Short

Turning Public Issues into Private Troubles: Lead Contamination, Domestic Labor, and the Exploitation of Women's Unpaid Labor in Australia

Author(s): Lois Bryson, Kathleen McPhillips and Kathryn Robinson

Source: Gender and Society , Oct., 2001, Vol. 15, No. 5 (Oct., 2001), pp. 754-772

Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3081973

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TURNING PUBLIC ISSUES

INTO PRIVATE TROUBLES

Lead Contamination, Domestic Labor, and the Exploitation of Women 's

Unpaid Labor in Australia

LOIS BRYSON

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and University of Newcastle

KATHLEEN McPHILLIPS

University of Western Sydney

KATHRYN ROBINSON

The Australian National University

Residents living in the vicinity of lead smelters are subjected to particularly high levels of contamination

from the toxic process of smelting. Yet, public health strategies currently promoted by state health authorities in Australia do not focus their major attention on stopping the contamination at its source. This article focuses on housecleaning regimes, largely implemented by women, aimed at stopping the toxic materialfrom being ingested by children. Because the residential areas surrounding the smelters are degraded, their property value is low and, by and large, working-class families live there. As this article shows, the recommended cleaning regimes are embedded in social class and gender relations. Analysis of the implementation of the strategy and the historical context within which it is administered

provides an example of a state gender regime, the state "doing" gender and class, and a lens through which to view contemporary gender and class relations.

Feminist theory presents competing interpretations of the state. Theoretical posi- tions provided by liberalism see the state as a neutral umpire, although liberal femi- nists see it as currently co-opted to men's interests (Eisenstein 1984; Pateman 1988; Phillips 1987). On the other hand, the radical feminist position sees the state as irre- deemably patriarchal (MacKinnon 1989). Nonetheless, most feminist theorizing, interpretation, and activism takes a position somewhere between, and there is

AUTHORS' NOTE: This research wasfunded by an Australian Research Council Small Grantfrom the University of Newcastle. We wish to thank Sarah Holcome, Sonia Freeman, and Andrew Johnson for their contributions to this research and Tsari Anderson for her editorial assistance.

REPRINT REQUESTS: Kathryn Robinson, Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, ACT 0200, Australia; e-mail: Kathryn. robinson@ anu.edu.au.

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 15 No. 5, October 2001 754-772

? 2001 Sociologists for Women in Society

754

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Bryson et al. / WOMEN'S UNPAID LABOR 755

widespread agreement among activists that while we must remain wary, we have no choice but to be involved in "struggles in and through the state" (Pringle and Wat- son 1990, 242).

Using a case study of state intervention in the industrial contamination of a resi-

dential community, this article offers a contribution to feminist analysis of the role of the state. Residents of three Australian lead smelter towns, with high levels of toxic pollution, have been given a strong message by state health authorities that their children's health could be irreparably damaged unless they adopt a strict regi- men of housecleaning and child management to reduce the ingestion of lead parti- cles by their children.

This case study of state action on a site that is classically women's domain pro- vides insight into a "state gender regime" (Connell 1990) through examining the state "doing gender" (West and Zimmerman 1987). Connell (1990) has commented on the potential of case studies such as this to illuminate the nature of particular state gender regimes (and gender relations more generally). He proposed that each "empirical state" has a definable "gender regime" that is the precipitate of social struggles and is linked to-although not a simple reflection of-the wider gender order of the society (Connell 1990, 523). The "empirical states" with which we are concerned are at the second level of formal Australian state structures, specifically the public health authorities in the states of New South Wales (NSW) and South Australia, and also the third formal level, the local government.

Unraveling the complexity of the state's role in developing and implementing its health strategy for dealing with the effects of lead pollution within smelter towns allows us to tease out some of the complexities of state intervention. How do they identify and address this health issue? Whose interests do the interventions serve? What are the impacts for different groups of women? Because the intervention is focused on mothering, we start by examining some relevant features of motherhood

in contemporary Australia and its place within the wider scheme of gender relations.

MOTHERHOOD AND THE STATE GENDER REGIME

The motherhood role, embedded in a traditional gender division of labor that assigns responsibility for caring work to women, has been recognized by feminists as pivotal to understanding gender relations and women's inferior power position (Finch and Groves 1983; Hartmann 1981; Heres 1987; Pateman 1988). It is signif- icant that the most influential modern philosophical treatise on justice in Western liberal democracies, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, accepts that "the principle of fair opportunity can only be imperfectly carried out, at least as long as the institu- tion of the family exists" (1973, 74). Feminist theorists agree that family and citi- zenship are fundamentally linked and gendered, although there is disagreement about how and why this is so (Bittman and Pixley 1997; Heres 1987; MacKinnon 1989; Pateman 1988).

