Rachel Carson and Her Sisters

Robert K Musil

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813571768
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

In  Rachel Carson and Her Sisters, Robert K. Musil redefines the achievements and legacy of environmental pioneer and scientist Rachel Carson, linking her work to a wide network of American women activists and writers and introducing her to a new, contemporary audience. Rachel Carson was the first American to combine two longstanding, but separate strands of American environmentalism—the love of nature and a concern for human health. Widely known for her 1962 best-seller,   Silent Spring, Carson is today often perceived as a solitary “great woman, ” whose work single-handedly launched a modern environmental movement. But as Musil demonstrates, Carson’s life’s work drew upon and was supported by already existing movements, many led by women, in conservation and public health.On the fiftieth anniversary of her death, this book helps underscore Carson’s enduring environmental legacy and brings to life the achievements of women writers and advocates, such as Ellen Swallow Richards, Dr. Alice Hamilton, Terry Tempest Williams, Sandra Steingraber, Devra Davis, and Theo Colborn, all of whom overcame obstacles to build and lead the modern American environmental movement.

1

Have You Seen the Robins?

Rachel Carson’s Mother and the Tradition of Women Naturalists

Among Rachel Carson’s earliest childhood writings is a small, handmade book, its pages pasted together and laboriously illustrated in crayon and colored pencil. It is a present to her “Papa,” Robert W. Carson, done, according to her biographer, Linda Lear, with a little bit of obvious help from the strongest single influence in Rachel’s life, her mother, Maria McLean Carson. In addition to the title page drawing of an elephant, Rachel’s first “book” identifies her woodland friends—mouse, frog, bunny, and owl. This sense of friendship, especially with birds, is central to a slightly later childhood story in cursive script, “The Little Brown House.” It is the story of two wrens, Mr. Wren and his mate, Jenny, looking for a place to nest. Rachel even draws four wren houses in the corners of the opening page. By the end of the tale, they find a dear little brown house with a green roof about which Mr. Wren declares, “Now that is just what we need.”1

Just as these few remaining pieces of juvenilia allow us to glimpse early indications of the mature writer and scientist yet to emerge, they also offer an entrance into the world that preceded and produced Rachel Carson. We think of Rachel Carson as the mother of modern environmentalism, yet her work is as close to the nineteenth century as it is to the twenty-first. Rachel was born on May 27, 1907, the youngest of three children. Her sister and brother, Marian and Robert W. Jr., were already in the fifth and first grades. “Papa” was often absent, trying to sell insurance. So it was Rachel’s mother, Maria, forced to resign her teaching job when she married, who poured all of her considerable talent and energy into her youngest, brightest child. As soon as she could toddle, Rachel and her mother rambled most days through fields, orchards, woods, and the nearby hills of their farm in Springdale, Pennsylvania. They talked about what they saw and especially enjoyed watching the birds. Maria McLean was well-educated for her time, having attended the excellent Washington Female Seminary, near Pittsburgh. She graduated in 1887 with honors in Latin, studied a range of classical subjects that included science, and took advanced courses at nearby Washington College. Maria also passed on values from her own independent and educated mother, Rachel McLean, the studious daughter of a Presbyterian minister, who became a widow when her children were teenagers.2

Rachel as a Child of Nineteenth-Century Nature Writers and Naturalists

It was Maria McLean Carson who first instilled in Rachel a love of learning, an emotional identification with birds and nature, and a penchant for careful observation and scientific method. She also groomed her to become a writer. As Maria studied nature and the birds on her walks with Rachel, helped her with her first childhood booklets and stories, and encouraged her to submit her work to the children’s section of St. Nicholas magazine, she was drawing on more than a half-century of work and influence arduously accumulated by a line of women naturalists, writers, educators, and conservationists who had come before. St. Nicholas magazine, whose style is reflected in Rachel’s childhood writing and drawing, often featured pieces about nature by extremely popular writers like Mabel Osgood Wright and Florence Merriam Bailey. The natural science lessons and instruction Maria offered to Rachel were based on the materials that her other children, Marian and Robert, brought home from school. This widely used school curriculum was produced by Anna Botsford Comstock, a leader in the nature-study movement and author of the popular Handbook of Nature Study. It came out in 1911, when Rachel was four, and went through eleven editions between 1911 and 1936. The books and stories of Wright, Bailey, and Olive Thorne Miller, as well as the nature lessons of Anna Comstock, now mostly forgotten, are direct influences on Rachel Carson.3

These women, too, are part of larger networks of authors, advocates, and artists whom they read, or worked with, or knew about. As the nineteenth century progressed in America and its frontier slowly filled in and then disappeared, women began to gain better educations and the ability to travel and write, especially those in the more privileged classes. They hiked, explored, botanized, and birded, and they observed the steady encroachment of industry and urban life on the countryside. And they began to write professionally. Denied access to the heights of academia, the professions, and publishing, and restricted still by their gender, they nevertheless churned out diaries, journals, novels, children’s stories and books, and magazine articles; they also published best-selling adult books, fiction and nonfiction, about nature. And, as women wrote, many also organized and advocated for the protection of wildlife, wilderness, and a vanishing way of life.

