Wednesday, June 22

1. Paula Rabinowitz: “Domestic Labor: Film Noir, Proletarian Literature, and Black Women's Fiction” 2. Giovanna di Chiro: “Living Envornmentalisms” Recommended: 3. Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner: “Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives” M FS Modern Fiction Studies Copyright © 2001 for the Purdue Research Foundation. All rights she also allows Lucia access to an underworld and its erotics. In this film, as in the classic melodrama reserved. Imitation of Life (1934, 1959) in which a black maid's domesticity facilitates a white woman's business, the M FS Modern Fiction Studies 47.1 (2001) 229-254 maid participates in the maintenance of family economic order, helping to support it when there is no man around, and acts as confessor for the white woman she serves. 3 The black maid, like the detective or the Domestic Labor: Film Noir, Proletarian Literature, and Black Women's Fiction femme fatale, by occupation slides between two worlds: as a black woman in racially segregated America, she lives on the margins of white America; as a servant to the bourgeoisie, she inhabits the bedrooms of the Paula Rabinowitz white middle class. As entertainer, cook, and servant, the black woman is rarely the center of the action in film noir, 4 but her presence appears necessary to the complex postwar sexual and racial dynamics that On the trail of the missing Kathie Moffett, private investigator Jeff Bailey begins uptown, in a Harlem films noirs track by linking domestic melodrama to hard-boiled proletarian culture. nightclub, by interviewing Kathy's black maid, Eunice. In this minor scene in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), Bailey enters the smoke-hazed, jazz-filled club and is escorted by the maître-d' to a table with What kind of work does the maid perform in film noir? Her service to the femme noire, as an overt femme two couples; he asks which woman worked for Kathie. Bailey seems at ease in the club; like many private noire, is more complex than simply that of the loyal employee of Hollywood melodrama. Her ability to eyes, he's used to interacting with African Americans, and after one couple leaves for the dance floor he understand and function within alien worlds makes her more of an equal to the female protagonist, yet she inquires about Kathie. Elegant and sly, Eunice says she has no idea where Kathie went--she got some does little more than protect the protagonist, lying and covering up for the white woman. Because the dark vaccinations and took off, to Miami perhaps. Bailey buys the table a round of drinks and leaves, lady of film noir was a white woman--glowingly white in her initial key-lit scenes--the black domestic commenting, in his detective voice-over narrative, that you don't get vaccinated to go to Florida: Kathie worker of film noir crystallized racial and class issues raised (and not always addressed) by the Left during took off to Mexico. James Naremore describes this scene and others like it, depicting interactions between the 1930s when domestic labor debates resurfaced after disappearing with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's beautiful, sophisticated black women and white detectives in various films noirs, as crucial to the powerful 1903 tract Women and Economics. On film, she shows up the bourgeois house as little more than construction of the noir hero's/detective's "aura of 'cool' [. . .] his essential hipness" (240-41). 1 a brothel whose sole purpose--now that even the housewife is freed from housework [End Page 231] and Undoubtedly Naremore is correct, as the integrated nightclub is an iconic location within film noir and one childcare--is sexual and reproductive. Racial erotics, tracked throughout the 1930s in reportage, poetry, and generally visited by the male detective figure, but a difference here is that Eunice was Kathie's maid. She short fiction, became the focus of postwar novels by black women. Ann Petry's The Street (1947) and serves a woman, and she is a woman. [End Page 229] Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha (1953), two novels by authors connected to the Left, were both published during the heyday of Hollywood's films noirs. Like the films' concerns with the new kinds of Coded through dress, lighting, and mise en scène as a femme fatale in her own right, Eunice is a replicant social relations forged during the Depression and World War II, each locates black women's labor within of Kathie's aura--a femme noire. The dark lady of film noir is a woman with a past, a kept woman who proletarian literary culture by linking domestic melodrama to female Bildungsroman. 5 performs no useful function other than sex. Her body is available, draped in mink and diamonds, for display and desire. She is free to meet men at night or in the afternoon because she is unencumbered by the As a popular medium, albeit often in its "B" form, postwar film noir began to visualize many of the issues usual trappings of domesticity. She is free in part because she has a housekeeper to clean up after a long lurking within proletarian literature--corrupt city life, the organization of work, social mobility, cross-class night of drinking, to fix the drinks and make the coffee, to help her dress. The "aura of cool" Blacks impart desire. As noir films borrowed 1930s proletarian narratives, themselves hybrid revisions of socialist realism to the white detective occurs through a transference: as authentic bearers of alienation, African Americans and domestic fiction, they also generated new literary concerns. The Street owes much to Stephen Crane's are the original outsiders. Both the white detective and the white femme fatale acquire their abilities to pass Maggie, Girl of the Streets and American naturalism, but it also taps fears haunting Tourneur's Cat People. into the underworld through their encounters with and knowledge of a darkness found beyond conventional 6 Gwendolyn Brooks structures Maud Martha like the jazz that orchestrates film noir as she revises a work and marriage. Like the "authenticity" of the original possessing an "aura," as Walter Benjamin defines coming of age story to reveal why the black femme fatale cannot be visualized in racist America. As Alan it (220), Eunice stands before Bailey as the "prerequisite" of another woman he has never seen. She doesn't Wald and Michael Denning have recently argued, the radical novel or the cultural front in American acquire a metaphoric status as femme noire; she embodies it. In this, she resembles Benjamin's notion of literature exceeded the bounds of 1930s proletarian culture. 7 For many writers, especially black writers, the "original" work of art, which remains fixed within "tradition," while its copies, endlessly available, are the themes and concerns central to 1930s fiction--the experience of collective subjectivity within social mobile and potentially revolutionary (223-24). Eunice vibrates sexuality--a sign hanging around black relations formed by economic and racial stratification--appeared after the Depression had ended. Invisible women's necks since they arrived shackled together on this continent--and thus allows us to know Kathie Man is a 1930s novel even if it didn't appear until 1952; so too is Margaret Walker's Jubilee, begun in the through her. Yet Eunice resists Bailey; she is straightforward in her lie and Bailey can see through her 1930s and completed in the 1960s. because she is the original woman of the dark. She points up Kathie's double duplicity. The "tradition" of racism and its economic and sexual effects are potentially wrecked by the white femme fatale. However, Focusing on the difficulties black women faced in supporting themselves and their families, analyzing the her radical rupture with conventional white femininity is still dependent upon this tradition. racial and sexual dynamics of black domestic workers in white women's households, The Street and Maud Martha deepened the domestic labor debates central to the Left. Beyond an analysis of housework as a Eunice never reappears in the film; however, her presence is essential to the construction of the white "double burden" for the working woman employed outside the home, these two novels consider what it femme fatale in many films noirs. Dressed as Billie Holiday did in the 1940s, upswept hair coifed with a means to maintain two homes--one's own and another's of a different class, race and neighborhood. 8 This veil of white camellias, black dress accented with white trim, Eunice, stylish and independent, assuredly contradiction is the focus of Toni Morrison's first novel (set during the 1940s), The Bluest Eye, in which resists a white man's authority. She defends herself and her former boss in a gesture of female solidarity, [End Page 232] Pauline travels between the white family, on whose blonde daughter she dotes, and her which extends to her look: the two women are erotic cross-dressers, as the white femme fatale inevitably own, where she ignores her daughter Pecola (whose name echoes that of Peola in Imitation of Life) with wears the clothes of the torch singer while [End Page 230] the maid acquires her boss's hand-me-downs. tragic consequences. It is also graphically displayed in Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices (1941). In Her deception parallels the deceit embodied by the object of desire, in this case femme fatale Kathie one two-page spread, pictures of the kitchenette are contrasted with the uniformed maid in a sparkling Moffet. Eunice's loyalty is to her employer, whom she knows has had a rough time with men, and who, kitchen (132-33). This image of a black mother tending white children is among the only recognition of presumably, as a single woman kept by those men, doesn't require too much work from Eunice, whom we black women's labor by Wright, whose first-person plural narrative "we" does not include women, who are see out on a date in Harlem. While Eunice's aid to Kathie is an isolated incident within the film, in Max pointedly spoken of as "our women." Nevertheless, the racial dimensions of domestic labor had been an Ophuls's Reckless Moment (1949) Lucia Harper's black maid Sybil appears as a central figure in her boss's ongoing concern of writers throughout the 1930s; the pages of The Crisis, The New Masses, and The Daily cover-up. 2 Like many domestic melodramas that rely on the household presence of a maid, Sybil helps Worker, among countless little journals sponsored by the Communist Party, explored black women's save her boss after Lucia hides the corpse of a blackmailing gigolo that her daughter has killed; in so doing, double life under white supremacy and capitalism; but these were often works of short reportage, poetry, or Kitchens short fiction, and they never attained the recognition that a novel did. Till my knees was rusty And so. (58) For instance, Belle Traub, in a 1935 article in The Negro Liberator, "Discovered: A Modern Slave Block!" interviewed one of the many black women lined up on the street corners of major cities waiting for day This story is repeated almost verbatim by Lutie Johnson in Ann Petry's terrifying novel The Street. When work as a domestic. Mrs. Rose Johnson described a typical day: "I get up at six each morning. Get she learns her husband is living with another woman, Lutie abruptly leaves domestic service, and breakfast for my three children. Wash the dishes, fix sandwich lunch for them, and send them off to school. eventually becomes a nightclub singer in the Harlem club owned by a gangster, Junto, who expects to pimp Then comes a bit of family work. All this, before coming out on the block [. . .] and then to stand around on for her. As historian Jacqueline Jones points out, during the Depression, "it was the entertainment field that a street corner for hours waiting" for the same work in another woman's house (qtd. in Battenfeld). Ella fueled the dreams of black girls who yearn for a life's work of glamour and triumph" as nightclubs, radio Baker and Marvel Cooke went underground to detail the workings of "The Bronx Slave Market" in The and records featured the voices of Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne and others Crisis. Here, on Jerome Avenue, black women lined up waiting for day work within the mostly Jewish (220). households of the neighborhood. "Paradoxically," they note, "the crash of 1929 brought to the domestic labor marked a new employer class. The lower middle-class housewife, who, having dreamed of the luxury This plot trajectory, from domestic work to entertainment to prostitution, was typical: "A young girl from of a maid, found opportunity staring her in the face in the form a Negro women pressed to the wall by North Carolina came to New York City in 1936. Unable to find work in a respected capacity, she sought poverty, starvation, and discrimination" (330). The work appears especially onerous, for in addition to the domestic work. Here, her relations with her employer were not entirely moral, but at least raised her usual window washing, scrubbing, laundry, dusting, turning of mattresses, and chasing off the wandering income. Finally domestic work becoming odious, was forgotten, and another prostitute was created" hands of the son, to wash dishes for Orthodox Jews required "a different dishcloth for everything they ("Harlem Crime" 377). The link between domestic labor and prostitution--sexualizing housework and cook. For instance, they ha[d] [End Page 233] one for 'milk' pots in which dairy dishes are cooked, another racializing sex work--is central to the image of the femme fatale's maid who can keep the house of a for glasses, another for vegetable pots, another for meat pots, and so on" (331). As late as 1940, Louise woman not known for her domestic virtues because she, too, exchanges her body for pay. Lutie Johnson Mitchell decried the "slave markets" where "Negro women wait[ed] for employers to come to the street runs up against this continually as a live-in maid in Lyme, Connecticut. Overhearing conversations between corner auction blocks to bargain for their labor" (229). Baker and Cooke advocated self-organization her employer, Mrs. Chandler, and other women friends, neighbors, and relatives, Lutie learns that these among the women, castigating "organized labor's limited concept of exploitation, which permits it to fight women fear her as an attractive, young (and therefore obviously sexually available) black woman; they all vigorously to secure itself against evil, yet passively or actively aids and abets the ruthless destruction of assume she is a "whore" (41). "Apparently," she realizes, "it was an automatic reaction [End Page 235] of Negroes," and citing the hopeful signs of an "embryonic labor union [. . .] in the Simpson avenue 'mart' [. . . white people--if a girl was colored and fairly young, why, it stood to reason she had to be a prostitute" (45). where f]or the recent Jewish holiday, habitues of the 'mart' actually demanded and refused to work for less Chester Himes inadvertently endorses this connection between young black maids and prostitution when than thirty-five cents an hour" (341). 