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756 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 2001

While schools of feminist thought account in different ways for women's posi- tion and gender relations, they do not contest that motherhood involves a responsi- bility for family work, which falls unequally to women. Graham (1983) pointed to the bifurcated nature of caring as involving "caring about" and "caring for." In terms of parenthood, she suggested that fathers are expected to "care about" their children, and this may involve taking some responsibility for overseeing that care is provided. For mothers, the two aspects are firmly fused: They are expected to both "care about" and "care for."

Empirical studies in Australia and elsewhere of perceptions of motherhood clearly expose a dominating ideology that reflects such views of caring (Dempsey 1997; McMahon 1999; Russell 1983). This is summed up well by a study of moth- ers of young children in Sydney in the early 1980s in which Wearing found that a "good" mother is seen to be "always available to her children, she spends time with them, guides, supports, encourages and corrects as well as loving and caring for them physically." The respondents also saw "good mothers" as "responsible for the cleanliness of their home environment" (Wearing 1996, 85), a perception that fig- ures in an important way in our case study. She found that this pattern was still robust in the 1990s in the face of women's challenges to traditional notions (Wearing 1996), although, not surprisingly, some change seems to be occurring as more women are employed. Her earlier study (Wearing 1984, 130-40) found that employed women, in line with their practice of relying more on others for child care, tended to place more emphasis on what Graham (1983) would term "caring about" rather than "caring for."

Decades of research into time use confirm women's disproportionate share of the work involved in both domestic cleaning and child care relative to their male partners (Bittman and Matheson 1996; Bryson 1997; Fenstermaker Berk 1985). Women in Australia, as elsewhere, are far more likely to undertake cleaning chores and physical care of children. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (1994) found that women's share of laundry was 89 percent (90 percent if in full-time employment), their share of cleaning 82 percent (84 percent if in full-time employment), and of physical care of children 84 percent (76 percent if in full-time employment) (Bittman and Pixley 1997, 113). These tasks are central to the housecleaning regime devised by state authorities that we examine here.

But motherhood is not only a key to understanding what goes on in the home. A rich strand of feminist research shows how motherhood provides a basis for women's activism and resistance in the wider community (Abrahams 1996; McPhillips 1995; Naples 1991, 1998). Brown and Ferguson (1995) pointed to the way women have been in the forefront of the "fight against toxic hazards," as they constitute the majority of both the leadership and membership of active organiza- tions (see also Garland 1988; Krauss 1993). They located the origins of women's propensity to be involved in "making a big stink" about pollution in their family responsibilities, in "their different, gendered experience ... based on their roles as

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Bryson et al. / WOMEN'S UNPAID LABOR 757

people who centre their worldview more on relationships than on abstract rights and on their roles as primary caretakers of the family" (Brown and Ferguson 1995, 147). We, too, found that more women than men were involved in a vocal public campaign against lead pollution in the smelter towns and that activism was very largely motivated by the women's concern for their children (McPhillips 1995). Here, however, our primary focus is not motherhood in relation to residents' often fierce (although small and not very effective) campaigns but on motherhood and the state's lead remediation strategy.

Nonetheless, our research is informed by recent feminist research and theorizing focused on motherhood that is concerned with difference, resistance, and women's

activism (Abrahams 1996; Naples 1992, 1998). These studies provide an important correction to earlier feminist theorizing, which often treated women as a monolithic category (white and middle class) and overemphasized structure at the expense of agency. The importance of difference was stated strongly by Black feminists in both the United States and Britain (hooks 1982; Many voices 1984) who specifi- cally took up the different meaning and experiences of family and motherhood for Black women.

Feminist theorists have provided a leading and timely input into social theory generally by emphasizing the importance of both resistance and difference. This was partly in reaction to the overly structuralist approach of much socialist-feminist or dual-systems theory (Hartmarni 1981; Walby 1990), which focused on the gendered division of labor and, at least in earlier theorizing, implied a unified sub- ject. The correction was important, because as Franzway, Court, and Connell (1989, 35) pointed out, "structure is realised and reconstituted only through social practice," which thus must account not only for agency but also the different cir- cumstances of the practice. However, we must not lose sight of structure and the fact that "action requires social structure as its condition" nor that "practice is his- torically concrete, developing in time" (Franzway, Court, and Connell 1989, 35). This directs us to both continuity and change and to a trio of ubiquitous elements that constitute gender relations: agency, structure, and history.

We now turn to the case study itself, describing our method and providing back- ground on the three cases. In the discussion, we outline how the associated health issues have been defined and redefined and how this informs public health strate- gies for dealing with pollution in the smelter towns. To contextualize the strategy historically, in the subsequent section we consider attempts to deal with lead pollu- tion in one smelter town, Port Pirie, starting in the early twentieth century and cul- minating in the domestic cleaning strategy adopted in the 1980s and 1990s. We examine the role of the state in this process and the reaction of the residents. Women

have been at the forefront of community resistance to the remediation strategies that rely on their unpaid labor as carers. Finally, we draw conclusions on what our case study reveals about the role of the state and note the implications for feminist theory and gender relations more generally.