By the time of President Theodore Roosevelt, who properly gets much credit as our most-influential conservationist president, there was a rich network of women’s organizations, local groups, magazines, editors, and authors who created the atmosphere in which Roosevelt was able to act to preserve wilderness and species. In these pages, we will look mainly at extraordinary women—those who achieved prominence and influence in their day yet who are now mostly forgotten. All had some scientific training or education, but they are also known as authors and advocates. Over the span of some sixty years before Rachel Carson had her first story published in St. Nicholas magazine, we see a shift from more descriptive writing about nature to open advocacy that something be done to save it. The combination of engaged, imaginative writing, moral values, calls to action, and writing for popular and youthful audiences led over time to a disregard for the women you are about to meet. They have been seen as sentimental, Victorian, overly moralistic, and too much given to anecdote over hard-boiled analysis and academic rigor. But their writing and lives—their influence and cultural legacy—led Rachel Carson to cherish science and narrative, imagination and wonder, the power of stories and words, and the need to take principled action.

These are values that are being rediscovered in the twentieth-first century, as hard science, technology, and a refusal to incorporate values, or consider long-term consequences, seems to have led to the continuing destruction of our natural and human environments. In some cases, like that of Susan Fenimore Cooper, we can see the evolution of a growing concern over a long career about this destruction, until, in her last years, Cooper joined with her younger sisters in the movement to stop the slaughter of birds for fashionable women’s hats. Others, like Graceanna Lewis, show the combination of wide-ranging interest in both nature and other reforms that concerned women—such as the abolition movement. Still others, like Martha Maxwell, began the development of natural history museums that presented birds and animals in natural poses and ecological settings. These are special places that Rachel Carson skipped class to visit in college, or where modern writers like Terry Tempest Williams have worked and educated new generations. Both Martha Maxwell and Graceanna Lewis were also stars at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition; they reveal how influential women were becoming conscious about asserting their new roles. Later, Mary Austin helped to develop a love of western nature and the desert that has spawned much American environmentalism, while writers like Neltje Blanchan and Mabel Wright Osborn introduced women and families in the newer East Coast suburbs at the turn of the twentieth century to a love of birds, backyard gardening, nature, and the need to preserve natural settings. By the time Rachel Carson published her first story at age eleven, she was already drawing not only on the tutelage of a loving mother, but also on two generations of women who gave birth to the first large wave of conservation in the Progressive Era. Our story begins in upstate New York, in 1850, a full century before Rachel Carson became the leading nature writer of the mid-twentieth century with her huge, instant, 1951 best seller, The Sea around Us.

Susan Fenimore Cooper—America’s First Popular Nature Writer

Even as Henry David Thoreau labored unappreciated and obscure in Massachusetts, America’s first popular nature writer was being hailed by critics and common folk alike. Susan Fenimore Cooper, the devoted daughter of famed American author James Fenimore Cooper, published Rural Hours in 1850.4 It was an immediate success and preceded Walden by four years. We know that Thoreau himself read Rural Hours at least two years before the publication of his own famous book; he records in his journal of 1852, while commenting on a newspaper account of loons diving to a depth of eighty feet, that “Miss Cooper has said the same.”5

Figure 1.1. Susan Fenimore Cooper in the 1850s after the publication of Rural Hours. From Mary E. Phillips, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: John Lane Co., 1913).

If mostly forgotten now, Susan Cooper was as influential in her time as Rachel Carson in ours. Rural Hours went through four decades of popular publication and revision, in the United States and overseas, where it was published in England as Journal of a Naturalist in the United States. After only six weeks of brisk American sales, the publisher, George P. Putnam, was planning “a fine edition”; Susan’s novelist father was stopped in the streets of New York with congratulations “a dozen times a day”; and William Cullen Bryant called Rural Hours “one of the sweetest books ever printed.”6 This is important praise, because Bryant was not only the premier poet of his time and editor of the New York Evening Post; he was also highly influential in publishing and political circles. He included an essay by Susan Fenimore Cooper, “A Dissolving View,” in the groundbreaking collection The Home Book of the Picturesque; or, American Scenery, Art, and Literature (1852). Her essay was placed alongside his own contribution, that of her famous father, and those of Washington Irving and other noted writers in this important illustrated literary and artistic volume that helped stimulate Americans’ desire to visit, observe, and preserve America’s architectural and scenic heritage. Susan Cooper’s popularity grew with numerous introductions to editions of her father’s work, other essays, biographical sketches, and a well-received 1854 collection of poems called The Rhyme and Reason of Country Life; or, Selections from the Field Old and New. With this volume that spanned the centuries and cultures, Cooper drew on her knowledge of languages along with her early sophisticated education and residence in Paris and London.