9 While the strains between black workers and Jewish petit bourgeois discussing his life working as a hotel bellhop in Cleveland during the 1930s. He recalls: "Black women entail a legacy of anti-Semitism and racism lurking within this Crisis exposé, the description of the were easy to pick up and made exciting bedmates; maids were the easiest and good-looking whores were housework, with the exception of the extra dishwashing for Orthodox Jews, is typical, with the white the hardest" (28). This continual sexualizing of the young black female body in the employ of white woman expecting immense labor--weekly window washing for instance--from the black woman for a middle-class families is directly connected, as Himes notes, to the history of slavery (18-19); the bodies of pittance--five dollars a week and carfare. One worker lost her position when she took Sunday off because black women were available to the white master to, in the words of Frederick Douglass, "make a her boyfriend was visiting. gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable" (3). Moreover, it shrouds the sex work of the white housewife, whose livelihood as a legal prostitute is covered by displacing it onto the Gwendolyn Brooks's Hattie Scott, one of the residents of A Street in Bronzeville (1945), also resists her maid. employer's demands on her time to pursue her own desire. Unlike Nora in Marita Bonner Occomy's Frye Street, a woman who rejects her lover Sam when she decides to enroll in City College to study law at night, Jacqueline Jones points out that for the black woman, the "forces that shaped the institution of human only to die of pneumonia brought on by exhaustion, 10 Hattie Scott daringly seeks pleasure with a black bondage in the American South endured, albeit in altered form, long after the last slave embraced freedom man, leaving the white woman behind: [. . . as she] toiled [. . .] in the kitchen of a Chicago white woman" (3). During the Depression, urban black women's labor was restricted to domestic work and laundry work; even during World War II, when factory If she don't hurry up and let me out of here. jobs opened up, they were janitorial. Seeking to expose this, the Daily Worker routinely decried women's Keeps pilin' up stuff for me to do. work, especially domestic labor, as slavery, seeing even female industrial workers as "slaves" whose bodies I ain't goin' to finish that ironin'. were being destroyed by brutal work. 11 For instance, a typical page lists the following headlines: "Rubber She got another think comin'. Hey, you Workers Paid $2 Daily for Slavery," "High Maternity Death Rate Under U.S. Slavery," "Women Slave in Whatcha mean talkin' about cleanin' silver? Steel Mill." 12 In this, they echoed the complaints of Bessie Smith in her 1928 "Washwoman's Blues": "All It's eight o'clock now, you fool. day long I'm slavin/ All day long I'm bustin suds [. . .] just to make my livelihood [. . .] rather be a I'm leavin'. Got somethin' interestin' on my mind. scullion/cookin in some white folks' yard/ [. . .] wouldn't have to work so hard." Don't mean night school. ("the date" 52) There is a curious history to the use of "slavery" as a metaphor for wage labor, however. As historian David Again, petty domestic chores, polishing silver, for instance, interfere with the speaker's sexuality and Roediger notes, in antebellum America, "[t]o be a slave, even a white slave, was to be associated with romance. The title of the poem, "the date," [End Page 234] suggests that Hattie Scott plans not only to degradation. Genteel factory women who rejected the term knew this, and knew that slavery implied sexual make love, "somethin' interestin' on my mind," but to go out (perhaps to a nightclub as Eunice does) first. exploitation as well. To be a slave also implied a connection with blackness" (85). During the "heyday of As the narrator of "Queen of the Blues" sings, the point of domestic labor in a white woman's kitchen is to American Communism," as Harvey Klehr calls the Depression decade, [End Page 236] the Party strove to support the man she loves and get his loving in return: portray workers as strong virile examples of democratic men; the image of the robust factory worker standing tall in interracial brotherhood against the forces of decayed, effeminate capitalism appeared in I was good to my daddy. prints, poems, novels, and essays. 13 So it appears surprising that the Daily Worker relies on the imagery of Gave him all my dough. slavery to describe workers, but not so strange when one realizes that the workers were female. Moreover, Scrubbed hard in them white folks' among female workers, racial differences still encoded the black women as a slave while her more revolutionary white sister understood "that we have a government of murderous bandits, parasites and modernize it with the naturalistic settings of urban horror, so that the nightclub and the train station oppressors" and thus could excoriate her as insufficiently politicized. For instance, Fannie Austin exhorted: replaced the attic and the cellar, thus moving domestic settings into public spaces.

Negro working women! When you go to look for a job you find it very hard to get, and, when you do get In fact, with the exception of the insistence on interracial solidarity among black and white women's it, you only obtain ten or twelve dollars for a big week of slavery. You are very much oppressed and auxiliary workers in steel mills, auto plants, and rubber works celebrated by the Communist Party as a vital exploited for a little nothing and you are looked upon by the bosses as not human. You are handled by the aspect of its antiracist work, 18 black and white women were more routinely portrayed only as interacting exploiting parasites as if you are sold to them. They hire and fire you any time they feel like it. Are you in private through domestic service, with white woman employing black woman to tend her children, fix going to let those fat-bellied bosses fool and enslave you forever? Are you going to be pressed down and her meals, and clean her home and laundry. In Fanny Hurst's Imitation of Life, this intimacy is reinforced stepped upon forever--or are you going to unite with your white working women sisters in struggle, in by the different kinds of work the two women perform--Bea pounds the pavement drumming up orders for battle against the capitalist oppressive system--against the wage slave, lynching system? Negro and white maple syrup, Delilah turns the extra syrup into candies to be sold, eventually becoming the basis for B. women workers! ("The Negro" 4) Pullman enterprises. In the 1959 Douglas Sirk film version, the white mother Lora's career takes her out at night as actress and singer; Annie, the black mother, stays home and supports her two families through the She concludes that black women workers should join the Communist Party. "Show your solidarity, show perfect waffles she makes, first for her two charges, her daughter Sarah Jane and Lora's daughter Susie, and your strength! don't sleep--wake up!" (4). then for an ever expanding public until she is running a domestic business while Lora lives the high life of celebrity. Not only is there a connection in the political unconscious linking domestic service to prostitution These metaphors of the slave mart and the slave block to describe domestic labor and women's work in through the bedroom and living room couch, this connection is also transmitted by staging entertaining and industrial labor indicate the long history of invalidating women's labor by sexualizing it as reproductive performing as housework, as Sarah Jane's racial passing eventually leads her to "imitate" in a debased form labor, and differentiating women workers from those members of the "producing classes." 14 Al Gore's use (as nightclub singer) Lora's profession, and as Lora's house begins to resemble a stage set. 19 of the term "working families," recently parsed in the New York Times, calls forth this ambivalence about the nature of work and class conflict within America. 15 Gore's attempt to appeal to the so-called gender In the film Mildred Pierce (1945), Mildred (Joan Crawford) relies on Lottie, her black maid played by gap with the term "working families" feminizes labor as service done on behalf of family (all work is thus Butterfly McQueen, to expand Mildred's pie baking expertise into a booming business, primarily as her domestic labor). [End Page 237] domestic servant but also as her assistant. 20 However, once she makes it, Ida (the [End Page 239] tough white woman played by Eve Arden who first hires Mildred as a waitress) replaces Lottie as a sidekick. In The dynamics between the white female employer and the black maid cannot be seen as merely about James. M. Cain's novel from which the film is adapted, the lower-middle-class women of Glendale economics, however. As Baker and Cooke note, domestic work barely registers as labor by union understand that both domestic service and waitressing are essentially prostitution. When Mildred finally organizers (341); its location in the privacy of the home and the intimate nature of the work--cooking, confesses to her neighbor Mrs. Gessler that she has taken an unspecified job, her cynical neighbor quips: "I cleaning, caring for children--blurs the lines between workplace and home. Domestic workers might hope you picked a five-dollar house. You're too young for the two-dollar trade." Mildred explains that she organize (as they did) across households, 16 but that still did not alter the private day-to-day engagement is a waitress, to which Mrs. Gessler comments: "It rhymes up the same way," something Mildred quickly with the employing woman who is often home alone with the maid. Lutie notes the bizarre change that learns as she hustles tips from businessmen who run their hands up her legs (50). As a single woman, the occurs in her dealings with Mrs. Chandler, who often confided in her when the two were alone, even femme fatale employer offers a kind of solace from the sexual harassment of sons and husbands. The chatting amiably on the train down to New York employer and maid are alone together, sometimes conspiratorially, as the maid becomes protective of her employer and the employer needs the maid's confidence. In the melodramatic noir film of Mildred Pierce, about some story being played up in the newspaper, about clothes or some moving picture. But when the the sidekick role is clearly meant to be understood as a Lesbian role, the lover and consort of an train pulled into Grand Central, the wall was suddenly there [. . .]. There was a firm note of dismissal in her increasingly butch Mildred. Mildred moves from waitress to freelance pie maker to restaurateur, eventually voice so that the other passengers pouring off the train turned to watch the rich young woman and her owning a string of franchises and in the process, like Lora, conspicuously upgrading her house. Thus she colored maid; a tone of voice that made people stop to hear just when it was that the maid was to report has converted domestic labor into a small business by moving domestic functions out of the house and back for work. Because the voice unmistakably established the relation between the blond young woman making public her private acts of fixing drinks, meals, and desserts done before only for her family. Ann and the brown young women. (The Street 51) Petry's Lutie also moves out of her home into a nightlife offered by the Junto Bar and Grill on her street corner when her casual singing along with the jukebox lands her an audition with Boots Smith's band. But It is this awkward intimacy that film noir foregrounds as it revises domestic melodrama to enable a new as she has already surmised from Mrs. Hedges's offer to fix her up with a white man--"on this damn street kind of modernity embodied through unencumbered female aggression and sexuality. you're supposed to want to earn a little extra money sleeping around nights"--there's more to the job than fronting the band (84). Lutie ends up on the lam after accidentally killing Boots, who pimps for Junto and Lutie had noticed that the tensions over sexuality were racial, not class based, as the young white women his white bankrollers who run everything in Harlem, when she tries to get money off him to hire a lawyer to hired to serve meals at the Chandlers never became the object of women's jealousy or men's desire, nor did pry her son from child welfare where he has been taken for mail fraud. She surmises that his life would be they receive the intimate outpourings or the cast-off clothes of the white woman employer. In public, the better off in reform school because as a murderer she'd lose custody anyway. Finding herself thinking and blonde woman oversaw the brown one; employer controlled employee. In private, Lutie fed the bored acting like a criminal, rifling Boots's wallet for money, hiding her bloodied gloves, taking the stairs rather bridge club a ladies lunch and watched Mrs. Chandler kiss a friend's husband on her couch--in fact, she than the elevator down from the apartment, she heads for Penn Station and buys a one-way ticket to watched Mr. Chandler watch her watching Mrs. Chandler. The two women were intimately connected. Of Chicago [End Page 240] where she can disappear, slide into the anonymity of the Southside, maybe get a course, the history of the British novel is a history of tales of domestic labor. From Clarissa to Jane Eyre, job singing at a nightclub, hustling drinks. the domestic novel recorded the plight of the serving girl whose isolation in a large, empty household sparks gothic stories [End Page 238] of lust, terror, and surrender through letters and diaries. For Lutie's poverty and race have sent her on the trajectory prepared for her by the jealous wives of Lyme, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists the consolidation of the bourgeoisie could be tracked Connecticut; she's on the way to being the femme fatale of film noir. Yet, as a black woman, all she can through the travails of the female domestic servant, governess, or teacher alone in the home of a wealthy hope for is the bit part as her maid, the one who covers her trail, helps cover up her crime, backs up her man. Her body and her bedroom become the intimate locus of desire driving the narrative. 