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Marsha P. Johnson’s historic role in the LGBTQ+ rights movement

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Born in Illinois in 1921, Betty's dad ran a store, and her mom was a newspaper editor that left her job to raise kids.

After feeling depressed about how pressured she was to be a stay at home mom, she studied psychology to learn more about why she felt that way, and after doing research and polls discovered that most other women felt the same.

She wrote the book The Feminine Mystique about how unhappy the housewife is, and it made her instantly famous.

She lost some friends and her husband divorced her because of it, but she became essential in the women's rights movement.

She was invited to a government conference to discuss Women in America, and when the government pretty much ignored the women speakers, she took a lot of representatives and founded the National Organization for Women, or NOW.

She wasn't entirely popular with some parts of the feminist movement because of her beliefs, like excluding women of color and lesbian women, believing younger activists were a bad thing.

Even with those though, her book is considered one of the most important parts of the movement.

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She wrote the book The Feminine Mystique, and she became famous for it. Even if she lost friends and her Husband,  It was like a wake up call to all of the other Women who felt the same, and reminded them that they weren’t alone. She then help organize and became the president of the National Organization for Women, or NOW.

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The Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948 was the first major U.S. law to address water pollution. Growing public awareness and concern for controlling water pollution led to sweeping amendments in 1972. As amended in 1972, the law became commonly known as the Clean Water Act (CWA).

The 1972 amendments:

Established the basic structure for regulating pollutant discharges into the waters of the United States.

Gave EPA the authority to implement pollution control programs such as setting wastewater standards for industry.

Maintained existing requirements to set water quality standards for all contaminants in surface waters.

Made it unlawful for any person to discharge any pollutant from a point source into navigable waters, unless a permit was obtained under its provisions.

Funded the construction of sewage treatment plants under the construction grants program.

Recognized the need for planning to address the critical problems posed by nonpoint source pollution.

Subsequent amendments modified some of the earlier CWA provisions. Revisions in 1981 streamlined the municipal construction grants process, improving the capabilities of treatment plants built under the program. Changes in 1987 phased out the construction grants program, replacing it with the State Water Pollution Control Revolving Fund, more commonly known as the Clean Water State Revolving Fund. This new funding strategy addressed water quality needs by building on EPA-state partnerships.

Over the years, many other laws have changed parts of the Clean Water Act. Title I of the Great Lakes Critical Programs Act of 1990, for example, put into place parts of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1978, signed by the U.S. and Canada, where the two nations agreed to reduce certain toxic pollutants in the Great Lakes. That law required EPA to establish water quality criteria for the Great Lakes addressing 29 toxic pollutants with maximum levels that are safe for humans, wildlife, and aquatic life. It also required EPA to help the States implement the criteria on a specific schedule.

Read more: EPA's Summary of the Clean Water Act.

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services for citizens > environmental management > pollution prevention & control > manage water quality

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support delivery of services > public affairs > official information dissemination > public information & outreach > provide public information

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The Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948 was the first major U.S. law to address water pollution. As amended in 1972, the law became commonly known as the Clean Water Act (CWA).

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Although they will probably always be less celebrated than wars, marches, riots, or stormy political campaigns, books have at times been the most powerful influencer of social change in American life. Thomas Paine's Common Sense galvanized radical sentiment in the early days of the Revolution; Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe roused the North's antipathy to slavery in the decade leading up to the Civil War; and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which in 1962 exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT, eloquently questioned humanity's faith in technological progress and helped set the stage for the environmental movement.

Carson, a renowned nature author and a former marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or FWS, was uniquely equipped to create so startling and inflammatory a book. A native of rural Pennsylvania, she had grown up with an enthusiasm for nature matched only by her love of writing and poetry. The educational brochures she wrote for FWS, as well as her published books and magazine articles, were characterized by meticulous research and a poetic evocation of her subject.

"Things go out of kilter"

Carson was happiest writing about the strength and resilience of natural systems. Her books Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us (which stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 86 weeks), and The Edge of the Sea were hymns to the interconnectedness of nature and all living things. Although she rarely used the term, Carson held an ecological view of nature, describing in precise yet poetic language the complex web of life that linked mollusks to seabirds to the fish swimming in the ocean's deepest and most inaccessible reaches.