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758 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 2001

THE SMELTER COMMUNITIES: METHOD AND BACKGROUND

We first became interested in the public health intervention processes in lead- affected towns when one of us (McPhillips) became caught up with the effects of lead contamination in her residential community, which bordered on Boolaroo, a smelter town in NSW. McPhillips's personal experience of dealing with lead con- tamination became the subject of spirited debate and theorizing in our (then) shared work context-the sociology department of the local university. This led to the development of the research reported in this article.

Method

We began with a review of the social science literature on the contamination of residential communities, and the kinds of interventions made by public health authorities, in Australia and overseas. The style of intervention that we found in Boolaroo clearly followed from previous attempts to remediate the effects of lead in other smelter communities. In general, the published studies were within a health intervention or epidemiological paradigm and did not encompass a sociologically informed critique of the circumstances of lead contamination or of the preferred ameliorative measures. None of them incorporated a critique of the gendered char- acter of interventions.

In investigating the case study of Boolaroo, we collected qualitative data through direct engagement in the community; through participant observation in community activities; and through interviews with eight residents of Boolaroo, including female members of community groups (both for and against the smelter). We also interviewed personnel in the local health authority who had been involved in testing children's blood levels and in designing and implementing subsequent intervention measures.

Historical materials relating to the genesis of the political conflict over contami-

nation in Boolaroo were available to us. These included reports in local newspapers (which had been systematically filed by the municipal library and collected by activists), reports and scholarly articles produced by the public health authorities, and a television documentary produced for the state-owned public broadcasting authority that critically recorded an intervention in 1991 intended to remove his- toric contamination from Boolaroo residences (Australian Broadcasting Corpora- tion 1992). The smelter company produced regular community newsletters, which were available to us, as were the public health information brochures.

In interpreting the data relating to Boolaroo, we used a comparative perspective, drawing on the reports of similar interventions in the other Australian lead smelter towns. There are three major sites of lead production in Australia: Port Pirie in South Australia, and Broken Hill and Boolaroo in NSW (see Figure 1).

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Bryson et al. / WOMEN'S UNPAID LABOR 759

o 1000 I I I I 1

kilometres

Figure 1: Map of Australia Showing Major Lead Smelter Sites

Port Pirie

Although lead has been a known environmental contaminant for at least 100 years, public health intervention has been attempted on a large population scale only in the past 20 years. In the early 1980s, Port Pirie in South Australia (which houses the largest lead smelter in the Southern Hemisphere) was identified by the South Australian Health Department as a serious source of lead contamination. The city of Port Pirie is located 320 kilometers north of Adelaide, and the main employer, the smelter operator BHAS, had a workforce of 1,500 at the time. The South Australian government undertook a remediation program based on a domes- tic cleaning regime aimed at reducing lead levels in children-the most vulnerable group to the effects of lead. The remediation program adopted by the health depart- ment for Port Pirie became the blueprint that other lead-affected towns drew on.

During the early remediation work undertaken at Port Pirie, research clearly demonstrated that exposure to low levels of lead sources could cause detrimental effects to children's physiological and neurological development (McMichael et al. 1992). This pressured the federal government through its regulatory authority, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), into lowering the acceptable levels of lead in air and blood, which in turn put further pressure on state health departments to intervene in, and remediate, lead-affected communities. In 1993, the NHMRC lowered the lead level considered safe (from 25 to 15 gg/dL)

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760 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 2001

with the future aim of lowering the level to that accepted in the United States- 10 gg/dL (Alperstein, Taylor, and Vimpani 1994, 5).

Boolaroo

Boolaroo is a small suburb of the city of Lake Macquarie, which is contiguous with the city of Newcastle. Located on the western tip of Lake Macquarie, it is about 200 kilometers north of Sydney. Boolaroo residents are not dependent on the smelter as their principal avenue of employment. Nonetheless, the area has housed a lead industry for more than 100 years, and since the 1950s, it has been smelting lead. Lead contamination in Boolaroo is both historical and current. Even with the

implementation of stack and emission controls in recent years, significant concern remains about high levels of lead in soil and house dust. In 1991, the Newcastle Public Health Unit (PHU) conducted a survey of the levels of lead in children's blood. The first report indicated that a significant proportion of young children in the suburbs closest to the smelter had high blood lead readings (Galvin et al. 1993). This prompted the PHU to instigate a remediation program, which still exists today.

Broken Hill

Broken Hill, in far western NSW, has had numerous lead mines in operation for many years. From the late 1980s, much of the lead-mining industry there has been in recession, and the major economic activity is now tourism. Broken Hill also has substantial unemployment and a large number of single-parent families and other social security recipients. Lead contamination has been a focus of concern to Bro- ken Hill residents and health professionals given the close proximity of the commu- nity to mining operations, the dangerous nature of the open-cut mine where lead oxide is released directly into the air, and the fact that lead mining has been the town's main source of employment until recently. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a remediation program in place that incorporated a domestic cleaning regime. The critical features of the populations in all three areas affected by the pollution is that they are of low socioeconomic status with manufacturing providing predomi- nantly male employment.