17 What Petry alibi, and sings her torch song. The black femme fatale cannot be visualized within film; her presence had done was to take the American version, which racialized the class conflict of the domestic novel, and remains located aurally in recordings of the blueswomen's voices. Ultimately, she finds her way into these novels. We can watch Mildred Pierce and Lucia Harper, as overly devoted mothers of noir melodrama, cover up crimes committed by their ungrateful daughters. Both depend on the domestic servants they household of Delilah and three babies that Bea plugged every morning, into the territory for the day" employ to get them out of a jam, but no one can come to Lutie's or her son's aid, nor can she expect to be (Imitation 77). In The Reckless Moment, Sybil stays home tending the children while Lucia Harper travels picked up from the two-bit bar where she might end up singing. to downtown Los Angeles from their Balboa Island beach house trying to borrow money from pawn shops and loan sharks for the blackmailer hounding her daughter. Similarly, Bea walks the Boardwalk, "with her The classic femme fatale, Ann Savage in Detour (1945) for instance, moves from the street to the bedroom, vigorous, honed-down contours," as an anomaly, "a woman salesman" (78). Walking the streets is an ensnaring the doomed noir hero first by her freedom to move alone through the urban landscape, then by essential element of the white femme fatale's deadly eroticism, as is her "honed-down" phallic presence. 24 her outspoken desire for sex, and finally by her dead body. The femme fatale possesses a power offered by She may end up in the bedroom (or more typically the living room couch) of her doomed lover, but she got the street that is never available to the maternal woman of postwar Hollywood films who is planted in the there by stepping out of the bounds of home. By contrast, the black domestic alters the contours of the kitchen. The domestic woman appears to be denied erotic power because her function is solely bourgeois home, making it into a fit home when her employer is a single mother, co-conspiring with her reproductive. However, the domestic servant, as Lutie learns, produces an economy out of the invisible single white woman employer, and becoming the object of sexual desire when her "mistress" has a reproduction of the home. 21 Living at her work site and having a bedroom in her employer's house husband. resexualizes the reproductive labor of housework, turning her into an object of desire who appears as mobile as the femme fatale pacing the sidewalks nightly, like Ella Raines appears to do in Phantom Lady Gwendolyn Brooks directly takes on this erotic "epistemology" in the chapter bitingly entitled, "the self- (1944). Because she is from elsewhere and will eventually return there too, she has a double life, one never solace." Maud Martha watches in horror the interaction between Miss Ingram, the white woman hawker of of interest overtly to her employers, but nevertheless hanging as a veil between them. She cannot be wholly beauty products, and Maud Martha's beautician Sonia Johnson, as Miss Ingram tries to sell her a new owned and, as free labor, rather than a wife, is able to dismiss herself. Even if "The Mistress terminates the product line for "dark complexions," a lipstick called "Black Beauty" (279). Critic James Smethurst notes interview, Mildred," as Mrs. Forrester reminds Mildred Pierce when she comes for the job of housekeeper, that Brooks's ambivalence about popular culture--including products that remake African-American the "servant" can always take off: "Mrs. Pierce, if you don't mind. And I'm terminating it" (43). Mildred's women's physiques, advertised daily in the Chicago Defender--reflects Brooks's engagement in a debate assertion suggests her connection as a servant to black women. In Langston Hughes's "Madam" series, within the 1930s black Left about the relationship of the masses to popular culture which altered from the Alberta K. Johnson declares: [End Page 241] Third Period (roughly 1928-1934) to the Popular Front (which began in 1935 and continued through the Second World War). Where Langston Hughes, unlike Richard Wright, found in American popular culture My name is Johnson-- the possibility of a jazzy voice with which to indict [End Page 243] its racism, Brooks's sensitivity to Madam Alberta K. gender exploitation made her far more skeptical of its subversive potential. For example, when Maud I do cooking. Martha and her husband Paul travel to downtown Chicago to see a movie at the World Playhouse and find Day's work, too! themselves "the only colored people [there]," it's clear that American popular culture is racially restrictive; Alberta K. Johnson-- not everyone is part of the masses supposedly participating in mass culture (214). Maud Martha's disdain Madam to you. 22 for Miss Ingram's failure to discern black differences--"in the 'Negro group' there were complexions whiter than her own, and other complexions, brown, tan, yellow, cream," she thinks to herself--grows into raw Each may end up running her own business--"The Madam stands for business" ("Madame's Past History" fury at the saleswoman's casual racism (279). Complaining of her working conditions, which force her into 301), but this is not usually the case, as Lutie Johnson demonstrates in The Street. Although she eventually "walking the streets" in all kinds of weather (280), the white saleswoman comments, quite unconsciously, manages to land an underpaid civil servant's job that allows her to move to the disastrous street, Lutie "I work like a nigger to make a few pennies, a few lousy pennies" (281). Popular culture and mass- discovers that the only readily available employment open to a black woman is in a laundry or as a marketed beauty as offered by movies, magazines, and make-up, ultimately degrade black women even prostitute. when they are targeting them.

Mildred Pierce, as a (still) respectable suburban wife and mother, a white woman, can scoff at the haughty Like the private battles between white female employers and black domestics, this rare interaction between Mrs. Forrester, who is herself a kept woman recently installed as the second wife of her wealthy husband; a white woman and black women occurs over work. Again, the work is about intimacy: here, refashioning however a black maid, even if she too were a mother and wife, as Lutie is, was subject to suspicions about the body; there, the home. The white woman again walks the streets, but it's not Jerome Avenue and she's her sexuality. Moreover her possibilities were more severely limited than even Mildred's. Baker and Cooke not in search of a "slave" to bring home to do her housework. In this case, she enters a black correctly called the Jerome Avenue "mart" a slave block because domestic work recalls antebellum (racial businesswoman's shop as supplicant. In a role reversal, she must please the black woman. Mrs. Johnson and sexual) divisions of labor. In Myra Page's Gathering Storm, a 1932 novel about the Gastonia Strike that notes that some black beauticians were "glad to have the whites at their mercy, if only for a few moments. tracks the tripartite class and racial divisions in the milltown of Greenville, Martha Morgan dies fighting off They made them crawl. Then they applied the whiplash. Then they sent the poor creatures off---with no a rape by the "young massa" Elbert Haines, and her family is murdered and lynched after her fiancé orders. Then they laughed and laughed and laughed, a terrible laughter" (278). Their job as beauticians, to avenges her death (122). 23 Page's novel directly links the Gastonia strike to the Scottsboro case and makes redo black women's hair, was now vengefully aimed at refashioning the white women into a "poor clear the remnants of white supremacy in the South, with black workers living as tenants on the plantation creature," dependent upon them for her economic survival. Is Miss Ingram reasserting her racial superiority and with black servants at the mercy of white men. In this situation, the domestic servant lives in a by referring to herself as a nigger before these two dignified black women? Or is she seeking to align bedroom of her employer's house, and her intimate connection with daily life reinforces her sexuality. herself with them in a misguided attempt to name herself another "slave"? For Maud Martha, the answer is While the image of maternal labor seems at odds with sexuality, when that labor is performed by another, it clear: the woman is a racist and should be called on the carpet for insulting Sonia Johnson in her own shop. opens the domestic to exploitation and fantasy. She is at once maternal and sexually available. For the However, Mrs. Johnson argues: "Now 'nigger,' for instance, means to them something bad, or slavey-like, single white female employer, the black domestic becomes the surrogate mother, giving the white woman or low. They don't [End Page 244] mean anything against me. I'm a Negro, not a 'nigger.'" (283). Sonia access to the streets where she can conduct business, have affairs. In Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life, Johnson's assertion of racial pride misses the echoes of the nineteenth-century mill girls' refusal to be called Delilah moves into Bea Pullman's house, allowing Bea to spend days hawking maple syrup up [End Page wage slaves that Maud Martha clearly discerns. Just because streetwalkers were also called white slaves, 242] and down the Atlantic City Boardwalk, using her dead husband's business cards that announce simply doesn't excuse Miss Ingram's reimposition of racial superiority (especially if it comes through her "B. Pullman." She tends to Bea's ailing father and infant daughter as she cares for her own daughter Peola, invocation of gender solidarity). cooking, cleaning, taking them for walks, and then giving Bea nightly backrubs. Eventually, her cooking skills become the basis for Bea's business success. Like the train car whose name Bea assumed with Smethurst argues that during the 1930s, African-American poets were engaged in a project of reclaiming marriage and whose porters were organized into the most powerful black union, "[s]o it was from a going folkloric images of the black masses that could bridge rural southern and urban northern vernaculars. To some degree the figure of the domestic servant in the novels and films I describe is connected to this ambivalent location within and outside of modern political economy and commodity culture. For Lutie, Gwendolyn Brooks's two volumes of poems from the 1940s and her 1953 novel Maud Martha all conclude domestic service opens a pastoral zone skewed by the racism and ultimate destruction of her own family with the end of World War II and its ambivalent effect on black Americans caught within a racist United effected by living with the white family on their tree-lined street. For Page's Martha Morgan, domestic States. Maud Martha notes the returning soldiers parading maimed, but alive, in contrast to "the Negro service differs little from slavery; the women on the slave blocks of northern cities suggest that domestic press (on whose front pages beamed the usual representations of womanly Beauty, pale and pompadoured) service links the urban industrialized north to the antebellum south. Bea Pullman's marketing scheme for [which] carried the stories of the latest of the Georgia and Mississippi lynchings [. . .]" (321). Brooks her sweets business is to photograph Delilah as a stereotypical mammy; her big breakthrough comes when expressly links color stratification within the black community to the racist lynchings of Americans by she dresses her in white toque and apron to cook waffles in her boardwalk stall. In the film version of whites. This is the violent underpinning of America tracked by films noirs, many of which were made by Mildred Pierce, Mildred (Joan Crawford) puts Lottie (Butterfly McQueen) to work on her pies in Glendale, left-wing directors, and adapted from fiction by left-wing writers. Kathie could flee to Acapulco; Lutie only California, just as Vivien Leigh had relied on McQueen in a different role to save Tara a few years before makes it to Chicago, where, like Maud Martha, she'll find her "type is not a Foxy Cat favorite" (Maud 223) in Gone with the Wind (1939). In the novel, the maid Lettie, like Ida and Mildred, is white, so that when her "color" also will be "like a wall" (229). What appears to adhere to the surface of the black woman's Veda, Mildred's daughter, discovers Mildred's uniform hidden in her closet and insists Lettie wear it when body in popular culture is "the plight of the black woman (which is, precisely, a problem of non- she accompanies her two charges to the swimming pool, it confirms Mildred's connection to service and her recognition)" (Doane 241). In postwar Jim Crow America, she cannot be seen; thus her narrative must by potentially aggressive sexuality, but maintains her whiteness. Lettie takes the girls to the pool daily to flirt sung or written, but not filmed. with the lifeguard. But when, in the film, Lottie is seen wearing Mildred's clothes, it suggests another trajectory: like Marlene Dietrich emerging in blonde wig from the gorilla costume in the "Hot Voodoo" When Eunice resists Jeff Bailey's entreaties to help him find Kathie, she underscores, through her deceit, a number of Blond Venus (1932), it points up the camouflage of racialized sexuality. Underneath the commitment to loyalty that Kathie will inevitably betray. The white femme noire double crosses white men costume of blackness--gorilla suit and voodoo, uniform and domestic service--lurks a white movie star, because she can get away with it; she's never had to clean up her own mess. Lutie Johnson and Maud whose value is in maintaining racial purity (and so the bourgeois home). Lutie prides herself in never Martha, keen observers of their cities' streets, recognize her type immediately; they've seen her, read about wearing [End Page 245] any of the hand-me-downs she receives from Mrs. Chandler that were "Designed her, [End Page 247] even worked for her, many times before in Harlem or the southside of Chicago. But for Country Living," sending them instead to her father's girlfriend to be worn "nightly in the gin mill at the they also would recognize Eunice out on a date; she's kin to Brooks's Hattie Scott or Petry's Lutie Johnson corner of Seventh Avenue and 110th Street" (50). These Connecticut clothes serve as a kind of drag to and the other "[y]oung women coming home from work--dirty, tired, depressed--[who] looked forward to stabilize white bourgeois femininity; Lutie's revenge against her employer lies in revealing their function the moment when they would change their clothes and head toward the gracious spaciousness of the Junto by ripping them out of the context of charity and relocating them in a site of transgressive pleasure. The [. . .] because they couldn't bear to look