Saving Florida: Women’s Fight for the Environment in the Twentieth Century by Leslie Kemp Poole (review)

Among the most regrettable missing elements in the historiography of environmentalism is the role of women. Leslie Kemp Poole has gone some way toward addressing that serious shortcoming. In Saving Florida: Women’s Fight for the Environment in the Twentieth Century, Poole tells the little-known story of women’s leadership on environmental issues in the Sunshine State. In women’s groups, in the broader environmental movement, and in notable individual careers, Florida women played leading roles in protecting their state’s natural heritage.

Poole’s study does not stop at the state line, however. She focuses on efforts in Florida but always connects them to the environmental movement as a whole. As the conservation movement gained support across the country early in the twentieth century, Laura Norcross Marrs led the Florida Audubon Society’s efforts against plume hunters, and May Mann Jennings helped the Florida Forestry Association protect the state’s trees. In the 1910s, while John Muir struggled to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley from being drowned by a reservoir for San Francisco, Jennings and Mary Barr Munroe championed the creation of Royal Palm State Park, the first step toward designating Everglades National Park decades later. So central were women’s efforts to conservation that Muir’s own opponents drew him in a skirt to suggest that he fought for a woman’s cause. In the 1960s Marjorie Harris Carr took on the Cross Florida Barge Canal because of its potential ecological impact, years before the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 made such impact a subject of law. In the 1970s, as the environmental movement battled pollution, Florida state representative Mary Grizzle crafted legislation to protect Tampa Bay from municipal waste.

Saving Florida keeps track of women’s rights nationally and shows how those shifting rights shaped environmental activism. Lacking the vote in the 1900s and 1910s, women in Florida organized grassroots groups and used moral authority to pressure legislators. Starting in the 1960s, second-wave feminism combined with women’s growing presence in the workplace to produce more assertive and pointed campaigns to protect the environment. By the 1970s, women in Florida were not only leveraging their votes through groups like the League of Women Voters but also assuming office themselves and passing legislation to clean up Florida’s cities, waterways, and countryside.

While gender defines the subject of Poole’s interest, it is never entirely clear how she wants historians to think about it or even how she thinks about it herself. Again and again, Saving Florida associates economic growth with men and concern for the natural world with women. At times Poole suggests this division is simply a matter of men dominating industry and politics; at times she seems to suggest something more. Grizzle’s election to the state legislature “signaled the end of long-held male views in which nature was sacrificed to the god of economics” (p. 142). Whether in the 1910s or the 1970s, “men and male-dominated interests that revolved around income and profits were ruining the state’s natural systems then and now” (p. 119). By the end of the century, women were in a position to correct men’s many mistakes: “The men had made a real mess of things. Now it was up to women to make a difference” (p. 153). Poole never makes clear whether “male views” were a product of culture, power, or biology, and the implication that women were somehow inherently more concerned with nature risks the sort of gender essentialism that has historically been used to restrict women’s freedoms.

Generally, though, Saving Florida is a welcome addition to the growing literature on environmentalism. Poole rescues from obscurity many women who fought tirelessly to protect and conserve Florida’s natural resources, and she reminds historians that many similar stories remain untold.