The Household Cleaning Regime

Public health authorities have systematically turned to an approach dealing with lead effects that is focused on the ways in which it is ingested, particularly by chil- dren, rather than with stopping pollution. In the vicinity of the Boolaroo smelter, for

example, an attractive poster was distributed to residents, with the title "Lead: Lower the levels & protect your child" (PHU n.d.). It mentions soil, food, house- hold dust, old paint, and the lead worker as potential sources, identifying interven- tions that can be made, with most of them involving an intensification of domestic labor. To avoid exposure of children to lead in household dust, parents are advised

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Bryson et al. / WOMEN'S UNPAID LABOR 761

to use a wet mop instead of a broom; keep dust from children's play areas, including under beds and in closets; and remember to dust corers, along sides of windows, and behind furniture and doors. Advice to the lead worker includes the following: Keep kit bags out of reach of children; keep children away from work clothes; and clean dust from inside and outside of car, especially if driven to work. To avoid lead

in food, the parents are advised to intensify domestic labor by preventing children from sucking dirty hands, fingernails, or objects; wiping surfaces before preparing food; and covering food and utensils to prevent lead dust from settling on them. The problem of contaminated soil is addressed by advice to wash children's hands before eating, especially if playing outside; to provide clean soil or sand for chil- dren to play in; and to use a nail brush under nails. The poster does not represent the source of the lead contamination in any way.

The focus on domestic-based interventions deflects attention away from the source of the pollution, which is clearly in the interests of capital. We argue that the

burden of activities to ameliorate the effects of pollution falls disproportionately to women and must be counted as an aspect of the state's gender as well as class regime. The communities, which already bear the burden of toxic contamination and its attendant health, social, and economic effects, are further burdened with the

responsibility of "putting things right." The spotlight in the three smelter towns in recent years has been very much on

children, even though evidence suggests that lead is a health hazard for all age- groups (Alperstein, Taylor, and Vimpani 1994; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1991). In earlier years, the focus of official programs was on workers and also in a manner that deflected attention away from the smelting companies' practices. Before we look in detail at the instigation of the domestic cleaning regime in the 1980s and 1990s, it is instructive to trace the evolution of public health approaches to dealing with lead pollution at Port Pirie, the first Australian smelter town in which such an intervention was made.

PORT PIRIE: A CENTURY OF PRIVATIZED SOLUTIONS

The Early Twentieth Century

The approach of both the companies and governments to lead poisoning issues show continuity during the past 70 years, in their shared tendency to privatize a pub- lic problem. In the years after World War I, an outbreak of problems referred to as an epidemic of lead poisoning in Port Pirie led to the establishment of a government inquiry, which returned a finding that the "epidemic" was located among Southern European migrants, who were seen as either susceptible or "malingerers." Workers were seen as at risk because of their resistance to the use of respirators and not tak- ing sufficient care to wash their hands or shower after work. As Gillespie (1990, 305) put it, there were struggles over "accounting for illness." In this struggle,

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762 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 2001

the company was able to establish its account as the most plausible and have it sanc- tioned by the state, thereby controlling the solutions that were adopted, and contain- ing the intervention of the state and workers in the organisation of production. (Gillespie 1990, 306)

The company's major focus was on managing its current problems rather than working toward prevention, and this provides a window into where the corpora- tion's interests lie. Some changes in production practices were made, but these were minor ones and inexpensive,' and migrant workers ultimately were the scapegoats.

In the 1920s, wives were also potential victims of contamination, more so if they lived close to the smelter, in particular through their household work of laundering the clothes of male workers. While women clearly have been involved and their labor exploited in the past, during recent years, women have been targeted more explicitly by public health strategies. Families of workers, but also other residents who live close to the smelter, are pressured to be involved in the housecleaning regime because of its emphasis on the implications for their children's health.

The 1980s and 1990s: Developing the Domestic Cleaning Regime

In the early 1980s, the South Australian health department responded to U.S. research linking impaired intellectual development with lead by undertaking a sur- vey of the factors implicated in elevated blood lead levels of young children living within the vicinity of the smelter at Port Pirie (Landrigan 1983). Using a control sample of children with low blood lead levels, researchers found that 5 of the 16 evaluated behavioral factors were significantly associated with high lead levels. These factors were a history of placing objects in the mouth, nail biting, dirty hands, dirty clothes, and eating lunch at home rather than at school (Landrigan 1983, 8). The survey also found that higher lead levels in children were associated with the number of persons in the household working in the lead industry (cf. Donovan 1996).