In Paris, her family lived in an elegant house at 59 Rue Saint-Dominique in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Under high ceilings, it contained her father’s fine library, a spacious salon, and a stream of accomplished American expatriates and visitors like suffragist and temperance leader Emma Willard and the artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse. Later known for the first telegraph, he was in Paris producing the astounding painting The Gallery of the Louvre, over which he labored daily at that museum; it shows in miniature most of the major masterpieces on display there. In the corner, along with James Fenimore Cooper, who saw Morse daily at the Louvre and walked home with him, we see twenty-year-old Susan (known as Sue in her youth) busily painting copies of the assembled gems. The widower Morse had been giving painting lessons to Susan, and there was always speculation about their relationship. Susan, meanwhile, had easily learned three languages. She and the entire family, as her father put it, “could prattle like natives.” James Fenimore Cooper was lionized in Paris, and the family circles included General Lafayette, who introduced them to King Louis-Philippe and other wealthy and influential members of the French elite. Among Americans living in Paris, the Coopers were close to the American ambassador to France; a variety of writers, artists, and other professionals; as well as the great Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. Given her facility in languages and the world in which she was coming to adulthood, Susan Cooper was undoubtedly aware of the French naturalists who had been shaping the world’s knowledge of the environment and evolution. They were congregated at the venerable Jardin des Plantes, a pleasant zoological, botanical, and archeological center, which also held lectures at its popular Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, within walking distance of the Cooper home.

But it was not so pleasant during the Parisian cholera epidemic that Susan and her family survived, though her mother did develop a bilious fever. The deadly epidemic that claimed more than eighteen thousand lives within six months began in the spring of 1832. Among the dead was the famous zoologist, paleontologist, and evolutionist Baron Georges Cuvier, whom Susan quotes in her work and may possibly have met. Given all this, it is no surprise that Cooper both extolled the fresh air and pastoral scenes of upstate New York, while showing immense erudition and familiarity with scientific and naturalist traditions.7

In 1887, as Maria McLean was graduating from the Washington Female Seminary, the last, shortened, and updated revised edition of Rural Hours was put out by Houghton Mifflin. It was followed by several essays by Cooper in 1893 that lament the decline of birds, the slaughter by the millinery trade, and the shift away from more natural small-town life. Then, in 1894, the year of her death, eighty-one-year-old Susan Cooper’s final piece, a children’s story, was published in St. Nicholas magazine. It is, of course, the very magazine that Maria Carson used to introduce Rachel to nature study and writing. Through this story, last published just three years before the birth of Rachel’s older sister, Susan Cooper and her influence touches the Carson household at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Susan Fenimore Cooper was a popular, highly regarded, and influential writer whose Rural Hours is a clear antecedent for the fascination with rural and country life, and for Americans’ wide interest in trees, birds, wildflowers, and other native flora and fauna that undergird environmentalism. Cooper heads the long line of those women whose work explains why so many Americans were upset when Silent Spring revealed that DDT and other pesticides were killing robins and other birds. Cooper’s first published odes to robins, and others that follow hers, are the cultural legacy beneath the outrage shared by Rachel’s good friend, Olga Huckins, when she wrote about watching and finding robins who had met horrible deaths from aerial pesticides sprayed into the sanctuary of her Massachusetts yard. Susan Cooper also reflects the turn of many cheerier, innocent women naturalist writers in the late nineteenth century toward early warnings of environmental destruction and the need for education, organizing, and political engagement. But Rural Hours and the essays of Susan Fenimore Cooper dropped out of print and out of favor.8 Susan Cooper, like other women nature writers, had fallen victim to increased specialization in science in the academy, and to a general disregard for the romantic and Victorian values they display.

Reading Rural Hours

Read with fresh eyes, however, Rural Hours is a remarkable document— a personal journal of the progression of the seasons day by day in upstate New York with a wealth of detailed and interesting descriptions of small-town life, sadly declining Oneida Indians, and countless species of birds, flowers, trees, and precise weather observations. It is the foremother of important twentieth-century environmental writing like Joseph Wood Crutch’s Twelve Seasons or works by Edwin Way Teale, a close friend of Rachel Carson’s, such as North with the Spring. Born of an old family already prominent in the Federalist period, Susan Fenimore Coop...