what they could see of the future smack in the face while listening idea that Butterfly McQueen could support Joan Crawford's shoulder pads adds comic relief, but it also to radios or trying or read an evening paper" (The Street 144-45). Like the radio and the newspaper, undercuts Mildred by linking her to servitude, destabilizing her value as broad-shouldered star. proletarian literature and film noir, in part, also dimly outlined their unrecorded stories. Lutie and Maud Martha know exactly what happens to the femme noire. In both versions of Mildred Pierce, Veda's shame that her mother wears a uniform in public is deflected by forcing the maid, hired to help Mildred take care of her growing pie business, to appear as a servant. Crawford's voice-over narration begins by intoning that her life had been little more than service, wearing an apron, forever cooking, cleaning, baking, but the crucial distinction is over the public display of her Paula Rabinowitz is author of They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (1994) and Labor service, which connects her to Lottie. In Ramona Lowe's devastating rebuttal to Imitation of Life, "The and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (1991) and co-editor of Writing Red: Woman in the Window," a short story published in the Urban League's journal, Opportunity, the An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940 (1987). Her forthcoming book is entitled Black protagonist Mrs. Jackson endures the humiliation of publicly dressing as "Aunt Jemima [. . .] a [sic] ol' and White and Noir: Pulping 20th-Century America. She teaches film, American Cultural Studies, and Southern mammy" (the very image of Delilah that Bea had concocted to help sell her maple sugar candies) Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota. to fry chicken in the window of a restaurant of the same name (82-83). Mrs. Jackson, like Mildred Pierce, Notes cannot hide her uniform from her children, who discover her one day while walking home from school and are shamed by the white kids calling her "nigger." Mrs. Jackson lets her children know that "[s]ome work's 1. Naremore connects this to Norman Mailer's "White Negro" as well as the emergence of a critique of dignified 'n' some ain' so dignified. But it all got t' be done. My work's cookin' 'n' there ain' nothin' wrong racism within Hollywood cinema in the wake of the Second World War. with that" (83). Like Maud Martha, she insists on confronting white racism: "'N' son, doan you never let me see you run no more when a body say nigger. You turn roun' 'n' give 'm such a thrashin' they woan never 2. Speaking of the 1940s' "'woman's film' (or more accurately, the 'white woman's film')," Mary Ann Doane forget" (83). notes: "When black women are present [in the 'woman's film'], they are the ground rather than the figure; often they are made to merge with the diegesis. They inhabit the textual sidelines, primarily as servants" As David Roediger and Lauren Berlant point out, questions of labor, racialized as they are in American (232-33). history, are questions of citizenship. 25 During the 1930s, membership in the Communist Party of the United States, or at least as Michael Denning has argued, allegiance to the Popular Front, became a vehicle 3. Fanny Hurst's Imitation of Life (1933) was immediately turned into a film by John Stahl (1934), then for a group of "plebeian" immigrants and migrants and their first generation urban children, to participate, revived in 1959 by Douglas Sirk. It has served as a nodal point for much feminist theorizing on race, [End Page 246] albeit oppositionally, in American culture (60-62). Films noirs, based so often on fiction identity, and sexuality. See Doane 209-48; Heung; Flitterman-Lewis; and Berlant, "National from the 1930s, visualized this dynamic. Central to the femme fatale's position as a mobile figure on the Brands/National Body." landscape was the war and the shifts in populations and work opportunities it provided women. This is, in part, what allows Lutie Johnson to disappear to Chicago--the massive migrations of African Americans to 4. See Jean-Peirre Melville's 1960s film noir homage, Le Samourai, for a French post-civil rights exception industrial cities, coupled with her essential anonymity as an "invisible (wo)man." 26 Within the films noirs to this. of the 1940s, like many of the 1930s novels, there lurks a figure of questionable race or ethnicity--Mexican, Spanish, Italian, Jewish, Greek--dark, but never black, who moves near the femme fatale. The femme 5. The whole question of what the "Left" was during this period is up for grabs, however. James Smethurst fatale, like Kathie Moffet, can establish an identification with her beautiful maid, Eunice, because she has describes the nexus of intellectuals, writers and organizations in Chicago that nurtured Gwendolyn Brooks no place within bourgeois domesticity; yet her visual presence in popular culture is overdetermined. and the "CPUSA subculture" of Chicago (58); he notes that Ann Petry wrote for "the Left-influenced newspaper," People's Voice (41); he cites that in a 1950 Phylon review of "New Poets," Margaret Walker United States entered the Second World War and better-paying jobs opened up in various industries for calls Brooks a "forties" writer (179). See also Maxwell 2. black women, notes Jacqueline Jones, Baltimore newspapers were trumpeting that "The Whip Changes Hands," as black domestics organized to raise wages and improve working conditions. In the South, 6. For a materialist reading of American naturalism, see Howard; for a reading of Cat People as a racial "mysterious 'Eleanor Clubs' (named for the notorious busybody of a First Lady)--groups of black women allegory, see Kaplan. who colluded to withhold their labor from the job market" demanded concessions from white employers (237). 7. Alan Wald and Michael Denning offer different perspectives on this subject, but both agree that limiting cultural radicalism to the novels written during the 1930s (as Barbara Foley, and many others, myself 17. See Armstrong and Eagleton, among other histories of the novel. included, have done) skews the vision of American radicalism by connecting it too firmly to an established genre and a conventional periodization. Yet when I was thinking through the difference gender made on the 18. See Lewis 277-8, Gilfillan 236-255, McKenney 379, and the film Union Maids. proletarian novel in Labor and Desire, I limited my investigations to the years between Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth (1929) and Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps (1941), including works by Tillie 19. See Doane 237-38 for an analysis of the complicated "act" that Sarah Jane performs. Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur that had been completed during the 1930s but never published until the 1970s, but excluding Margaret Walker's Jubilee because she spent over twenty years writing it. By delimiting the 20. In its first issue, Ebony interviewed black stars about their roles in this film; Butterfly McQueen subject as I had--trying to read the novels as direct responses to the pronouncements of literary radicals, complained about still being relegated to playing the maid (McQueen 30). like Michael Gold and Philip Rahv--I had contributed to another form of what I criticized these radicals and their subsequent literary historians and critics of doing: just as they failed to see women's literary 21. Doane argues that "pretense, ontology, and the visible real" are "the core of its [the maternal radicalism because gender and sexuality reconfigured the form and content of proletarian culture, by melodrama's] discourse" (235). Moreover, "blacks are insistently there, never central, but an important limiting my study to a period and a genre, I failed to see how black nationalism and feminism further component of the discourse, of its reality-effect" (239). revised proletarian literature. 22. Smethurst argues that the Madam series may have been written in response to Brooks's "Hattie Scott" 8. Grace Hutchins, in Women Who Work (1934), summarizes the double burden of the working-class poems (247 no. 8),which he claims were a reply to Richard Wright's Native Son (169). See Mullen 167-176 woman: "on top of a long day's work in the home, the working mother goes out for another stretch of five and Smethurst 106, 172-175. or six hours' work, scrubbing and cleaning floors and stairs and toilets [. . .]" (339). 23. For a discussion of the interracial dynamics between women in this and other white women's 9. Two years later, Marvel Cooke, in an article entitled "Modern Slaves," described the efforts of domestics proletarian novels from the early 1930s, see Sowinska. to organize the Domestic Workers' Union and win uniform contracts. 24. See any number of feminist readings of film, but especially relevant is chapter 5 of Doane's Femmes 10. Marita Bonner Occomy, "One True Love" 219. Originally published in Opportunity, this story of the Fatales, "Gilda: Epistemology as Striptease." futility of black female struggles for education may have been an impetus for Brooks' Hattie's bitter assessment of night school. 25. Lauren Berlant, in "Race, Gender, and Nation in The Color Purple," notes that Sofia's refusal to accept the mayor's wife's offer to her that she work as her maid, with her vocal "Hell no!" represents the first time 11. Doc and Lou reported in "Not Sunny for Girl Slaves in 'Sunny' Florida" that black women worked Celie imagines rebellion to the rule of racial oppression (843). That Sofia ultimately lands in prison for this fifteen hour days as waitresses for $5 and picked up "a little extra on the side" from a "man friend" (4). refusal and is then further punished by being paroled into service as the mayor's maid suggests just how Waitressing as a public form of domestic service is thus directly linked to prostitution; it is through the imbricated the state is with the private family. restaurant that the woman finds her clients. Another issue of the Daily Worker features two articles headlined: "Scrub Women Slave While World Sleeps; Wages Miserable," and "In Chicago, Waitresses 26. For a contemporary history of Black migration, which is limited to Black men and their labor power, Slave 70 Hour Week as Union Officials Fail Them." Again these women are defined as slaves because they see Bontemps and Conroy. serve and scrub, like domestics, in public places. Works Cited 12. Daily Worker (23 September, 1929): 3. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 13. See Rabinowitz, especially 34-58; Faue, especially 69-99; and Melosh, especially 15-32. On the 1987. connections between masculinity and interracial solidarity, see Maxwell, especially chapter 4. Austin, Fannie. "The Negro Working Women." The Daily Worker 2 May 1930: 4. 14. See Roediger 50-55; he explains that in Republican rhetoric this term allied artisans, small manufacturers, craftsmen, as well as mechanics, workingmen and tradesmen against "the parasitic designs Baker, Ella, and Marvel Cooke. "The Bronx Slave Market." The Crisis Nov. 1935: 330+. of bankers, undeserving paupers, monopolists, aristocrats and corporations" (50) as well as slaves. Battenfeld, Mary. "'The World Problem is a Personal Problem': Women Document the 1930s." American 15. See Seelye A18. The phrase was meant to appeal to the "waitress mom" but it seemed to resonate well Studies Association Conference. Fountainbleu Hotel, Miami Beach, Florida. 27-30 Oct. 1988. with more professional women--teachers and day care licensers are the two interviewed in the article--who also call themselves "working class." Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 217-251. 16. In "Domestic Workers Too Must Organize and Fight," an article that appeared in a special issue of The Daily Worker entitled "Working Woman Special," the writer exhorts houseworkers, maids, chambermaids, Berlant, Lauren. "National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life." Comparative American Identities: day workers and live-ins to "build a union of domestic workers to defend our interests" (8). By the time the Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. Hortense Spillers. New York: Routledge, 1991. 110-40.

------. "Race, Gender, and Nation in The Color Purple." Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 831-859. Howard, June. Form and History in American Naturalism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1985.

Bonner Occomy, Marita. "One True Love." (1941). Frye Street and Environs: The Collected Works of Hughes, Langston. "Madam's Calling Cards." Rampersad 301. Marita Bonner. Ed. Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy. Boston: Beacon, 1987. 219-27. ------. "Madam's Past History." Rampersad 301. Bontemps, Arna, and Jack Conroy. They Seek a City. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1945. Hurst, Fannie. Imitation of Life. 1933. New York: Permabooks, 1959. Brooks, Gwendolyn. Blacks. Chicago: Third World, 1994. Hutchins, Grace. "Double Burden." Women Who Work. 1934. Nekola and Rabinowitz 335-339. ------. "the date." A Street in Bronzeville. 1945. Brooks, Blacks 52. ______. "Women Under Capitalism." Women Who Work . 1934. Nekola and Rabinowitz 329-334. ------. Maud Martha. 1953. Brooks, Blacks 141-321. Imitation of Life. Dir. John Stahl. Universal, 1934. ------. "Queen of the Blues." A Street in Bronzeville. 1945. Brooks, Blacks 56. ------. Dir. Douglas Sirk. Universal-International, 1959. Cain, James, M. Mildred Pierce. 1941. New York: Penguin, 1946. "In Chicago, Waitresses Slave 70 Hour Week as Union Officials Fail Them." Daily Worker 13 Mar. 1929: Cooke, Marvel. "Modern Slaves." The Amsterdam News 16 Oct. 1937. Lerner 232-34. 4.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture. London: Verso, 1996. Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Vintage, 1985. Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991. Kaplan, E. Ann. "The 'Dark Continent' of Film Noir: Race, Displacement and Metaphor in Tourneur's Cat Doc and Lou. "Not Sunny for Girl Slaves in 'Sunny' Florida." Daily Worker 4 Jan. 1929: 4. People (1942) and Welles's The Lady from Shanghai (1948)." Women in Film Noir. 2nd ed. Ed. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1998. 183-201. "Domestic Workers Too Must Organize and Fight." Daily Worker 2 Mar. 1931: 8. Klehr, Harvey. The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade. New York: Basic Books, Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. 1984. (1845). Garden City, NY: Dolphin, 1963. Lerner, Gerda, ed. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. New York: Vintage, 1973. Eagleton, Terry. The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982. Lewis, Mollie. "Women in Steel." Nekola and Rabinowitz 276-278.