However, the research also showed that none of the factors were as important as

living in a contaminated environment and that living near the smelter was three times more important than anything else (Landrigan 1983, 9). Because past emis- sions still contaminate the atmosphere and the soil, reducing emissions was acknowledged as insufficient for dealing with the problem. More recently, public health officials recognized that the only effective way of dealing with lead contami- nation at smelter sites is relocating residents (Galvin et al. 1993, 377), although to our knowledge no public body has ever implemented a relocation program.

In 1984, the South Australian health department and the smelter management started an education program about the importance of personal hygiene and house- hold cleaning. The focus was on "pathways" through which lead is ingested by chil- dren and the ways this can be minimized within the home. The general manager of smelter operations expressed the view that "given reasonable care and hygiene, then you can live with the levels of contamination from past emissions." Fowler and Grabosky (1989, 153-57) suggested that the company was "defensive and cautious"

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Bryson et al. / WOMEN'S UNPAID LABOR 763

lest remedial action imply admission of legal responsibility. The company main- tained public health to be a government responsibility and invested far less than the government. The South Australian government's response was restrained as well, illustrating the power of major capital by showing an unwillingness to "antagonise one of the state's largest employers" (Fowler and Grabosky 1989, 150). The gov- ernment was prepared to burden working-class women, rather than business.

In 1986, another case control study examined children's blood lead levels in Port Pirie (Wilson et al. 1986). The study focused mainly on environmental issues and the implications for the smelter. It assessed behavioral differences between "cases" and "controls" and again pointed to the "pathways" for ingestion such as "biting fingernails" or "dirty clothing/hands at school."2 In 1988, the public health program at Port Pirie also undertook external decontamination in the yards of 1,400 homes at

highest risk, and adjacent vacant blocks and footpaths were sealed (Heyworth 1990, 178). Subsequently, a "partial decontamination" of the same area was insti- tuted, in recognition that contamination is continuous. Such a program requires a permanent cycle of treatment of the homes and vacant blocks and a continuing awareness within the community of the need for vigilance in terms of personal and home hygiene (Heyworth 1990, 183).3

In 1993, after several months of remediation, including replanting tailings dumps and the implementation of housecleaning regimes, the blood lead levels had elevated in a part of the town deemed to be a nonrisk area and hence not subject to the campaign. Further investigation found the source to be stacks of lead ore left on the wharves in open piles, with dust being carried by the winds into residential areas not previously considered at risk from the smelter.

The South Australian Health Commission published a decade review of the Port Pirie program in 1993 that concluded, "Given the amount of lead contamination to which these households are exposed, changes in dust hygiene would not seem to be a realistic way to ensure lower exposures to lead by the child" (Maynard, Calder, and Phipps 1993, 25). This point, that domestic strategies are unsustainable in the long term (Maynard, Calder, and Phipps 1993, 5), had previously been made by Landrigan in 1983 and by Luke in 1991 after an extensive search of the world litera-

ture on the topic (Luke 1991, 161-67). Many people are prepared to modify their behavior in the short term, but sooner or later they revert to more comfortable hab-

its. The report notes that because there is a constant process of recontamination, it is

unrealistic to expect continuing voluntary participation of residents in programs for lead remediation. Another barrier to ongoing participation is the stigmatization that is involved if a child's blood levels are high. Parents are reluctant to have their child labeled as potentially intellectually impaired, and they themselves feel stigmatized by the implication that they have dirty houses.

Over time, parents tend to withdraw from participation in blood-monitoring pro- grams. This can be seen as a form of resistance in situations where parents are expected to comply with surveillance of a problem that has a source external to the home and family, but they are expected to deal with the consequences. Their con- certed efforts at housecleaning fail to bring the promised results, and they continue

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764 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 2001

to suffer the stigmatization of the threats to their children's healthy development and the implication that they are poor housekeepers.

During the evaluations of cleaning regimes by health authorities, little attention was paid to the women involved as the cleaners, which indirectly provides us with some insight into the state gender regime. Apart from the effort and the responsibil-

ity, there is evidence that the cleaning process itself can be contaminating (Austra- lian Broadcasting Corporation 1992; Luke 1991, 99).4

Fowler and Grabosky (1989, 148) suggested that the "regulatory orientation to pollution control has been characterized by negotiation and compromise, rather than strict enforcement." Governments have been reluctant to antagonize business, and business has been motivated by a "desire to avoid the loss of a marketable prod- uct rather than environmental concern" (Fowler and Grabosky 1989, 147). State recognition of business interests as more important than smelter community resi- dents has ultimately resulted in greater recourse to the cleaning regime. Further- more, it is unlikely that the public health care system has the long-term capacity to maintain the level of involvement and monitoring that is required. This suggests the program is "window dressing," a project of state legitimation, which rests on the state's class and gender regime and which masks the interests that are served by de facto tolerance of levels of industrial pollution damaging to a small and easily ignored segment of the population.

