At first glance Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager, seems a very unlikely candidate to become arguably the world’s best known environmental activist. Yet despite her youth and lack of advanced degrees or political authority, she has inspired millions of people to join in the effort to combat climate change. Certainly Thunberg is unique in her global reach, but even a cursory history of women’s environmental leadership reveals countless women operating far outside the bounds of conventional government, yet making a meaningful impact. 

Throughout much of history, women’s ability to affect the environment through conventional governmental channels was either blunted or non-existent. Yet many women claimed environmental authority, some because they believed women were more inherently attuned to nature. In most parts of the world, women are the ones who are “closest to the earth,” that is, the ones who gather the food and prepare it, who haul the water and search for the fuel with which to heat it. Everywhere, they are the ones who bear children, or in highly toxic areas, suffer the consequences of environmental pollution through miscarriages, still births, or birth defects.   

In the United States, claims of women’s innate environmental authority bolstered the mission of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), established in 1890 to serve as an “important liaison between legislators and their constituencies.” The GFWC maintained that “conservation in its material and ethical sense is the basic principle of womanhood,” adding, “Woman’s supreme function as mother of the race gives her a special claim to protection not so much individually as for unborn generations.”   

Others who agreed that it fell to women to save the earth claimed such authority was based in culture rather than nature. Men’s roles as the providers had skewed their view of non-human nature, transforming it into something to be manipulated or conquered for profit rather than conserved or preserved for its own sake. In 1908, American activist Lydia Adams-Williams asserted that “Man has been too busy building railroads, constructing ships, engineering great projects, and exploiting vast commercial enterprises” to consider the future and the need for sustainability. For decades prior to women gaining the vote in the United States, women’s clubs urged their members to put their gendered (rather than innate) conservation practices and housekeeping ethic to broader use. By 1911, Ladies’ Home Journal was reminding its readers that in a thousand ways, from reusing paper and string to using bones and meat scraps to make soup, “you have been practicing conservation all your life, doing on a small scale what the Government is beginning to do on a huge one….the Government is in a way the good mother of us all.” 

Even women not wholly persuaded by either (nature v. culture) argument found that playing the gender card was frequently the only way to be taken seriously. In the early 1960s the group Women Strike for Peace protested the escalating nuclear weapons race. The strikers emphasized that their maternal concerns about children and the future trumped any and all political issues. President John F. Kennedy claimed that the women’s generational arguments influenced his thinking, culminating in the U.S.-Soviet test ban treaty, stating, “I have said that control of arms is a mission that we undertake for our children and our grandchildren, and that they have no lobby in Washington. No one is better qualified to represent their interests than the mothers and grandmothers of America.”  

Kennedy was also instrumental in legitimizing the claims made by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring. After Carson hit the glass ceiling in her work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, she became a successful nature writer before publishing her best-selling attack on the government’s misplaced and ineffectual paternalism. Specifically, she questioned the wisdom of the governmental “fathers” concerning industrial waste and the vast reliance on pesticides, especially DDT, echoing traditional women’s arguments in favor of privileging future generations over the short-sightedness of modern development. Carson’s work was denounced in the popular press. Time devoted considerable space to those who dismissed her as “hysterically overemphatic,” and the scientific community denounced her as emotional and unscientific. Her “unnatural” status as an unmarried woman meant that she lacked women’s traditional authority as well. However, when Kennedy ordered his Science Advisory Committee to investigate, Carson’s painstaking research proved impossible to refute, and her emphasis on the interconnectedness of all life could not be dismissed as feminine romanticism. Silent Spring became one of the most influential books of the last century. 

While efforts were made to dismiss women who couched their protests in maternalistic rhetoric as emotional and irrational, their authority as selfless mothers frequently proved to be effective.  In 1978 homemaker Lois Gibbs expressed the dismay of the Love Canal Homeowners Association about the dropping property values in their community, built on a toxic landfill in Love Canal, New York, citing as well their rights, as taxpayers and citizens, to environmental health and safety. She quickly found that expressing her concerns about her children’s health and future generated far more press interest, sympathy, and support. When Love Canal’s African-American renters did not get the same governmental assistance as their white, home-owning counterparts, they too used motherhood as their credential: “We love our kids just like the home owners over there and…we should have the same protection that the home owners have.” In the end, Love Canal was declared a Superfund site and virtually all of the 900 area families had moved and had received some financial restitution for their loss of health and property. 

In 1979, Hazel Johnson created People for Community Recovery (PCR) in the low-income community of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Altgeld Gardens, created in 1945 for African-American World War II veterans and war workers. Following the cancer deaths of four little girls whose bodies she described poignantly as “so tiny they could fit into shoe boxes,” this mother of seven became deeply concerned about the high levels of cancer in her community. Although she had no scholarly credentials, she sent out questionnaires to document her neighbors’ health problems, including asthma and childhood cancers. PCR became the first public housing environmental justice organization in the country, and demanded a comprehensive health study. Johnson learned that the housing had been built on land that was once a sewage farm, and had also been used as an illegal dumping ground for highly toxic PCBs. Half of the community’s pregnancies resulted in miscarriages, stillbirths, premature births or birth defects. PRC recognized these as problems disproportionately affecting people of color in poor communities.  Johnson was one of several women who helped President Barack Obama when he was named first executive director of the Developing Communities Project in 1986.   

At the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership summit, held in Washington D.C. in 1991, Johnson was dubbed “The Mother of the Environmental Justice Movement” for her relentless efforts to bring attention to and resolve environmental racism. In 1994 she was on hand to witness President Bill Clinton sign the executive order mandating that every federal agency make achieving environmental justice part of its mission. Johnson was one of a multitude of women who took on leadership positions in this burgeoning movement, claiming their authority not in science, but in their deep understanding of community issues, especially those concerning children, as effected by racism, poverty, and a lack of traditional political power. 

Johnson’s campaign to eliminate environmental racism took her all around the world, including Brazil, where ecofeminist Giselda Castro, of Friends of the Earth, echoed the claims made more than eighty years earlier by Lydia Adams-Williams. According to Castro, by dedicating themselves to the pursuit of immediate profit, “Men have separated themselves from the ecosystem.” Indigenous women around the globe became notable environmental leaders by applying their expertise garnered at the intersections of environment, grassroots experience, Indigenous traditions, and gender. They range from the Women of All Red Nations in the United States, to the environmental activist Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores, who received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 for her work to protect the land rights of Indigenous Hondorans, activism that culminated in her murder in 2016. In 2004, Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in recognition of her founding of the Green Belt movement, which brought worldwide attention to the relationship between planting trees, environmental conservation, and women’s rights. 

Like increasing numbers of women environmentalists, Maathai did not work outside of government. She was ultimately elected to the parliament of Kenya, and served as assistant minister for environment and natural resources. In the United States, Carol Browner served as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration, as well as director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy during the Obama administration. In both positions, Browner conspicuously and successfully used maternalism to promote her political agenda. Unlike her male predecessors, Browner declared that she placed children “at the focal point of the EPA’s mission,” identifying herself at the end of her tenure “as a mother and a person whose job it is to protect the American people from environmental hazards.” 

Certainly not all women environmental leaders embrace maternalism as a credential. Claims of women’s inherent environmental authority are denounced as anti-feminist, an insult to male environmentalists, and a damaging reinforcement of the traditional (and extremely limiting) women’s sphere. But as Greta Thunberg and countless other women have shown, maternalism is only one of a variety of approaches women have pursued outside of traditional government to promote resource protection and help shape the environmental movement.