Faue, Elizabeth. Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men and the Labor Movement in Lowe, Ramona. "The Woman in the Window." Nekola and Rabinowitz 79-83. Minneapolis, 1915-1945. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991. Maxwell, William J. New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between and Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. "Imitation(s) of Life: The Black Woman's Double Determination as Troubling Wars. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 'Other.'" Literature and Psychology 34.4 (1988): 44-57. McKenney, Ruth. Industrial Valley. 1939. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. McQueen, Butterfly. "Mildred Pierce." Ebony Jan. 1946: 30.

Gilfillan, Lauren [Harriet Woodbridge]. I Went to Pit College. New York: Viking, 1934. Melosh, Barbara. Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1991. "Harlem Crime." The Crisis Dec. 1939: 366+. Mildred Pierce. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Brothers, 1945. Harris, Trudier. From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1982. Mitchell, Louise. "Slave Markets Typify Exploitation of Domestic." Daily Worker 5 May, 1940. Lerner 229-231. Heung, Marian. "'What's the Matter with Sara Jane?' Daughters and Mothers in Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life." Cinema Journal 26.3 (1987): 21-43. Mullen, Bill. Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935-1946. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999. Himes, Chester. The Quality of Hurt. New York: Paragon, 1972. Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. "High Maternity Death Rate Under U.S. Slavery." Daily Worker 23 Sept. 1929: 3. Nekola, Charlotte, and Paula Rabinowitz, eds. Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940. New York: The Feminist Press, 1987.

Out of the Past. Dir Jacques Tourneur. RKO, 1947.

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"Women Slave in Steel Mill." Daily Worker 23 Sept. 1929: 3.

Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. 1941. New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1988.

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Environmental Politics Environmental Politics 277 Vol. 17, No. 2, April 2008, 276–298 (see Schlosberg and Bomberg, this volume).1 Like horsemen of the apocalypse, the ‘death’ prognosticators maintain that despite the significant gains made by the US environmental movement, it has failed miserably in its goal to create a successful movement that would inspire widespread popular support or that could muster sufficient political strength to confront effectively the earth’s Living environmentalisms: coalition politics, social reproduction, ecological crises, especially the big ones, like global climate change. A similarly and environmental justice bleak assessment of the world’s environmental report card, and an implicit criticism of the political vitality of the environmental movement, was launched Giovanna Di Chiro* early in 2005 with the release of the United Nation’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a five-year study compiled by an international panel of scientists, Mount Holyoke College Massachusetts, USA which warned that if current levels of resource exploitation and waste production continue unabated, the world’s ecosystems will not support life on earth or sustain future generations of humans or other species.2 The overall This paper examines the intersectional, coalition politics forged by activists message from these prominent environmentalist voices is that the battle to in US environmental justice and women’s rights organisations. This coalitional politics articulates environmental and feminist concerns and protect the environment is being lost. rejects the limitations of a narrow-focused politics in favour of a more The language invoking ‘inadequate gains’ and ‘losing ground’ also surfaces strategic, relational vision of social and environmental change. Framed by in critical assessments of the outcomes of what is generally considered a the Marxist-feminist concept of ‘social reproduction’, the analysis addresses separate social movement – the international women’s movement – in terms of the complex ways that globalised capitalism has transformed state and its success in improving the status and wellbeing of women around the world. corporate responsibilities for social reproduction. The neoliberal policies of For example, hundreds of delegates attending ‘Beijing 10’ – the meeting of privatisation and deregulation have eroded the assurance of a liveable þ wage, affordable healthcare, decent education, breathable air, and clean the United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women convened in 2005 to water. Drawing on several examples from grassroots movements and assess the advances in women’s rights in the 10 years since the groundbreaking community-based organisations, the essay discusses how diverse women UN Women’s conference was held in Beijing – concluded that the condition of activists conceptually link environmental justice and reproductive rights women around the world is worsening as evidenced in virtually all indicators: issues in their communities’ struggles to sustain everyday life (or, to accomplish ‘social reproduction’). The innovative coalition politics of deteriorating health, escalating violence, declining access to education, decent organisations such as Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice and the jobs, and civil rights, and rising poverty levels worldwide. A key issue that rose Environmental Justice and Climate Change Coalition are generating to the top of the Beijing 10 agenda, and one that the delegates asserted dynamic ‘living environmentalisms’ with enough political vision and continues to limit women’sþ equality, status, and advancement around the community ‘groundedness’ to build broadly-based social–environmental world, was that of women’s reproductive health and rights to sexual freedom.3 collaborations that stand a chance at compelling people to take stronger action to curb problems as big as global warming. Leading feminist analysts speaking in 2006 at the 20th Annual International Conference on Reproductive Freedom warned that ‘we are not winning, we are losing, and if more people don’t come out for reproductive rights in this country and internationally, the ‘‘right to choose’’, in its fullest sense, will be an There has been some talk of late about the alleged ‘death’ of environmentalism. empty promise for thousands of poor and low-income women’.4 Whether viewed as a timely critique of a moribund and out-of-touch Activists in both the environmental movement and the women’s movement environmental movement, or as a gratuitous bit of grandstanding by a couple have struggled with how to represent the urgency of their message to a broader of living dead white men (pace Wendy Wasserstein) seemingly oblivious to audience and have felt discouraged by what appears to be dwindling interest decades of vibrant environmental activism by people of colour and Third and participation in these movements. In this paper I argue that we can look to World activists, the publication in 2004 by Michael Shellenberger and Ted the innovative intersectional politics being shaped by a host of environmental Nordhaus proclaiming environmentalism’s demise has generated a lot of heat justice and women’s rights organisations to find evidence that ‘environmental’ awareness and action are very much alive,andconcernfor‘reproductive’ freedom extends far beyond what has been considered its customary political *Email: [email protected] terrain. I discuss some promising developments in the analyses of women activists who link environmental and feminist concerns and reject the ISSN 0964-4016 print/ISSN 1743-8934 online limitations of a narrow-focused politics in favour of a more strategic, relational Ó 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09644010801936230 http://www.informaworld.com 278 G. Di Chiro Environmental Politics 279 vision of social and environmental change. I explore the ‘politics of Defining what counts as an environmental problem and what doesn’t articulation’ (Hall 1986, Haraway 1992) forged by environmental and social invites certain alliances and inhibits others, and the environmental movement justice activists who identify the important intersections between ‘reproductive’ has shot itself in the foot by adopting the definitional frontiers that delegate and ‘environmental’ issues, thereby challenging western societies’ categorical different issues as either inside or outside the environmental ‘frame’. The distinction between humans and nature and the normative binaries partitioning conceptual-ideological mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, which draw the separate spheres of production and reproduction. Such political-ecological clear distinctions between problems that are defined as ‘social’ (jobs, housing, articulations identify, and address, patterns of social reproduction. They also transportation, public health, racial and sexual inequality, violence, poverty, strive to address threats to such relationships associated with the rise of reproductive freedom) and those termed ‘environmental’ (global warming, neoliberalism: the re-privatisation, commodification, and increasing deregula- natural resource conservation, pollution, species extinction, overpopulation) tion of all things relating to social wellbeing including the assurance of a have led to the endless fragmentation of progressive movements and to the liveable wage, affordable healthcare, decent education, breathable air, and dwindling appeal of liberal/democratic politics in the US. Sadly, environment- clean water. Adopting the position held by many ecofeminists that all alism got it all wrong. environmental issues are reproductive issues (see Mies and Shiva 1993, Merchant The critique of how the environmental movement’s ‘boundary work’ 1996, Silliman and King 1999), I examine examples of the political-conceptual (upholding western cultures’ categorical distinction between ‘nature’ and coalitions and articulations formulated by women activists that make clear the ‘society’) has crippled coalition politics boasts a respected history (see social and environmental dangers inherent in hypercapitalism’s relentless Bookchin 1990, Darnovsky 1992, Di Chiro 1992, Schlosberg 1999), yet this subordination of reproduction to production (Colker 1998). The struggle for history remains largely absent in the ‘death’ thesis. In a supportive, yet critical, social reproduction is the common ground that joins up the diverse, genuinely response to the ‘death’ issue titled, ‘The soul of environmentalism’, a group of pro-life social movements vigorously engaged in life-and-death battles for environmental justice scholars and activists historicised the problem of environmental justice and reproductive freedom. conceptual and political fragmentation, arguing that ‘the environmental justice and sustainability movements have been reframing environmental issues for more than 20 years’ building ‘transformative alliances’ that ‘get people to In(toxic)ating alliances: reframing common ground, moving toward coalition recognize the inter-connectedness of social, economic, and environmental politics issues’ (Gelobter et al. 2004, p. 22). Claiming that ‘environmentalism, like According to the aforementioned ‘eco-morticians’5 proclaiming environment- poetry, has a soul deeper and more eternal than the one described by its alism’s death, the major failure of the environmental movement has been its examiners’, the ‘Soul’ critics contend that ‘the key to environmentalism’s new commitment to a narrow minded and objectivist practice of ‘boundary work’ life’ is not through sacrificial and/or metaphorical death but by breaking (Gieryn 1999, Jasanoff 2005) bent on demarcating the definitional limitations through denial to rediscover the movement’s deep-rooted ties to human rights of what counts as ‘the environment’, the entity which the movement has seen and social justice, a lineage which is embodied in and ‘nurtured by the itself in the business of protecting and saving. In their essay, Shellenberger and Environmental Justice and Sustainability movements’ (p. 6). Nordhaus provide a compelling instantiation of the perils of a ‘bounded In agreement with critics of the ‘death’ thesis, I look to the counter-histories environmentalism’ (Gottlieb 2001) that separates environmental issues from or ‘challenger environmentalisms’ (Darnovsky 1992) such as the environmental social ones. They recount the history of the US auto industry’s and the justice movement (EJM) or the many ‘just sustainability’ developments autoworker unions’ ruinous 1980s decision to tie their fortunes to the niche occurring around the world, for potent examples of the kinds of cross-cutting market of the gas-guzzling, landscape-shredding, pollution-spewing SUV, alliances that are already reframing and reshaping the contours of envir- while the environmentalists went after fuel efficiency and global warming – onmentalism (see, for example, Ageyman et al. 2003, Stein 2004, Bullard 2005, neither group recognising the necessity or potential to hammer out a ‘win–win’ Shiva 2005, Sumner 2005). The reframings I examine are representative of the alliance (also see Bradsher 2002). The inability of the environmental groups to hard-won outcomes of the conceptual and mundane material work that break out of their rigid environmental categories (by, for example, refusing to Bernice Johnson Reagon (1983) describes as coalition politics:transcommunal identify national health insurance as an ‘environmental’ issue, a public policy alliances and communities of practice forged in the knowledge that survival that would unshackle the auto companies from paying rising healthcare costs depends not on the retreat to the comfort of ‘home’ (what some refer to as and allow them instead to invest in manufacturing fuel-efficient cars) resulted identity politics), but on the worldly and laborious engagements with the in a lost opportunity for environmentalists to unite with labour and to bring fleshly realities of socio-ecological interdependence. While Reagon’s analysis of corporations into the fold in a mutually beneficial alliance combining the goals coalition politics may be soulful (deeply reminiscent of African American of environmental rationality and economic security. musical and spiritual traditions), it does not make its argument by promising 280 G. Di Chiro Environmental Politics 281 eternity,eitherofa‘soul’orofaparticularcoalitionorsocialmovement. Rather than prefigured on an organic model having an ‘eternal or natural The significance of social reproduction shape to their configuration’ (Clifford 2001, p. 478), Reagon’s coalitions result As many feminist theorists have pointed out, the reproductive economy, the from the strategic assemblage of ‘uncomfortable’ but necessary social, supposed ‘private’ sphere of reproduction (or more precisely, ‘social economic, environmental, and cultural practices implemented by different reproduction’), is often ignored or trivialised in mainstream political, communities joining together in mutual recognition that ‘I ain’t gonna let you economic, and environmental analyses of the worldwide impacts of globalisa- live unless you let me live. Now there’s danger in that, but there’s also the tion and its neoliberal policies (Katz 2001, Peterson 2003, Marston 2004). Even