DOMESTIC CLEANING REGIMES-THE 1990s

A similar household cleaning regime to that developed and applied in the 1980s by public health workers in the vicinity of the Port Pirie lead smelter was subse- quently put in place in the NSW smelter towns of Boolaroo and Broken Hill. The regime was formalized in 1994 by a federal agency, the Commonwealth of Austra- lia Environmental Protection Authority (EPA), and outlined in a document pub- lished by the EPA titled Lead Alert: A Guide for Health Professionals (Alperstein, Taylor, and Vimpani 1994).

Lead Alert set out the "steps to minimise exposure and absorption" of lead by children. Health professionals are told to give the following advice "to parents if a child's blood lead is more than 15 ,lg/dL" (Alperstein, Taylor, and Vimpani 1994, 17). Parents should ensure that children's hands and face are washed before they eat or have a nap, discourage children from putting dirty fingers in their mouths, encourage children to play in grassy areas, and wash fruit and vegetables. In terms of housecleaning, they are advised to wet dust floors, ledges, window sills, and other flat surfaces at least weekly or more often if the house is near a source point

for lead; to clean carpets and rugs regularly using a vacuum cleaner; to wash chil- dren's toys, especially those used outside; and to wash family pets frequently and discourage pets from sleeping near children. The parent should ensure that the child does not have access to peeling paint or chewable surfaces painted with lead-based paint and that the child's diet is adequate in calcium and iron, which helps to

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Bryson et al. / WOMEN'S UNPAID LABOR 765

minimize lead absorption. Children should be provided with regular frequent meals and snacks, up to six per day, because more lead is absorbed on an empty stomach (Alperstein, Taylor, and Vimpani 1994, 17).

The document was widely disseminated, not just in smelter communities but in situations where people had elevated blood lead levels from any source. The house- cleaning regime has been promoted as a primary intervention strategy, despite the evidence from evaluations of the Port Pirie experience (as well as studies in other countries) that show it to be ineffective.

This extremely detailed cleaning regime involves an implicit threat for noncom- pliance, the threat of adversely affecting one's child's health and intellectual devel- opment. Because of the nature of the tasks, the responsibility for most of this work falls to mothers rather than all parents.

For communities in the vicinity of lead smelters in Australia, public health authorities recommend an even more stringent regime than that implied in Lead Alert. The regime suggests not vacuuming with a child in the room since the clean- ing raises dust. Dusting should ideally cover what one Boolaroo mother described as "bizarre places" such as the fly wire in screen doors. Other suggested strategies include moving children's beds from under windows and putting away soft toys because they cannot be easily washed (Gilligan 1992,4). To add to this intensifica- tion, some anxious parents intensify the regime further. The "wet dusting" or mop- ping over of all horizontal surfaces is done more than once a day by some mothers. In a television documentary on the subject of lead poisoning and children, women who had implemented the regime in both Boolaroo and Port Pirie expressed their frustration. "They tell you to run round with a washer after them. They are not allowed to put their fingers in the mouths"; "You do things that you just would not do"; "We must be the only housewives in New South Wales that do these tasks" (Australian Broadcasting Corporation 1992). Another mother verbalized the worry and guilt associated with such responsibility for her children's health, "You feel guilty if you just don't want to do the work... you think your child does not have a normal life ... should you have more children?" (Gilligan 1992, 45).

The lead abatement program also involves the monitoring of the child's blood lead levels as the most significant means of measuring the levels of lead absorption. This means subjecting the child to frequent blood sampling and a constant measur- ing as to whether the family's efforts have been successful. There is constant con- tact for both mother and child with health and other professionals and often researchers (Australian Broadcasting Corporation 1992; Gilligan 1992, 4). The constancy of the monitoring creates the impression that the responsibility for the public health problem falls on the residents themselves (and especially on moth- ers), rather than the government or the corporation (see also McGee 1996, 14). The monitoring of blood lead levels also gives the impression that something is being done but actually does nothing to address the source of the contamination. In some cases, children's blood lead levels have risen after the implementation of household- cleaning regimes.

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766 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 2001

A study of the effects of the lead issue on Boolaroo residents found that families of children with high blood lead levels experienced "feelings of guilt, stigma, anxi- ety, stress and powerlessness... that the difference may be due to or to be seen to be due to some action or inaction of them as parents" (Hallebone and Townsend 1993, 17). We found that in Boolaroo, health professionals regarded parental failure to present children for monitoring as evidence of irresponsibility. As with smelter workers in the 1920s, stigma is attached to those who do not conform to the clean- ing standards.

