This is the second post in our series “Mobilizing Motherhood,” focused on mothers in twentieth-century industrial and environmental activism.
On January 1, 1979, The Washington Post readers encountered a shocking front page headline: “Women Say They Had to Be Sterilized to Hold Jobs.”[1] The accompanying article described a situation unfolding at the Willow Island, West Virginia plant of chemical manufacturing company American Cyanamid. Five women working at the Willow Island plant had obtained tubal ligations to retain their jobs in the wake of an exclusionary “fetal protection” employment policy that barred women of “childbearing age” from jobs exposing them to reproductive hazards including lead. That these women had been pressured to make such a deeply personal decision for job security signaled to them, and to the broader world, that there were pressing questions to be answered about occupational safety, the range of family planning decisions available to working women, and the limits of bodily autonomy.[2]
As historians such as Alice Kessler-Harris, Sara Dubow, and Sarah Milov have argued, exclusionary policies introduced new pressures for women workers in which their reproductive capacity and assumptions about their future motherhood were used to deny them economic stability. All the while, the corporations instituting these policies claimed to be protecting the best interests of women and unborn children.[3] Barbara Cantwell Christman, one of the employees who underwent a tubal ligation in order to comply with American Cyanamid’s policy, emphasized that she had little choice. “When you’re faced with something like this [from] a big company you feel powerless. But this is 1978. What do you have to do to hold a normal job and support your child?”[4]
Clearly, the version of maternal and fetal “protection” American Cyanamid promoted was ultimately hollow. Under the pretext of protection, the company offered a pay cut and weakened job security while ensuring that toxic conditions would persist within industrial workplaces. Activists at the time knew that toxic chemical manufacturing within factories would inevitably permeate surrounding environments and compromise the health of surrounding communities. Anthony Mazzocchi, a leader of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers union which represented American Cyanamid workers at the Willow Island plant, later reflected, “It was the workers in these industries who taught me that there was a systematic conflict between profits and health. They said, ‘You know, it’s production that’s causing all these problems.’ When you start thinking that, when you start to interfere with the forces of production, you’re going to the heart of the beast, right?”[5] To stop environmental degradation, then, would require strict workplace controls on pollutants and toxic substances which, if harmful to workers, would inevitably harm communities in turn.
Environmental historians have most often recognized women’s environmental activism within their homes and communities, where maternalist calls for the protection of children have been consequential in securing environmental remediation.[6] Occurring in the same historical moment as the New York Love Canal disaster, which sparked national conversations about the relationship between hazardous waste and reproductive health, the Willow Island story reveals how differences in the site of injury–the home versus the workplace–shaped the resulting public and state response. Whereas Love Canal was framed as a disaster involving housewives and mothers, Willow Island was framed as a tragedy involving “women workers.”[7] The site of injury also, crucially, shaped the state resources and regulatory bodies available to those affected to push for redress. Love Canal was “resolved” through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), while Willow Island was arbitrated through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Despite these differences, Mazzocchi drew connections between the two sites. If the 1970s was a decade of struggle over the lives of working people at the point of production, he predicted the 1980s would be characterized by the consequences for the next generation, or as he put it, “essentially a struggle over children.”[8]
The Willow Island case inspired the creation of a Coalition for the Reproductive Rights of Workers, a group brought together with a fundamentally environmental argument: “clean the workplace, not the worker!” As a coalition of unions, civil rights organizations, feminist health activists, and environmental advocacy groups, CRROW bridged typically divided domains through a focus on environmental health’s intersections with reproductive and workplace health and rights. CRROW tracked cases relating to layoffs, sterilizations, and negative health outcomes for workers exposed to hazardous substances across the country, organized a Conference on Reproductive Hazards in the Workplace, contributed amici curiae to relevant legal suits, pressured government agencies including EEOC and OSHA, and published a quarterly newsletter. [9]
CRROW also organized worker-education sessions which interwove lessons in self-help from the women’s health movement, collective organizing from the labor movement, and regulatory reform and pressure from the environmental movement. Flyers for the training series prominently featured a photo of Donna Martin, Lola Rymer, and Barbara Cantwell, whose sterilizations while working at American Cyanamid’s Willow Island plant acted as a potent reminder of the trainings’ stakes. CRROW worked to scale the training series to a national campaign, including by producing a Resource Guide.[10]
In the context of the new political climate inaugurated by the Ronald Reagan administration, however, CRROW members questioned the ability of the coalition to meet its moment, particularly as federal agencies turned over to unsympathetic hands. As an era characterized by the potential of regulatory reform faded into one defined by privatization and deregulation, in the early 1980s CRROW struggled to adjust its tactics within the new political landscape and ultimately disbanded.[11]
The case of Willow Island and its fallout, including legal suits waged by affected women workers, battles over regulatory reform, and organizing efforts taken up by unions, environmentalists, and reproductive rights activists, offers a window into how environmental health acts as a bridge to bring together diverse and, at times, conflicting movements. Despite its limited tenure, CRROW contributed to an analysis of reproductive freedom which affirmed the health of the workplace and its surrounding environment as necessary preconditions, offering a model of reproduction and environmental coalitions in the 1970s which rejected maternal or fetal protection in favor of a collective vision of environmental health as a right. In grasping these connections, the coalition offers a model for the intersectional organizing challenges facing us today.