possibility that we can both live – if you can stand it’ (1983, p. 365). Coalition the most critical approaches to theorising the global political economy and its politics is more about life than death. involvement in environmental crises and transformations have sought to Coalition politics is also about articulation –thepower-laden,non-innocent describe these shifts in terms of ‘power and production and as primarily practices of interconnection, alliance-building, and ‘joined-up thinking’ involving the interplay between states and markets’ (Bakker and Gill 2003, (Agyeman et al. 2003). Articulation is produced by diverse social actors p. 3). For many feminist analysts, this narrow ontology of global society as through engaging ‘situated knowledges’ about the world and creating new ‘states and markets’ misses the ways the current era of restructuring has collective eco-political entities in the hopes of ‘surviving together’ (Haraway transformed the social processes and institutions associated with the creation 1992, p. 311). A politics of articulation understands boundary work and frontier and maintenance of communities, and the social, economic, and ecological effects; it is aware of the possibility that hooking up and recombining ‘can make conditions supporting human security and sustainability. Such processes, aunityoftwodifferent elements under certain conditions’ (Hall 1986, p. 53) but institutions, and conditions that are associated with human health, education, the elements/partners are not eternal;they‘areneversetonceandforall’ and welfare (and upon which, ultimately, all production, exchange, and (Haraway 1992, p. 314). Moreover, the emerging collective ensembles, while accumulation rest) correspond to the feminist concept of ‘social reproduction’ predicated on a coalitional consciousness, are always contested and themselves (Bakker and Gill 2003, p. 18). made up of oppositional and differential practices, relations, and under- Social reproduction is the intersecting complex of political-economic, socio- standings. Arguing that the politics of ‘articulation is work, and it may fail’, cultural, and material-environmental processes required to maintain everyday Haraway insists that ‘commitment and engagement, not their invalidation, in an life and to sustain human cultures and communities on a daily basis and emerging collective are the conditions of joining knowledge-producing and intergenerationally. It encompasses and critically analyses both the enabling world-building practices’ (p. 315). The hard work essential to political and dis-enabling conditions for ‘biological reproduction, the reproduction of articulation – the linking of diverse movements, common ideas, and situated labour power, and the social practices connected to caring, socialization, and knowledges in the hopes of surviving together – constitutes coalition politics the fulfilment of human needs’ (p. 4), as well as the social relations of power reaching toward the vision of environmental and reproductive justice. within which these conditions are embedded, regulated, and transformed. The The mainstream environmental movement and the women’s movement conditions for social reproduction are always in dialectical relation with have struggled with the difficulties of developing a politics of articulation, production and so are consistently restructured as capitalist systems shift to largely, I would argue, due to the problems of frontier effects – the new political economies creating new regimes of production and accumulation impossibility of finding common ground in the risky terrain that ultimately (Katz 2001). comes down to ‘our issues versus your issues’. Can coalition politics be The recent intensification of globalised capitalist production has changed sustained by reframing ‘common ground’? The women environmental justice the face of social reproduction, and has made its accomplishment (including and reproductive justice activists whose work I examine engage in a coalition the ability to procure decent food, clean water, shelter, clothing and healthcare) politics that reframes or rearticulates environmental and reproductive rights difficult if not impossible for many people around the world. Feminist critics issues in terms of the necessities for sustaining everyday life, what Marxists and have pointed out how neoliberalism’s mantra of privatisation, flexibility, and feminists have termed social reproduction. An analysis of social reproduction mobile capital has eroded the capitalist state’s commitment and responsibility as an environmental issue allows us to ‘jump scales’ (Smith 1992) to understand for social reproduction (e.g. Brodie 2003, Katz 2004, Mitchell et al. 2004, Piven the impacts of the current mode of production – corporate globalisation – on 2004). The current restructuring of social reproduction has had devastating the survivability of individual bodies, particular communities, national effects and is now signified by: the withdrawal of government entitlements and cultures, and the earth itself. The death of everyday life,andallthatsustains protections, by public disinvestments in education, social welfare, housing, it, becomes the focus of the intersectional analyses forging dynamic coalition healthcare and environmental regulation, and by the backing away of politics which brings together social movements committed to environmental corporate commitment and investments in particular places, workforces, and and reproductive rights. communities. Global economic restructuring policies such as SAPs (structural 282 G. Di Chiro Environmental Politics 283 adjustment policies), welfare reform, free-trade agreements, low wage labour (e.g. Seager 1993, 2006, Kraus 1994, Silliman and King 1999). For example, the migration, environmental deregulation, and the privatisation of public most enduring connection to issues of reproduction identified by the amenities hit hardest in the arena of social reproduction, but they are rarely mainstream environmental movement has been what feminists consider a analysed as such. As Katz (2001, pp. 701, 714) emphasises, ‘social reproduction negative one, that is, the focus on ‘overpopulation’ and on reducing global is the missing figure in current globalization debates. This is a serious population growth by curtailing the ‘unsustainably high fertility rates’ of omission . . . The widespread and serious environmental problems symptomatic women from poor countries and poor women of colour in the US (Hartmann of capitalist relations of production have received plenty of public attention, 1995, Bandarage 1997, Seager and Hartmann 2005). The use of alarmist but generally not as problems of social reproduction’ (pp. 710, 714). population arguments that identify poor women’s fertility as the major Globalised capitalist production has put at risk the realisation of social ecological threat to the planet (conveniently shifting the blame from the reproduction for a large portion of the world, while at the same time enabling consumption and production patterns of the North) has led to the historically unsurpassed wealth accumulation for the few. I am arguing for the recommendation and in some cases implementation of aggressive and coercive resuscitation and rethinking by both environmentalists and feminists of the population control mechanisms that restrict women’s reproductive rights and dynamic and dialectical relationship between production and social reproduc- endanger their health, and also to the support of regressive anti-immigrant tion in the hopes of generating effective political articulations across these policies that portray Third World women as ‘over-breeders’ burdening the diverse social movements. Can revitalised political-ecological analyses of social country’s resources and threatening national security (Hartmann and reproduction aid in producing these potentially productive linkages? The Hendrixson 2005). Such concern about reproductive issues has not made for struggle for social reproduction, the ‘fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of agoodmarriagebetweenmainstream/Northernenvironmentalistsand everyday life’ (Katz 2001, p. 711), is the common thread articulating ‘selected proponents of feminist environmentalism. traces of globalization on particular grounds’ (p. 721) across scales and across In a similar vein, the mainstream/Northern women’s movement, particu- diverse environmental justice and reproductive rights issues. These cross-scale larly its reproductive freedom wing, has been slow to recognise and embrace and cross-issue articulations and coalitions centre on the maintenance and conceptual and political intersections with broader environmental arguments long-term sustainability of everyday life (the achievement of social reproduc- (particularly those put forth by the environmental justice movement) or with tion). They are emerging as the life force of progressive, coalition politics. the concerns raised by women of colour and poor women about what it means to struggle for and have access to ‘reproductive rights’. Over the past three decades the movement for reproductive rights in the US has been shifting from All environmental issues are reproductive issues: political ecologies of social what many feminists have argued has been a single-issue movement (the pro- reproduction choice battle for abortion rights) to an international movement that is The emergence in the 1980s and 1990s of theories and actions forging committed to a much wider set of social justice issues and that defines intersectional analyses between feminist and environmentalist agendas ‘reproductive rights’ and ‘choice’ in much broader terms. This redefining of signalled a moment ripe with the possibilities for political articulation between reproductive rights, largely spearheaded by Third World feminists and US the two social movements (e.g. Plant 1989, Diamond and Orenstein 1990, Mies women of colour, recognises the interlocking forms of oppression that different and Shiva 1993, Merchant 1996, Sturgeon 1997). Writing and organising under women face. This view critiques the dominant framing of ‘choice’ as situated the compelling, yet ultimately contentious, label ‘ecofeminism’, scholars and within a neoliberal tradition that: activists drew critical connections among diverse issues including: social injustices based on race, gender, class, and sexuality; ecological interconnect- locates individual rights at its core, and treats the individual’s control over her body as central to liberty and freedom. This emphasis on individual choice, edness, peace and anti-militarism, domestic violence and the ‘rape’ of nature, however, obscures the social context in which individuals make choices, and the control of women’s bodies and reproductive freedom, toxic contamination discounts the ways in which the state regulates populations, disciplines individual and women’s and children’s health, the Western, Judeo-Christian, and bodies, and exercises control over sexuality, gender, and reproduction . . . ‘Choice’ scientific worldviews founded on the ‘control of nature’, animal rights and implies a marketplace of options in which women’s right to determine what environmental ethics, colonialism and Indigenous peoples’ rights, earth-based happens to their bodies is legally protected, ignoring the fact that for women of color, economic and institutional constraints often restrict their ‘choices’. cultural traditions and spirituality, and community-based, sustainable living. (Silliman et al. 2004, p. 5) Despite this apparent abundance of potentially overlapping causes, many feminist activists have lamented what they see as disinterest or, more For women whose communities struggle with high unemployment rates, accurately, wilful ignorance, on the part of the dominant environmental escalating poverty, unreliable, inaccessible, or dangerous contraceptives, and paradigm regarding how the two movements could intersect and join forces poor health and low life expectancy rates, the decision to have an abortion is 284 G. Di Chiro Environmental Politics 285 largely not experienced as an act of reproductive freedom or choice. Moreover, on indifference, to the ongoing federal and state erosion of Roe v. Wade in light of the history of US eugenics laws, coercive pro-natalist and anti- limiting access to abortion rights for low-income and poor women) has led to natalist population control policies, immigration restrictions, sterilisation meaningful or sustained coalition-building with social and environmental abuses, and state-mandated fertility regulation efforts (a feature of the US’s justice movements in the developing world or with people of colour in the US. current welfare reform policy), the question of under what conditions one can For many Third world women and feminists of colour, the environmentalist’s exercise the right to not have children or the right to have children becomes population control agenda, and the US women’s movement’s narrow-focused central. Reproduction, therefore, is abortion rights agenda appear to be about limiting their rights to have children, to reproduce, or to sustain their communities. These agendas can not just a matter of individual choice. Reproductive health policy . . . reflects resonate too closely with the histories of colonialism, anti-immigration policies which people are valued in our society; who is deemed worthy to bear children and capable of making decisions for themselves. Reproductive decisions are made and genocide. In light of these problematic roadblocks to coalition, can we within a social context, including inequalities of wealth and power. Reproductive identify existing alliances or political articulations that represent more freedom is a matter of social justice.