DDT, the most powerful pesticide the world had ever known, exposed nature's vulnerability. Unlike most pesticides, whose effectiveness is limited to destroying one or two types of insects, DDT was capable of killing hundreds of different kinds at once. Developed in 1939, it first distinguished itself during World War II, clearing South Pacific islands of malaria-causing insects for U.S. troops while being used as an effective delousing powder in Europe. Its inventor was awarded the Nobel Prize.

When DDT became available for civilian use in 1945, there were only a few people who expressed second thoughts about this new miracle compound. One was nature writer Edwin Way Teale, who warned, "A spray as indiscriminate as DDT can upset the economy of nature as much as a revolution upsets social economy. Ninety percent of all insects are good, and if they are killed, things go out of kilter right away." Another was Carson, who wrote to Reader's Digest to propose an article about a series of tests on DDT being conducted not far from where she lived in Maryland. The magazine rejected the idea.

Silent Spring

Thirteen years later, in 1958, Carson's interest in writing about the dangers of DDT was rekindled when she received a letter from a friend in Massachusetts bemoaning the large bird kills that had occurred on Cape Cod as the result of DDT sprayings. The use of the pesticide had proliferated greatly since 1945, and Carson again tried, unsuccessfully, to interest a magazine in assigning her the story of its less desirable effects. By 1958, Carson was a best-selling author, and the fact that she could not obtain an assignment to write about DDT is indicative of how heretical and controversial her views on the subject must have seemed. Having already amassed a large quantity of research on the subject, however, Carson decided to go ahead and tackle the issue in a book.

Silent Spring took Carson four years to complete. It meticulously described how DDT entered the food chain and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings, and caused cancer and genetic damage. A single application on a crop, she wrote, killed insects for weeks and months-not only the targeted insects but countless more-and remained toxic in the environment even after it was diluted by rainwater. Carson concluded that DDT and other pesticides had irrevocably harmed animals and had contaminated the world's food supply. The book's most haunting and famous chapter, "A Fable for Tomorrow," depicted a nameless American town where all life-from fish to birds to apple blossoms to human children-had been "silenced" by the insidious effects of DDT.

First serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962, the book alarmed readers across America and, not surprisingly, brought a howl of indignation from the chemical industry. "If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson," complained an executive of the American Cyanamid Company, "we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth." Monsanto published and distributed 5,000 copies of a brochure parodying Silent Spring entitled "The Desolate Year," relating the devastation and inconvenience of a world where famine, disease, and insects ran amok because chemical pesticides had been banned. Some of the attacks were more personal, questioning Carson's integrity and even her sanity.

Vindication

Her careful preparation, however, had paid off. Anticipating the reaction of the chemical industry, she had compiled Silent Spring as one would a lawyer's brief, with no fewer than 55 pages of notes and a list of experts who had read and approved the manuscript. Many eminent scientists rose to her defense, and when President John F. Kennedy ordered the President's Science Advisory Committee to examine the issues the book raised, its report thoroughly vindicated both Silent Spring and its author. As a result, DDT came under much closer government supervision and was eventually banned. The public debate moved quickly from whether pesticides were dangerous to which ones were dangerous, and the burden of proof shifted from the opponents of unrestrained pesticide use to the manufacturers.

The most important legacy of Silent Spring, though, was a new public awareness that nature was vulnerable to human intervention. Carson had made a radical proposal: that, at times, technological progress is so fundamentally at odds with natural processes that it must be curtailed. Conservation had never raised much broad public interest, for few people really worried about the disappearance of wilderness. But the threats Carson had outlined-the contamination of the food chain, cancer, genetic damage, the deaths of entire species-were too frightening to ignore. For the first time, the need to regulate industry in order to protect the environment became widely accepted, and environmentalism was born.

Carson was well aware of the larger implications of her work. Appearing on a CBS documentary about Silent Spring shortly before her death from breast cancer in 1964, she remarked, "Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."

One of the landmark books of the 20th century, Silent Spring' s message resonates loudly today, even several decades after its publication. And equally inspiring is the example of Rachel Carson herself. Against overwhelming difficulties and adversity, but motivated by her unabashed love of nature, she rose like a gladiator in its defense.

This NRDC.org story is available for online republication by news media outlets or nonprofits under these conditions: The writer(s) must be credited with a byline; you must note prominently that the story was originally published by NRDC.org and link to the original; the story cannot be edited (beyond simple things such as grammar); you can't resell the story in any form or grant republishing rights to other outlets; you can't republish our material wholesale or automatically-you need to select stories individually; you can't republish the photos or graphics on our site without specific permission; you should to let us know when you've used one of our stories.

