control Commission, June 3, 1966, included as Addendum
Number 2 in Minutes -- Meeting of the Florida Air Pollution Control Commission, Lakeland,
Florida, June 3, 1966, in ibid.; undated handwritten letter (late 1966) from Harriett A.
Lightfoot to Vernon G. MacKenzie in ibid.
18 Michael Gannon, Florida: A Short History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), p. 85; Charlton W. Tebeau, A History of Florida (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press,
1971), p. 431; Charles I. Harding, Samuel B. McKee, and Jean J. Schueneman, A Report on Florida’s Air Resources (Jacksonville: Florida State Board of Health, February, 1961), pp.
28-31, 41; Florida Health Notes: Clean Water -- Clean Air (Special Issue on Air and Water
Pollution), Volume 48, Number 10 (December 1956), p. 220, in apeb 5960 box 6: “fla --
(Polk County)”. By the end of the 1950s, Florida produced ten per cent of the nation’s wood pulp.
19 Charles I. Harding, Final Progress Report: Greater Jacksonville Air Pollution Control
Program (Gainesville: Bioenvironmental Engineering Department, College of Engineering,
University of Florida, August, 1966), p. 41. While the population within the city limits of
Tampa evidently had grown larger than that within the Jacksonville city limits, Greater
Jacksonville remained the second largest metropolitan area in Florida through most of the
1960s.
20 Randy McLaughlin, “Talleyrand Pollution Fighters Win Hearing,” Jacksonville Journal,
Wednesday, October 9, 1963, newspaper clipping in U.S. Senate: Senate Office (625-5),
Edmund S. Muskie Collection, The Edmund S. Muskie Archives, Bates College, Lewiston,

Maine. Talleyrand was also the center of the vegetation damage during a serious industrial fumigation in 1961. See Harding, Final Progress Report, p. 209.
21 Letter from Ann Belcher to Florida Governor Farris Bryant, December 5, 1963, U.S.
Senate: Senate Office (625-5), Edmund S. Muskie Collection, The Edmund S. Muskie
Archives, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine; letter from Ann Belcher to US Senator Edmund
S. Muskie, January 2, 1964, in ibid.; letter from Mrs. Joseph C. McGuffy to Muskie, January
6, 1964, in ibid.; letter from Lula J. Dovi to Muskie, January 2, 1964, U.S. Senate: Senate
Office (765-8), Edmund S. Muskie Collection, Muskie Archives; Harding, Final Progress
Report, pp. 222-223, 351-352. Subsequent events helped to keep air pollution in the spotlight in Jacksonville. For instance, during December of 1964, stable atmospheric conditions led to a week-long fumigation of the whole city which caused serious paint discoloration and great public displeasure. Then, beginning around May 15, 1965, residents of the Springfield, Talleyrand, and Arlington areas of the city [industrial areas] again began to notice and complain about very obvious and extensive damage to vegetation in their neighborhood. The die-off continued into the summer months. In early 1966, residents of a subdivision in the Arlington area complained of noxious fumes from an asphalt plant across the St. Johns river from them which they claimed disturbed their sleep and their enjoyment of their property (Harding, p. 216).
22 Statement of Miss Chloe Gifford, in Proceedings: National Conference on Air Pollution,
Washington, DC, November 18-20, 1958, 1959, pp. 248-251 (quote p. 249); statements of
Mrs. B. Brand Konheim and Mrs. Michael Levee, Jr., in Proceedings: The Third National
Conference on Air Pollution, Washington, DC, December 12-14, 1966, pp. 551-553, 428;
Clubwoman, April, 1965.
23 Statement of Mrs. Chester W. Rose, Clean Air: Hearings Before a Special Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution of the Committee on Public Works, United States Senate, Eighty-
Eighth Congress, Second Session -- Field Hearings Held on Progress and Programs
Relating to the Abatement of Air Pollution, Denver, January 29, 1964, pp. 210-215, quote p.
213; statement of Mrs. Chauncey D. Harris, in ibid., Chicago, January 31, 1964, pp. 264-
268, quotes p. 265; statement of Mrs. Charles E. Shepard (Marcia E. Shepard), in ibid.,
Boston, February 17, 1964, pp. 433-436. Harris complained of the weak fines and sluggish enforcement in Chicago, including how regardless of what civilian smoke-spotters saw and reported, the violation could not be prosecuted unless one of the city’s professional smoke inspectors observed it.