(Roberts2000,p.4) proactive and productive intersections between reproductive rights and environmental politics? Emphasising this point, long time women’s rights activist Loretta Ross argues that for poor women of colour, ‘our ability to control what happens to our bodies is constantly challenged by poverty, racism, environmental degradation, Sustainability and everyday life: environmental justice as social reproduction sexism, homophobia, and injustice in the United States’ (Silliman et al. 2004, Having taught for many years in both environmental studies and women’s and p. 4). In short, reproductive freedom is about both individual and social gender studies departments, I am ever more persuaded by the rationality reproduction. underlying the argument that all environmental issues are reproductive issues; The intersectional politics of reproductive justice, therefore, has articulated efforts to protect the health and integrity of natural systems – water, air, soil, the rights to bodily self-determination and the right to safe contraception biodiversity – are struggles to sustain the ecosystems that make all life possible choices and abortion (the right to not have children) with the right to have and enable the production and reproduction processes upon which all children and to be able to raise them, to educate them, to keep them healthy communities (human and non-human) depend. In other words, environmental and safe, and to provide them with the opportunities to live meaningful and struggles are about fighting for and ensuring social reproduction. While productive lives. The reproductive justice movement, therefore, asserts that the ecofeminists forcefully challenged mainstream environmentalism’s focus on exercising of an individual woman’s reproductive rights and freedom of choice protecting an external and endangered ‘nature’, and shifted the frame to an requires attention to and the realisation of many other social, economic, civic, understanding of ecology as the interconnectedness between humans and and environmental goals, including good jobs and economic security, freedom nature, it is the women (and men) activists fighting for environmental justice from domestic violence, sexual coercion, and forced sterilisation, affordable who have most convincingly foregrounded the everyday life (and death) stakes healthcare, educational opportunities for women and good schools for at the root of their environmental politics. children, decent housing and transportation, and a clean and healthy The history of the environmental justice movement chronicles the existence environment. This emergent challenge to the dominant discourse of of a long-standing, sustained challenge to the limitations of a single-focus reproductive-rights-as-abortion-rights identifies these social, economic, and environmental movement.6 It also substantiates the intersectional commit- environmental issues also as significant reproductive issues, thereby construct- ments at the core of its epistemological standpoints and political philosophies ing a politics of intersectionality recognising the important interconnections (an historical record about which the two aforementioned authors calling for between individual rights and the broader aims of social justice. This feminist ‘death’ revealed their apparent ignorance). Critics using the environmental reframing of the concept of ‘reproductive justice’ points to the significance of justice frame have argued that the mainstream environmental movement (such the struggle to achieve social reproduction for poor women and women of as Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, Nature Conservancy) has colour and develops a critique of its relative invisibility in the political ineffectively made the connections between the survival of humans and the consciousness of the middle-class, predominantly white, reproductive rights survival of the environment. It has instead focused its attention on an movement. abstracted idea of nature/environment that is separate from humans; in other Neither the focus by some mainstream/Northern environmentalists on words, it has been preoccupied with protecting uninhabited wilderness areas, reducing the fertility rates of poor and Third World women, nor the focus by or on saving endangered species. Or it has fixated on a mono-causal peril of the mainstream reproductive rights movement on advancing abortion rights overpopulation, blaming the world’s deteriorating environment on the birth for middle-class women (and responding with lukewarm opposition, verging rate of poor women from the Third World rather than on the cultures of 286 G. Di Chiro Environmental Politics 287 overconsumption, pollution, and waste originating in its own backyards. This colour, define the environment as the places in which we live our lives, build categorical separation of nature and culture, common in much mainstream our communities, and have a chance for earthly survival. ‘Sustainability’, environmental discourse, has led to claims that the environmental movement therefore, becomes about securing the enabling conditions for the accomplish- ‘cares more about whales and owls than it does poor people’ (Newman 1994, ment of social reproduction, an achievement that, in an era of intensified p. 42). It appears to many environmental justice activists from around the globalisation, and for many poor and marginalised communities around the world that for mainstream/Northern environmental elites, the survival (aka world, has in fact become an ‘endangered species’. social reproduction) of an ‘endangered species’ is more important than that of In the final sections of this essay, I discuss examples of how environmental their families and communities. Moreover, as some critics have argued, the justice and reproductive justice activists are demonstrating the intersections institutionalisation in the 1990s of the concept of ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustainable between the health of their environments and the future health and survival development’ (largely embraced by Northern governments and international into the future of their communities. These examples suggest the potential for NGOs) on the surface looked as though it should have been the the emergence of a nascent politics of articulation and coalition-building environmentalist’s counterpart to the idea of social reproduction. But instead around the localised effects of a common set of global processes – that is, it looked more like a global campaign to sustain social and economic political analyses of how global capitalist production threatens localised development (aka social reproduction) in the rich countries and limit it in the struggles for social reproduction. poor countries (Conca and Dabelco 1998, Ageyman et al. 2003, Di Chiro 2003).7 The diverse, international network of EJM activists and organisations, Mapping social reproduction and environmental justice in Asian Pacific Islander while not speaking in one voice on all issues, adopts a much more relational communities idea of humans and nature and develops what some have referred to as an In response to growing threats to reproductive freedom and women’s self- ‘environmentalism of everyday life’ (Pen˜ a2005,p.153).Ratherthan determination signalled by the 1989 Supreme Court decision in Webster v. understanding nature as an exotic elsewhere that is separate from our daily Reproductive Health Services8,AsianandPacificIslander(API)feministsinthe lives and that we might visit on a summer vacation or study in a biology class, San Francisco Bay area ignited a new wave of reproductive rights activism activists in the EJM locate ‘nature’ and the ‘environment’ in the geographies of broadening the pro-choice agenda to include the specific concerns of API everyday life: the places in which we ‘live, work, play, learn, and worship’. This communities and their struggles for social reproduction. Co-founder of Asian perspective of the ‘everydayness’ofnaturebringsenvironmentalissueshome,so Pacific Islanders for Choice (APIC), Audrey Shoji, argued that: to speak, and activists make connections between the health of human bodies and the health of the neighbourhoods we live in, the water we drink, the air we For communities who have been forbidden from immigrating to this country, owning land, interracial marriage; who have endured internment based solely on breathe, and the food we eat. In so doing, EJM activists examine how the ancestry, and forced or coerced sterilization and birth control, access to combination or intersection of specific economic, social, and environmental reproductive health care is indeed a basic civil right essential to self-determination conditions might dis-enable or make very difficult an individual’s or and survival. (pp. 176–177) community’s ability to survive into the future. Over the past several years, historical and ethnographic accounts of environmental injustices have revealed The struggle for ‘reproductive rights’ enabling social reproduction for API many of the dis-enabling conditions that limit a community’s sustainability and communities, therefore, needed to address more fully these historical, that are suffered disproportionately by poor people and communities of colour. economic, and social complexities. APIC’s members saw the need to enlarge These conditions include, for example, living next to a polluting facility that the organisation’s original mission, which had focused on abortion rights and dumps toxic chemicals into your neighbourhood, working in hazardous on procuring reproductive health services for low-income and immigrant API workplaces, living in substandard housing, teaching and learning in unhealthy women. While maintaining their resolve to bring an API perspective to the schools, or having your tribe’s ancestral land expropriated as the preferred site largely white, middle-class, pro-choice/reproductive rights dialogue, Bay Area to bury the country’s high level nuclear waste. feminists also recognised the importance of reaching out to broader API By hitching together all of these diverse issues, activists in the EJM – much constituencies and organisations, most of which have concerns extending like the activists organising under the banner of reproductive justice – also beyond abortion alone. These concerns include issues such as access to basic engage in a politics of intersectionality linking a variety of problems that have healthcare, the many barriers to access based on race/ethnicity, linguistic not been deemed properly ‘environmental’ by the mainstream movement. isolation, and cultural differences, the availability of decent, affordable housing Instead of seeing the environment as separate from people and communities, and transportation, the high rates of unemployment and harsh working EJM activists, who are predominantly low-income women and women of conditions, the access to good schools and educational opportunities, and the 288 G. Di Chiro Environmental Politics 289 prevalence of human trafficking targeting Asian immigrant women. Several stopping in front of the garment factory of a popular clothing designer, a 16- years after its establishment, the organisation changed its name to Asian year-old tour guide described the working conditions that her mother Communities for Reproductive Justice (ACRJ) to reflect this emergent contended with, including 12-hour shifts with no breaks, overcrowded sewing intersectional framework (ACRJ 2005). As the organisation’s current executive rooms with little ventilation, toxic fumes from dyes and cleaning chemicals, director, Eveline Shen, explains: and abusive treatment from male supervisors.13 The physical reality of environmental racism comes into view as the van Our goals were to address reproductive freedom within a social justice context, approached the IES (Integrated Environmental Systems) commercial medical because we realized that you can’t disentangle the issues that intersect with reproductive freedom that are most important to the communities we work with, waste incinerator located in the low-income district of Fruitvale in East which include immigrant rights, workers rights, queer rights, environmental Oakland. The HOPE activists displayed the clarity of their intersectional justice, educational justice, bringing an end to violence against women, and the analysis and the strength of coalition politics as they detailed the links between empowerment of youth. Our definition of reproductive freedom is connected to environmental contamination and reproductive justice (HOPE 2001).14 In the 9 social justice and to building self-determination of individuals and communities. late 1990s, the ACRJ joined together with the San Francisco Bay area’s ‘Coalition for Healthy Communities and Environmental Justice’ to help shut Popular education approaches are at the centre of ACRJ’s organising strategy, down IES, the largest medical waste incinerator in the state of California which focuses on action-based research and educational and political (Figure 1). Regularly in violation of federal and state air quality regulations, campaigns identified as important to the local community. One such campaign IES emitted carcinogenic compounds such as dioxins and mercury, highly was birthed in 1997 when ACRJ launched the Health Opportunities, Problem- toxic by-products of solid waste incineration (DeFao 2001), exposure to Solving and Empowerment Project (HOPE) for teenaged girls. Through this which has been associated with reproductive health risks including ovarian project HOPE leaders connected issues of reproductive freedom to a broad cancer, breast cancer, birth defects, endocrine irregularities, declining sperm spectrum of social justice concerns including environmental justice, school counts, endometriosis, and infertility (Manchikanti 2001, Steingraber 2001, safety and quality of education, welfare rights, workplace safety and worker’s 2007). rights, and community health and quality of life.10 Working in alliance with After years of community protests, large fines, and pending legal action, organisers from the nationally known environmental justice organisation, IES was sold to another waste treatment company, Stericycle, which Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), the young HOPE activists immediately closed the East Oakland facility (Fischer 2001). ACRJ’s Eveline recognised the integral connections between reproductive rights issues and Shen argues that the success of the environmental justice campaign hinged on APEN’s environmental justice campaigns supporting API communities in East the alliance-building that emerged from the Coalition, which was strengthened Oakland. From 1998 to 2000, the HOPE for Girls activists designed and conducted a ‘Reproductive Freedom Tour’ of their neighbourhoods in East Oakland, highlighting sites or ‘tour stops’ in the city that adversely affect or limit their communities’ reproductive freedom (HOPE 2001).11 HOPE activists set out to research and ultimately map the full range of structural, economic, and environmental factors affecting the reproductive health and freedom of women and girls to ‘make visible all of the complex intersections pertaining to reproductive justice that come together in their lives, and to determine a course of action around which to organize and take steps to bring about change’.12 Loaded into several vans, the ‘tourists’ (local residents, teachers, commu- nity leaders, and media and foundation representatives) were treated to a guided tour of East Oakland, which included stops at the Cal-Works welfare office, a garment factory, Oakland High School, a correctional facility, the IES medical waste incinerator, and several Oakland-based organisations serving the needs of the community, such as Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) and Californians for Justice. The HOPE for Girls tour guides presented the ‘sightseers’ with information and survey research results about Figure 1. HOPE for Health and Environmental Justice activists protest IES the site as well as first hand accounts of its impact on their lives. For example, incinerator. Photo courtesy of Greenaction. 