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How a courageous woman took on the chemical industry and raised important questions about humankind's impact on nature.

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Endangered and also the National Bird of the United States 

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Endangered and also the National Bird of the United States 

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Marsha P. Johnson was a trans woman who advocated for the inclusion of transgender and gender non-conforming people in the gay liberation movement, as at the time the majority of those who participated in the movement were white, middle class, and cisgender. Straight out of high school, she moved to New York City with a bag of clothes and very little money. She remained without a permanent home for most of her life, and had to make most of her money doing sex work. These aspects of her life inspired her to advocate for the protection of transgender youth, which she dedicated her life to. Her participation in Stonewall was probably her most famous action. There are multiple different versions of how the riot went, but regardless she was in the front lines of the uprising. After this event, Johnson was inspired to start the Street Transvestite Activist Revolutionaries (STAR), which was founded in order to give young trans people a place to live when they hadn’t had one previously. In addition to this, the organization also stood as a reminder that transgender lives had just as important of a role in the gay pride movement as cis ones.

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Fought for treaty rights and the reclamation of tribal land, and advocated on behalf of urban Indians whose situation bred illness and poverty. Leaders spoke out against high unemployment, and racist treatment. The group's formation in Minnesota in 1968, as well as the initial occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969. The movement also organized the “Trail of Broken Treaties” March, where protesters marched on Washington, D.C. -Ben Miller

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Dolores Huerta was born in 1930 all the way in New Mexico. Her young life consisted as a farmer and would work with her family. However, when she was just five, her parents divorced. She moved with her mother and brothers to the agricultural community of Stockton in California. Due to the fact that she grew-up in Stockton, she witnessed the farming industry change dramatically throughout The Great Depression and World War II.

Dolores attended Stockton High School, where she encountered a lot of racial discrimination and was faced with her achievements being downplayed due to her teachers not believing that a Latina girl could be so great. After graduating, Dolores earned a teaching degree and taught English to farmworkers’ children.

She would then continue to marry, have children, and continue to push her involvement in the farming community for later on in her life.

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The American Indian movement took place in the 60s-70s. The effects of this movement were very important for the Native American communities and people inside the United States. The movement advocates for and spreads awareness for Native American rights. It also supports social justice, cultural preservation and tribal support.

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Dolores is still an activist today. In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Dolores Huerta is the founder and president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. Through it, she continues to fight for social justice and equal rights, particularly within agricultural labor communities.

Her effects have brought up many different groups to start rising more and more and continue to push forward with fighting. She has been noticed by a feminist group which in turn had her meet up with a leader, Gloria Steinem, who then had Dolores speak before the National Organization of Women (or the NOW) and helped found the Coalition of Labor Union Women. The Coalition of Labor Union Women help push women into the role of legislators, increase their role in their unions, and overall promote for more power in unions for women.

In all, she has bettered the role of women in varying fields such as the LGBTQ, immigrants, poor/ lower income families and women, and many more.

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Movement Goals and other facts about the movement. 

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-One of the goals of the CSO was to encourage Spanish-speakers to participate in civic life and protest on the very important issues she fought and advocated for.

-Delores led voter registration drives, supported bilingual candidates, and lobbied for equal rights for stocktons Latinx community.

-One of her strategies was to appear soft spoken and calm, but behind her calm and quiet personality she was a powerful and well spoken leader where she stood out fighting against racist and sexist resistance.

-She advocated for women laborers, spoke up on gender equality and how men and women are equally qualified in the workforce.

-Other critical issues she fought for were better environments for the poor, women, families, the environment, LGBTQ individuals, and immigrants. Shes still an activist today fighting against these things today and still advocating for civil peace and equality amongst everyone in the world.

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Judy Heumann started a movement called the disability rights movement. This allowed disabled world war 2 veterans to have vocational classes which made it significantly harder for doctors to correctly aid them. Although these veterans made it much clearer to the public that this was occurring in the war aftermath.

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She was a anti-feminist who believed that women should be stay at home moms for their kids she thought that feminism movement would only deteriorate motherhood and break down family structures. Phyllis believed in traditional gender roles. Which where a stay at home mom and a working father. She believed that if the women went into the workforce than there would only be negative consequences. JAKE M.

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Angela Davis was born January 26th, 1944. She is an American Marxist, a feminist political activist, philosopher, an author, and a professor at the University of California. She was a member of the communist party USA and was one of the founding members of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.