Women in the Environmental Movement: An Examination of Maternalistic Rhetoric and its Relationship to Modern Environmentalism in the 20th Century

From 1942 to 1953, the Hooker Chemical Company decided that an abandoned canal in Niagara Falls was the perfect place to dump 22,000 tons of toxic chemical waste, a common disposal practice that was largely unregulated by the local government. The company covered the 16 acres of hazardous waste with clay and sold it to the Niagara Falls Board of Education in 1953 for one dollar. With a warning included in the property deed that mentioned the presence of chemical waste, the company was excluded from all future liability.2 In the decades to follow, a suburban community would flower around the Love Canal site, with hundreds of homes and an elementary school built on top of the former landfill. By the late 1970s, the smell of chemicals would follow people in and outside their homes. Residents began to notice goopy, black sludge seeping into their basements while backyards filled with oily puddles. Children playing in the schoolyard suffered from mysterious chemical burns and rocks would miraculously catch fire if skipped across the water. Most alarming however, were the troubling health issues, ranging from skin rashes and seizures to miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer.3