[1] Bill Richards, “Women Say They Had to Be Sterilized to Hold Jobs,” The Washington Post (Jan. 1, 1979), A1. Tony Mazzocchi Papers, Box 11, Folder L.U. 3-499, American Cyanamid Co. Willow Island, WV, 1978-Misc., from Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) Records, COU:1193, University of Colorado Boulder Libraries, Special Collections and Archives Department. (Hereafter OCAW Records, CU Boulder).
[2] Intra-Organization Communication, Mazzocchi to Wodka, “Subject: Confidential Chronology,” (Jan. 18, 1979), Tony Mazzocchi Papers, Box 11, Folder L.U. 3-499 American Cyanamid Co. Willow Island, WV, 1978-Misc., from OCAW Records, CU Boulder.
[3] For historical scholarship on “fetal protection policies,” see: Alice Kessler-Harris, “Protections for Women: Trade Unions and Labor Laws,” in Double Exposure: Women’s Health Hazards on the Job and at Home, ed. Wendy Chavkin, M.D. (Monthly Review Press, 1984); Sally J. Kenney, “Who Is Protected?: What’s Wrong With Exclusionary Policies,” Women & Politics 13, no. 3–4 (April 26, 1994); Allison L. Hepler, Women in Labor: Mothers, Medicine, and Occupational Health in the United States, 1890-1980 (Ohio State University Press, 2000); Sara Dubow, Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2011); Nancy Woloch, A Class by Herself: Protective Laws for Women Workers, 1890s–1990s (Princeton University Press, 2015); Sadie Bergen, “Fetal Protection Policies and Corporate Liability of the US Vinyl Chloride Industry, 1974-1991” American Journal of Public Health 112, no. 2 (2022): 271-276. For discussion of American Cyanamid specifically, see: Sarah Milov, “Damned Women: Fetal Protection as Employer Offensive at American Cyanamid,” Labor 22, no. 4 (Dec. 2025): 51-81.
[4] Richards, “Women Say They Had to Be Sterilized to Hold Jobs.”
[5] Les Leopold, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007), 229, 246.
[6] For discussion of women’s environmental activism at home, see, for example: Valerie Ann Kaalund, “Witness to Truth: Black Women Heeding the Call for Environmental Justice” in New Perspectives on Environmental Justice, ed. Rachel Stein (Rutgers University Press, 2004); Julie Sze, “Gender, Asthma Politics, and Urban Environmental Justice Activism,” New Perspectives on Environmental Justice; Amy Hay, “Recipe for Disaster: Motherhood and Citizenship at Love Canal” Journal of Women’s History 21, no. 1 (2009): 111-134; Elizabeth D. Blum, Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism (University Press of Kansas, 2008); Nancy C. Unger, Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History (Oxford University Press, 2012); Elizabeth Grennan Browning, “Wastelanding and Racialized Reproductive Labor: ‘Long Dyings’ in East Chicago from Urban Renewal to Superfund Remediation,” Environmental History 26 (2021): 749-75; Natasha Zaretsky, Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and The Political Transformation of the 1970s (Columbia University Press, 2018); Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement, Revised edition (Island Press, 2005). For recent analyses of women’s activism as workers in environmental history, see: April Merleaux, “Equal Risks: Workplace Discrimination, Toxic Exposure, and the Environmental Politics of Reproduction, 1976–91,” Environmental History 26, no. 3 (2021): 484-507; Josiah Rector, “Environmental Justice at Work: The UAW, the War on Cancer, and the Right to Equal Protection from Toxic Hazards in Postwar America,” The Journal of American History 101, no. 2 (2014): 480-502.
[7] Molly M. Henderson, “‘For Our Children’: Reproduction, the Family, and Neoliberalism in the Environmental History of the 1970s,” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 2025).
[8] Tony Mazzocchi, “A Decade of Genetic Struggle,” International Journal of Health Services 14, no. 3 (1984): 447.
[9] CRROW, “August 22 Conference Report,” (n.d.), “CRROW Folder,” Steve Wodka Personal Files; “Corporate Politics on Reproductive Hazards Hit,” Chemical & Energy News (Sept.1, 1980), 8. CRROW Box 1, Folder 12, New York University Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives (hereafter NYU); “CRROW August 22 Conference Agenda,” CRROW Box 3, Folder 3, NYU; CRROW Letter, “Dear Friends” (July 9, 1979), CRROW Records, Box 3, Folder 5, NYU; CRROW Newsletter 1, no. 1 (Spring 1981); CRROW Newsletter 1, no. 2 (Summer 1981); CRROW Newsletter 1, no. 3 (Winter 1982), “CRROW,” Personal Files.
[10] “New York Region of the Education and Organizing Committee of the Coalition for the Reproductive Rights of Workers,” CRROW Box 3, Folder 5, NYU.; “Reproductive Hazards in the Workplace,” Karen Stamm Papers, Box 3, Folder 25, NYU; “CRROW Blueprint & Timeline,” Steve Wodka, “CRROW Folder,” Personal Files.
[11] Letter, Maria Mazorra, Steve Wodka, Peg Seminario, and Bob Marlow to CRROW Steering Committee Members (Feb. 23, 1981); “Memo, Maria Mazorra to Steering Committee” (June 15, 1981); “CRROW Membership Meeting,” (July 23, 1981); “CRROW Meeting, ‘Dear Friends,’” (Aug. 26, 1981), “CRROW Folder,” Wodka Personal Files.
Sadie Bergen and Molly M. Henderson