Contemporary environmental movements force a disproportionate weight of responsibility on women. Maternal framings to environmentalism are transformed from powerful organizing principles into unpaid, domesticated responsibility which reproduce gendered, classed, and racialized inequalities.

In this paper, I discuss a third problem with the neoliberal emphasis on individual responsibility and market-based solutions to environmental issues: the exacerbation of the gendered burden of environmental harm. As a growing body of literature at the intersection of environmental sociology and gender studies reveals, such individualized approaches fall more heavily on women, particularly those who are tasked with the work of feeding, caring for, and protecting their families. Even environmental advocacy groups that acknowledge the failure of regulatory agencies often perpetuate the notion that individual mothers are ultimately responsible for protecting their children against pollution (MacKendrick & Cairns, 2019). Indeed, everyday precaution in avoiding harmful exposures to toxic chemicals through food and consumer products is becoming another component of responsible mothering subject to moral judgment (MacKendrick, 2014). This departs from earlier modes of maternal framing that focused on community protection and stopping pollution at its source. Women engaged in environmental activism historically justified their work in ways that align with and extend traditionally feminine identities and responsibilities; many women’s environmental organizations during the Progressive era used the language of mothering and “public housekeeping” (Addams, 1915), particularly in relation to keeping urban environments clean and livable (Rome, 2006). Similarly, early women environmental justice organizers presented a community-oriented notion of motherhood that encouraged advocacy outside of the home (Peeples & DeLuca, 2006). But in the age of precautionary and ethical consumption, maternal discourse is increasingly mobilized in a way that prioritizes protecting oneself and one’s own family. Scholars have not only documented a gender gap in precautionary consumption, but also in household-level proenvironmental behavior (Dzialo, 2017; Organo et al., 2013). Yet this gender gap has rarely been treated as problematic by environmental sociologists and is not conceptualized as another example of women’s unpaid labor (Kennedy & Kmec, 2018). This is reflective of the overall absence of gendered and feminist perspectives within environmental sociology and environmental justice scholarship, which several scholars have repeatedly called attention to in the past decade (Dzialo & Kennedy, 2015; McWright & Xiao, 2014; Buckingham & Kulcur, 2009; Banerjee & Bell, 2007). Gendered and/or feminist perspectives are also largely missing from environmental justice policy, discourse, and activism (K. Bell 2016). It is concerning that the domestic scale remains an underexamined site of environmental harm and gendered burden. I argue that precautionary consumption and other forms of individualized environmental risk management add to the “third shift” (Hochschild, 1997), on top of the disproportionate burden of household labor and care work that women already face.1 As stated by Buckingham and Kulcur (2009), the persistent gendered domestic division of labor is a social injustice that is compounded by modern environmental risks. Not only is this third shift a problem in and of itself, in that it is yet another form of unpaid labor performed predominantly by women, but it is also a demobilizing force. Just as the environmental movement gave women the opportunity to impact public life in order to protect their family, today’s calls on women to protect their families push them back into the household and urge them to engage in more household labor and consumerism. Moreover, not only does precautionary consumption offer inadequate protection overall, but it potentially reproduces existing gender inequalities between men and women and also among women of different levels of race and class privilege. Low-income and racial-ethnic minority women are not only more likely to have greater exposure to environmental hazards by way of their geographic location, but they are also less likely to have the time and resources to engage in precautionary consumption and behavior. Thus, the increasing individualization of the environmental movement also potentially exacerbates environmental injustice at the household level. In this paper, I begin with a brief overview of literature that points to the increasing individualization of the environmental movement under neoliberalism. I then explore the politics of motherhood in social movements, and how the maternal role serves both as an impetus for action and as a frame through which mobilization occurs. A key insight offered by this literature is that movements with feminine identities face a “double bind” (Einwohner et al., 2000), in that while such identities may help movement participants establish legitimacy, they may not provide long-term political effectiveness and agency. I then examine how this double bind has played out in women’s environmental activism, while emphasizing that maternalist framing has been a consistent part of a long history of powerful, often successful organizing for environmental protection and justice. The latter half of the paper builds toward an understanding of how maternal responsibility and discourse has taken on a new meaning in the contemporary environmental movement. I conclude by outlining areas for future research on gender and environmental inequality.