Reproduction, the Family, and Neoliberalism in the Environmental History of the 1970s
Open Access Deposited"For Our Children"
privatization, deservingness, responsibility, and regulation. These concepts, I contend, became dominant frames for environmental politics during this period. In chapter one, I consider how oil corporations, and particularly Mobil Oil, capitalized on the oil crises to promote cultures of “privatization.” In the second chapter, I examine how toxic waste activists in Love Canal, New York leveraged conceptions of “deservingness” in order to call for state accountability. In chapter three, I trace how “responsibility” shaped occupational health policies at an American Cyanamid plant in Willow Island, West Virginia, demonstrating how claims to protecting future generations undermined the health of workers and surrounding communities. And, in chapter four, I analyze how environmentalists, specifically members of Zero Population Growth, called for solving overpopulation through intimate “regulation.” Rather than engendering a broad sense of social responsibility for a sustainable—and collectively sustaining—future, the four case studies in the dissertation demonstrate how assertions of protecting the children in the 1970s narrowed the scope of environmental politics to individual, rather than structural, solutions. The dissertation illustrates both the pitfalls and possibilities of environmental politics in the 1970s, providing lessons for those seeking alternate modes to care for environments and communities in the present.
Oriented around the question of how American environmental politics came to be premised as “for the children,” this dissertation draws on historical archives to analyze how reproduction and the family became key sites of environmental concern and intervention during the 1970s. Throughout the 1970s, diverse political actors leveraged claims to protect the future, often signified through children and unborn generations, to situate their visions of environmental reform. Across the dissertation, I demonstrate that understanding why and how this emphasis came to be requires situating American environmental politics within a broader cultural context of the 1970s in which neoliberal family values emerged as a dominant political and economic agenda, resulting in broad sweeping changes to how Americans understood themselves in relation to corporations, government, and society. Across its chapters, the dissertation tracks four keywords at the heart of the 1970s transformations
- All rights reserved
Notice to Authors
If you are the author of this work and you have any questions about the information on this page, please use the Contact form to get in touch with us.
| Thumbnail | Title | Date Uploaded | Visibility | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Henderson_gwu_0075A_17495.pdf | 2025-12-11 | Open Access |
|