290 G. Di Chiro Environmental Politics 291 by the feminist and reproductive justice articulations introduced by the ACRJ US fossil fuel-based energy policy that, on the one hand, selectively locates and the HOPE activists. hazardous petrochemical facilities adjacent to low-income communities of The ACRJ’s youth programme, now called SAFIRE (Sisters in Action for colour in the US and poor communities in the Third World, and on the other Issues of Reproductive Empowerment), continues the legacy established by the hand, represents one of the largest contributors to rising atmospheric CO2 HOPE members by articulating reproductive and environmental justice issues levels and global warming. Planetary warming will gravely affect those same in their new initiative known as POLISH (Participatory Research, Organising, communities already economically vulnerable and burdened with poor health, and Leadership Initiative for Safety and Health). Partnering with Asian Health inadequate housing, transportation, and municipal services, and bad environ- Services and researchers at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, the mental quality (Athanasiou and Baer 2002, Redefining Progress 2004, Joseph POLISH project focuses on women’s and girl’s exposure to dangerous 2005, Mann 2006). For environmental justice activists such as Wright, Harden, chemical additives, such as dibutyl pthalates, in beauty and personal care Richard, and Stewart, these connections could not have been made clearer than products both personally as consumers and on the job as beauty/nail salon in the events that unfolded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf workers. Committed to a coalition politics that does not pit environmental Coast of the United States. protection against economic security, the POLISH project deploys a Arguing that the human and environmental devastation left in the wake of community-based intersectional approach that connects the environmental Hurricane Katrina was only the most recent in a long history of social and health, safety, and livelihood concerns of both consumers and workers.15 ecological disasters in the deep South, New Orleans activist and sociologist Moreover, by articulating reproductive justice and environmental justice issues Beverly Wright (2005, p. 1) elaborates: the ACRJ has created an army of young API women who now identify themselves as environmentalists, and who are becoming social and environ- New Orleans, what we once called home, is now a toxic wasteland. But our communities were polluted even before Hurricane Katrina . . . I have learned how mental justice leaders in this urban community in California. ACJR director the use of fossil fuels hits us hard at the front end, through pollution from the Shen refers directly to the necessity of forging a coalition politics to counter the production process. But we also suffer from a ‘boomerang’ effect: the increased current ‘escalated assault on women’s rights as well as a shrinking of the extreme weather patterns caused by global warming . . . The situation in New mainstream reproductive health and rights movement’. To address adequately Orleans and the Gulf Coast has pushed three critical issues into the national the full range of assaults on reproductive justice – including environmental spotlight. First, Hurricane Katrina dramatically demonstrates our vulnerability to environmental disasters. Second, America still suffers from gross economic contamination – Shen calls for ‘an integrated analysis, holistic vision, and inequalities, and these inequalities largely coincide with race. Third, these two comprehensive strategies that push against the structural and societal issues are linked, and the results can be deadly. conditions that control our communities by regulating our bodies, sexuality and reproduction’ (2006, p. 14). In the wake of a revival of public interest in global warming, environmental justice leaders have refocused the debate on this planetary-scale environmental issue: global climate change produces devastating localised effects, which are Climate justice and everyday environmentalism: local/global struggles for social borne most severely by poor and marginalised communities both here and reproduction abroad. Far from being the exclusive domain of an environmental elite Another embodiment of a ‘living environmentalism’ lies in the coalition politics dispassionately churning out ever more abstracted climate models and of a growing international network committed to ‘climate justice’: the aim of impenetrable international protocols, global warming is reframed by environ- making visible the disproportionate impact of global warming on poor and mental justice activists as a grassroots concern putting at risk people’s health, marginalised communities throughout the world. The work of Gulf Coast homes, neighbourhoods, and livelihoods, and exacerbating the life-and-death environmental justice activists, in particular, has been at the forefront of the consequences of government and private disinvestments in social reproduction movement for climate justice in the US, creating the diverse alliances necessary suffered by millions of people worldwide. As members of a growing to understand and act on an environmental problem of such magnitude. international coalition of environmental and social justice groups organising Hailing from Louisiana, scholar-activists such as Beverly Wright, Monique around the concept of ‘climate justice’, these activists demonstrate a politics of Harden, Margie Eugene-Richard, and Juanita Stewart have clearly shown how articulation that connects global-scale environmental problems with their the communities who live in ‘Cancer Alley’ – the 80-mile industrial corridor everyday impacts on people’s lives. Research by climate justice scholars warns flanking the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans and housing that the uneven, (un)natural selection process brought on by climate change more than 130 oil refineries and petrochemical plants – are situated at the will affect human health and security in myriad ways, all of which will be felt nexus of the complex local and global intersections contributing to global disproportionately by environmental justice populations around the world climate change.16 These environmental justice activists draw attention to the (Cordova 2006, Harden 2006, Pastor et al. 2006, Seager 2006, Roberts and 292 G. Di Chiro Environmental Politics 293

Park 2007).17 For example, activists from the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) have been among the first to observe and document in detail how climate change affects the lives and capacities for social reproduction of land-based cultures and island nations, communities whose homelands and livelihoods are already being transformed by global warming.18 Long before the levees failed in New Orleans, environmental justice activists were constructing an intersectional politics revealing the political, economic, cultural, and ecological aspects of the geography of social reproduction in a global capitalist production system in which the costs of social reproduction are borne far away from where most of the benefits accrue. As one of the founding members and currently co-director of the ‘Environ- mental Justice and Climate Change Initiative’ (EJCC), Louisianan Beverly Wright joined with other activists in the US and internationally to put climate change on the agenda of the environmental justice movement and to put environmental justice on the agenda of the climate change establishment. To Figure 2. Climate Justice Youth Corps. Photo courtesy of the Environmental Justice amplify the concerns of those populations most likely to be negatively affected and Climate Change Initiative. by a changing climate, a coalition of US environmental justice and Native American activists organised in 2000 an Intra-National Equity Panel to present its position on climate justice at The Hague during the 6th Conference of the initiatives, climate justice leader Van Jones argues that fighting global Parties (COP6) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate warming needs to be articulated with a commitment to environmental Change (UNFCCC). Climate justice emerged as the point of intersection justice. That ultimately means addressing the ever-diminishing access to joining together activists from South Africa, Nicaragua, El Salvador, social reproduction suffered by marginalised populations (both human and Colombia, India, the Philippines, California, Native Alaskan territories, and non-human) around the globe: Louisiana. They called for the UN member states to embrace sustainable The green economy has the power to deliver new sources of work, wealth and global economic policies that would include clean production, renewable health to low-income people – while honoring the Earth. If you can do that, you energy, and sustainable development that would not endanger people’s lives just wiped out a whole bunch of problems. We can make what is good for poor and futures, and that would rein in the dangerous emissions of greenhouse black kids good for the polar bears and good for the country. (quoted in gasses warming the planet and threatening life on earth.19 Energised by the Friedman 2007) international consensus that was emerging around climate justice, the US- based group expanded its base and participated in the drafting of a consensus The central political-ecological strategy adopted by the EJCC focuses on statement on climate justice at the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism education and youth leadership development. The youth programme, comprised held in Durban, South Africa and which has since been revised and developed of the Climate Justice Corps and the newly launched Climate Justice Institute, at the UN COP meetings on Climate Change from Marrakech in 2001 to Bali trains youth from around the country in workshops focusing on climate science, in 2007. domestic and international climate policy, environmental justice theory, media EJCC activists also participate in national and state level debates, literacy, and community organising (see Figure 2). Upon completion of the week- including lobbying Congressional representatives to include a ‘green jobs for long programme, the youth return to their communities and initiate creative all’ proposal in the drafting of the 110th Congress’ energy bill and providing climate justice actions, which include implementing green building and renewable substantial research and documentation in support of the state of energy programmes, lobbying for affordable public transportation, working with California’s Climate Action Initiative.20 Climate justice coalition partners local organisations to adopt pollution prevention plans in local industries, and worked with US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Representative calling for wetlands and ecological protection policies.21 Hilda Solis (D-CA) to draft H.R. 2847 (the Green Jobs Act of 2007), which was approved by both the US House and the Senate and, if authorised, would direct $125 million annually for ‘greening the nation’s workforce’, Conclusion earmarking funds for job training programmes and investments in renewable Young Climate Justice Corps members are learning that the trick to building energy technologies. Reflecting on the early success of these policy broad-based coalitions to confront the ‘mythological scale of this issue’ is 294 G. Di Chiro Environmental Politics 295 helping people to grasp the direct connections to their own lives and to future the emphasising of the term ‘equality’ in, for example, United Nations discourse, generations (Gearon 2006, p. 15). This political-ecological approach connects as one of the necessary ingredients of what should constitute sustainable development (see The Ecologist 1993, Chatterjee and Finger 1994). The language global climate change to an environmentalism of everyday life. Like the of sustainability has since been appropriated, reclaimed, and modified to reflect successful coalitions forged by the HOPE activists in Oakland, it also possesses different approaches and commitments to balancing economic security, human the visionary power and vitality to push the bounds of a moribund, rights, and ecological integrity (see, for example, Agyeman et al. 2003). decontextualised environmentalism and to confront the shortcomings of a 8. See Fried (1990) and Solinger (2005) for background on Webster v. Reproductive single-issue reproductive rights agenda. Innovative environmental justice and Health Services, 109 S. Ct. 3040, 3077–3079 (1989). 9. Author’s interview with Eveline Shen, Asian Communities for Reproductive reproductive justice coalitions articulate people’s concerns about their families’ Justice (ACRJ), Oakland, CA, 28 October 2005. and communities’ access to social reproduction –the maintenance and 10. Author’s interview with Eveline Shen, ACRJ, 28 October 2005. sustainability of everyday life and earthly survival made all the more difficult 11. Author’s interview with Amber Chan, Asian Pacific Islander Environmental by global economic and environmental crises. These coalitions are generating Network (APEN), Oakland, California, 31 October 2005. dynamic, living environmentalisms that may well compel people to join 12. Author’s interview with Aparna Shah, ACRJ, Oakland, CA, 31 October 2005. 13. Author’s interview with Eveline Shen, ACRJ, 28 October 2005. together and take stronger action to curb problems as big as global warming. 14. Author’s interview with Eveline Shen, 28 October 2005 and Aparna Shah, ACRJ, 31 October 2005. Acknowledgements 15. Author’s interview with Aparna Shah and Dana Ginn Paredes, ACRJ, 31 October Many thanks to colleagues who have read and given feedback on early versions of this 2005. paper: Rachel Stein, Eveline Shen, Katie Hogan, Cate Mortimer-Sandilands, and Anne 16. Beverly Wright, Director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, and Wibiralske. The author is also grateful to the editors of this special issue of Professor of Sociology at Dillard University (New Orleans), Monique Harden, Co- Environmental Politics – David Schlosberg and Elizabeth Bomberg – for their insightful director of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights (New Orleans), Margie comments and editorial talents. Eugene-Richard, former President, Concerns Citizens of Norco (Norco, LA), Juanita Stewart, President, North Baton Rouge Environmental Association (Alsen, LA). Notes 17. See World Health Organisation (2005) Climate Change and Human Health, 1. The essay ‘The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post- available at: http://www.who.int/globalchange/climate/en/index.html and EPA’s Environmental World,’ argues that not only is the mainstream environmental Global Warming website, http://yosemite.epa.gov/OAR/globalwarming.nsf/content/ movement dead (in the sense of ‘outdated’), but it should accept that its central index.html. conceptual frame —a disarticulated ‘environment’ that needs saving— ‘must die so 18. See Indigenous Environmental Network, Climate Justice Campaign, available at: that something new can live’ (2004, p. 10). Available at: http://www.3nov.com/ http://www.ienearth.org/climate_campaign.html. images/report_doe_final.pdf. The book-length version of the authors’ critique 19. Author’s interview with Ansje Miller, former Programme Director for the expands upon this central thesis of a failed environmental movement. See Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative (EJCC), Redefining Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2007). Progress, Oakland, California, 26 July 2006. 2. To access the library of reports produced by the Millennium Ecosystem 20. For more information on the California’s Climate Action Initiative, go to the Assessment visit: http://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.aspx. California Climate Change Portal at: http://www.climatechange.ca.gov/clima- 3. For a full review and appraisal of the status of women and conclusions drawn te_action_team/. Also see, Cordova (2006). Information on the ‘green for all’ from the Beijing 10 special session of the General Assembly, see the United initiative launched by members of the US climate justice coalition can be found at: Nations Divisionþ for the Advancement of Women, available at: http:// http://www.greenforall.org/. www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/Review/. Also see the report by the Women’s 21. 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