24 Statement of Mrs. J. H. Kerstetter, Air Pollution -- Hearings before the Subcommittee on
Air and Water Pollution of the Committee on Public Works, U.S. Senate, Ninety-First
Congress, First Session, St. Louis, 1969, pp. 50-51; statement of Mrs. Richard E. Kuster, in ibid., pp. 159-160; statement of Alfred Kahn, Vice President, Coalition for the Environment,
St. Louis Region, in ibid., p. 152; letter for the record from Marie Bryan Blair, November 10,
1969, in ibid., p. 230; letter for the record from Rosalin Flax, November 5, 1969, in ibid., pp.
231-232; letter for the record from Sally Goerner, Girl Scout President of Greater St. Louis
Girl Scout Council, undated, in ibid., p. 232; letter for the record from Hugh A. Logan,
President, Girl Scout Council of Greater St. Louis, October 20, 1969, in ibid., p. 235; letter for the record from Sue Markeis, Chairman, the Ninety-Nines International Organization of
Women Pilots, Greater St. Louis Chapter, October 27, 1969, in ibid., p. 236; letter for the record from Mrs. Phil McBrayer, November 10, 1969, in ibid., p. 236. The statement of
Alfred Kahn notes that the League of Women Voters of Bellevile, Illinois was one of the affiliated groups with the St. Louis Region Coaltion for the Environment.

25 Letter from Nancy D. Fritz of Missoula, Montana, to Senator Edmund S. Muskie, October
22, 1969, U.S. Senate: Senate Office (626-4), Edmund S. Muskie Collection, The Edmund
S. Muskie Archives, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine; letter from Karen L. Shuttleworth to
Muskie, July 14, 1969, U.S. Senate: Senate Office (624-2), Edmund S. Muskie Collection,
Muskie Archives; letter from Mrs. Bertis Dudley to Muskie, September 29, 1969, U.S.
Senate: Senate Office (765-8), Edmund S. Muskie Collection, Muskie Archives.
26 Statement of Dr. Ruth Weiner, Air Pollution: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution of the Senate Committee on Public Works, United States Senate,
Ninety-First Congress, Second Session, Washington, DC, 1970, Part I, pp. 68-88. Dr.
Weiner followed in the footsteps of the much earlier Dr. Alice Hamilton, a professionally trained activist on public health and urban environmental issues early in the century.
Regarding Dr. Hamilton, see Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the
American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993), pp. 47-51. The fact that Weiner was both president of Colorado Citizens for Clean Air and was representing the Colorado Open Space Cooridinating Council, a federation of some twenty-six conservation-minded groups with nearly 25,000 members in all, shows that anti-pollution and land-conservation groups in Colorado recognized their shared environmental agenda by 1970.
27 Statement of Martha Blacksher, in Air Pollution -- Hearings before the Subcommittee on
Air and Water Pollution of the Committee on Public Works, U.S. Senate, Ninety-First
Congress, First Session, St. Louis, 1969, pp. 161-162, and Statement of Mrs. Jean Francis, in ibid., pp. 166-165.
28 Letter from Rose Owen to Senator Edmund S. Muskie, March 24, 1969, U.S. Senate:
Senate Office (765-1), Edmund S. Muskie Collection, The Edmund S. Muskie Archives,
Bates College, Lewiston, Maine. As a poor mother from one of the most blighted neighborhoods in Philadelphia, one of the nation’s most heavily African-American cities, one might think that there was a good chance that Rose Owen was African-American. However, her neighborhood was a mostly white, working-class enclave in a mostly black section of town, so this is unlikely. Rose Owen lived at 4481 Garden Street. Thanks to Morris J. Vogel of Temple University for an e-mail message clarifying this situation.
29 Letter from Emma Kai to Senator Edmund S. Muskie, September 21, 1966, U.S. Senate:
Senate Office (595-1), Edmund S. Muskie Collection, The Edmund S. Muskie Archives,
Bates College, Lewiston, Maine.