Cathy Phipps, a worker with the health program in Port Pirie, confirmed that ele-

vated blood lead levels incur stigma as they are assumed to be associated with lack of adequate child care and hygiene (Clean-up hopes 1994). We found that some Boolaroo women were critical of homes where there were children with high blood lead levels on the basis that the mothers "weren't looking after them properly" (see also Hallebone and Townsend 1993). In one instance, a Boolaroo mother told us that she received anonymous phone calls calling her "ignorant and dirty." Another was chastised for her irresponsible behavior in having her grandchildren come to visit her in her contaminated home, while another local mother had overheard the

site manager of the lead smelter claiming that only children from "dirty homes" have high lead levels. The consequences of the politics of shifting blame onto indi- viduals-in this case mothers-leave them open to stigmatization, which is likely to be internalized.

Stigma is not the only problem. Manning (1993), an economist, attempted to quantify the cost for Boolaroo families of the extra domestic work, as part of his overall cost estimates of the abatement strategy employed in the area. He calculated there were 40 minutes of additional domestic work per day, costing about Aus$10 per hour.

Not only are women enslaved by the domestic cleaning, but their children's psy- chological and/or emotional development is put in question. In the education book- let written by the education department for use in Boolaroo schools, the family unit is presented as the most important element in dealing with lead exposure: "Children who are supported and confident in their family unit will be better able to deal with any problems associated with the lead issue" (quoted in Mason 1992, 41).

Despite evidence of limited success in the long term, domestic cleaning regimes are becoming popular for dealing with lead contamination from gasoline.5 As has occurred with the smelter communities, the effect again is to shift responsibility from the polluting source to the private sphere of the family and women.

RESISTANCE TO STATE INTERVENTIONS

The focus on housecleaning regimes as a response to children's elevated blood lead levels has the effect of stigmatizing parents and calling into question their capacity to care for their children. As noted above, mothers who have implemented the regime, however, find it very oppressive and anxiety provoking, hence many

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Bryson et al. / WOMEN'S UNPAID LABOR 767

cease doing it (McGee 1996, 14). There is also resistance to the surveillance of chil- dren's blood lead levels in situations where the health authorities are not offering an effective response to the problem. The proportion of smelter-town families who continue to present their children for blood testing has declined considerably over time (Isles 1993; Maynard, Calder, and Phipps 1993, 9; Stephenson, Corbett, and Jacobs 1992; Western NSW PHU 1994).

Nevertheless, women in smelter towns have responded with active as well as passive resistance. Following the PHU's 1991 revelation of elevated blood lead lev- els in Boolaroo children, local residents, mainly women, formed the North Lakes Environmental Action Defence Group (No Lead). It has campaigned for action by state and local government and by the smelter to counter the high levels of lead pollution.

Teresa Gordon, the president of No Lead, was described in the local newspaper as having "transformed herself from a media-shy concerned citizen to a slick, com- pelling orator for the powerful lobby group" (Sorenson 1995). Gordon was quoted:

I think a lot about women and the environment today and the way housekeepers are left with the problems. Boolaroo is a typical example of that. Mothers are asked to clean the home and it is the women who are left with the burden of guilt and responsi- bility. When kids' blood lead levels do not go down, it is the mother's fault and not the industry's. (Sorenson 1995, 14)6

Gordon fits the profile of the women activists described by Kaplan (1997). She coins the term female consciousness to describe the basis of political action by women who "proclaim their identity as wives and mothers according to the terms their culture dictates" but make demands on the state and powerful social actors to enable them to fulfill those responsibilities (1997, 185). She sees this concept as fulfilling a similar function to Molyneux's (1985) notion of "practical gender inter- ests," explaining why women act collectively in response to threats to their families

and communities and "assume authority to speak for entire communities" (Kaplan 1997, 186).

No Lead has addressed the issue of lead contamination by refocusing public attention on the responsibilities of the government to regulate the industry and the industry's responsibility to reduce toxic emissions. They have found themselves in direct conflict with the company's public relations strategists who have attempted to downplay their political significance as legitimate representatives of community interest. No Lead has been able to successfully work with environmental groups like Greenpeace and has achieved some success in refocusing government attention on Boolaroo. For example, a Parliamentary Select Committee set up in 1994 resulted in a management plan that placed more responsibility on the smelter and the local government in limiting the effects of plant emissions, although it rein- forced the emphasis on housecleaning regimes (NSW Parliament 1994).

Other women in Boolaroo have actively resisted government interventions intended to ameliorate the exposure of children to lead, which they see as stigmatiz- ing their children as intellectually limited or themselves as poor housekeepers. The

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768 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 2001

most significant of these was the 1992 resistance by the Parents and Citizens Asso- ciation to a temporary closure of the local school for remediation. The parents ques- tioned whether the school was indeed contaminated or if the contamination was any more significant than that which they experienced in their homes. They rejected the implication that the school posed a threat to their children's intellectual develop- ment, citing cases of local children who had succeeded academically. The women involved in this public protest expressed a fear that the school would be closed for- ever, once the children had been relocated. McPhillips (1995, 48) commented that the issue brought out the "deep-felt suspicion that this section of the local commu- nity held for government bureaucracies." That is, they do not see the public authori- ties as acting in their interests and resist the authorities' efforts to intervene in the situation. In this case, the women's resistance was successful, and the remediation

was carried out while the school was routinely closed for summer holidays.

