More Than Municipal Housekeepers: How Women’s Organisations Fought Environmental Inequalities in Chicago circa 1890-1990

Women have played an integral role in American environmental history, particularly in urban and industrial cities. Their significant contributions to combatting the seriously harmful effects of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation must be discussed in detail to demonstrate how they overcame barriers to activism and were a powerful force in protecting the lives, environments, and health of their cities. This thesis will examine how the experiences of women involved in challenging environmental inequalities in urban settings, specifically Chicago, from the 1890s to 1990s were shaped by gender, race, and class, and, crucially, how they used these themes of race, gender and class to promote their causes. The groups and individuals that will be discussed include women’s city clubs such as the Chicago Women’s Club, The National Association of Colored Women, The Chicago Urban League, Jane Addams, Mary McDowell, and Hazel Johnson and People for Community Recovery. By exploring how the purpose for their activism and the strategies they employed were informed by their own internalised perceptions of gender, race, and class which affected how they viewed themselves as well as those they were helping, allows links to be made between these women that span over one hundred years. How these characteristics were used by external parties to support or contest their battles will also be discussed to demonstrate that these women were operating in complex and difficult circumstances. This thesis will further demonstrate how African American women and white women, who were active in Chicago, subverted gendered expectations of domesticity, passivity, and submissiveness through their identities as municipal housekeepers. This ideology has been characterised as women cleaning the city as they would their homes, but it is a much more intricate set of ideals that warrants greater analysis.