CONCLUSION: LEAD LEVELS, PUBLIC HEALTH STRATEGIES, AND

STATE GENDER REGIMES

The strategy promoted by public health authorities for smelter towns, rather than

dealing with the source of the pollution, turns this public issue into a private family matter. In appearing to do something, the state selected a remediation strategy that has been repeatedly proven to be ineffective. Research from many countries (Luke 1991) persistently shows that the major issue is one of proximity to the smelter and the level of emissions, with past pollution also a critical factor. There is a continuing history of failure of the smelting companies to own the pollution problem they cause and to deal with it. Profit levels, rather than health concerns, have historically taken precedence, with the state mediating the corporations' interests. The state his- torically has facilitated the shifting of the focus of responsibility for the problem to the relatively powerless. Now the blame is laid on working-class women, whereas early in the twentieth century, it was directed toward recently arrived male immi- grant workers, although women were indirectly implicated.

The official remediation strategy does not fall in a gender-neutral way on both parents. It relies for its implementation on additional daily caring labor being undertaken by mothers of children deemed "at risk" and thus on the basis of a tradi- tional understanding of the responsibilities associated with motherhood. In addi- tion, it relies for compliance on the mothers' emotional commitment to their chil- dren's health, a situation with great potential to engender feelings of guilt and to stigmatize those who "fail." The exploitation of these working-class women's unpaid caring labor is not only an example of the state "doing" gender but a recent form of "doing" class as well. Brown and Ferguson (1995, 161) noted that

when activists discover that local industry values its bottom line or international repu- tation more highly than it does the health of children in the community, this realization

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Bryson et al. / WOMEN'S UNPAID LABOR 769

violates the trust that the women toxic waste activists have placed in the ideal of cor- porate citizenship and governmental protection.

Working-class mothers are the target of a burdensome housecleaning regime that absorbs their labor but at the same time effectively shifts responsibility for ensuring the pollution does not damage their children's health away from the corpo- ration and the state. This strategy reflects a state gender regime that involves mate- rial exploitation in the form of reliance on women's labor in a manner that serves powerful interests and ideological exploitation through the manipulation of the women's sense of maternal responsibility.

The structural features of class and gender do not, of course, account for the whole story. Residents are not duped nor have they have been silent on the matter. The women as individuals resist or reject the recommended regime and have been at the forefront of organized community resistance strategies. Women organized into community-based pressure groups have had limited success in directing atten- tion back onto the smelter as the source of the toxic pollution and away from their responsibility as domestic carers for the health of their children.

This case study raises specific questions about where the responsibility lies for the health of residents of smelter communities. But it also illuminates class and

gender relations in contemporary Australia and the manner in which the state is engaged in the reproduction of class and gender difference.

NOTES

1. In 1992, the company still had personnel devoted to the management of the problem. There was a

Port Pirie manager for health and environment and a company-wide manager of environmental projects (Australian Broadcasting Corporation 1992).

2. In terms of current standards, the controls also had elevated blood levels (with a mean of 17 Ig/dL), which casts doubt on the conclusions from the study. The study had the effect of normalizing

the underlying high level of contamination (represented in the high blood levels) and, once again, the effect of focusing attention away from the source.

3. Over time, improvements have been made in levels of air emission. However, past emission levels ("historic contamination") remain part of the problem that needs to be dealt with by major decontamina-

tion programs that should establish buffer zones by buying up the houses closest to the smelter. (By 1992, 100 houses in Port Pirie had been purchased and demolished.)

4. This potential was belatedly recognized in the 1993 Port Pirie high-risk area program when the blood of both parents and children was tested after residents were encouraged to participate in the home

contamination procedure (Maynard, Calder, and Phipps 1993, 9). 5. At the Newcastle conference on Lead Abatement and Remediation in 1994, Professor

Bornschein, director of Epidemic Research at Cincinnati University, claimed that "full abatement is expensive and ineffective" and that good results can be obtained from educating people about personal and home hygiene. He indicated that this was to be the focus of 29 programs to start in the United States in the near future (Maguire 1994).

6. Reprinted with permission from Newcastle Newspapers.

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770 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 2001

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Lois Bryson is an emeritus professor of the University of Newcastle and an adjunct professor at

the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Melbourne, Australia. She has had an extensive research and teaching career in sociology, and herpublished work hasfocused on gen- der issues especially in relation to family, employment, and social policy.

Kathleen McPhillips teaches in the School of Cultural Inquiry at the University of Western Syd-

ney and has been involved in lead issues as both an activist and a researcher.

Kathryn Robinson is senior fellow and head of the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. She has published research on social policy and resource management, gender and health, principally focusing on Indonesia.

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