Abstract
In October 2012 Hurricane Sandy again thrust natural disasters into the national spotlight. Many aspects of the media coverage were disturbingly familiar, and among these was a conspicuous absence of how gender shapes people’s experiences before, during, and after such disasters. It is these “gender blinders” (Enarson, p. 46) in the field of disaster work that two new books about gender and disasters hope to remedy.
The first, Women Confronting Natural Disasters, is a monograph by Elaine Enarson. Although the main focus of the book is natural disasters, she also draws on data from man-made disasters such as the BP oil spill and the 9/11 attacks. The focus is primarily on disasters in the United States, but her discussion of her findings and her message are also applicable to international disaster scholarship and emergency work.
She begins with a brief statistical accounting of how women’s life chances in general differ from men’s and then moves on to a chapter on how gender and disasters are represented in the media. She addresses not only the messages of the typical “big budget” Hollywood films—where both nature and women are usually eventually returned to a “natural” subservient role to men—but also how women represent their own experiences with disaster (e.g., disaster quilting).
The third chapter provides an overview of the role of gender in disasters and of how various feminist theories can shed light on disaster studies and experiences. Of particular value here are the practical, clearly conceptualized ways of bringing theory to practice for disaster workers and researchers. This chapter could easily be used as a stand-alone introduction to the history of gender in disaster studies, the methodological challenges of accounting for gender, and the theoretical models that would be most useful for doing so.
Many of these suggestions are borne out later in the book. For example, it is a socialist feminist lens that is used to draw attention to both the weaker market power of women before disasters (Chapter four: “Measuring Vulnerability and Capacity”) and the unpaid and often unnoticed work of women to support “front stage” physical rescue and recovery efforts (cooking meals for those sandbagging during the Grand Forks flood for example). This “backstage” work as well as the increased domestic and emotional work of women during and after disasters is given significant attention in Chapter seven: “Intimacy and Family Life.”
The importance of intersectionality of gender, race, class, age, and health status (an emphasis drawn from using multiracial and global feminism) is a theme that runs throughout the book. This is highlighted in her chapter “Work and Workplaces.” Here she notes that many poor African American women affected by Katrina had delicate and extensive social networks that facilitated transportation, child care, and general social support in order to make ends meet before the storm. Evacuation and relocation are particularly damaging to these groups of women whereas other women with different social characteristics (e.g., upper-class white women) do not necessarily share much in common in terms of their disaster experiences.
Two chapters draw from radical feminism to address the ways that women involved in disasters struggle against both ideological and practical manifestations of men’s dominance. Chapter five, “Health and Well-Being,” notes that because emergency planners tend to be primarily men, little attention is generally given to issues like access to birth control and women’s greater susceptibility to environmentally related health problems (mostly related to menstruation or pregnancy) in planning how to set up emergency shelters. Chapter six, “Violence Against Women,” addresses how some women must take abusive situations, either current or former, into consideration when making evacuation, relocation, or rebuilding plans. How, for example, can a woman know whether she will be evacuating to a flood shelter that an abusive spouse won’t also be seeking shelter at? And if so, how will her safety be guaranteed?
The chapters “Building Disaster Resistance” and “Representations of Women in Disasters” both draw from postmodern feminism to emphasize the importance of listening to women’s interpretations and experiences with disasters and giving these voices equal value and attention to those of men. Even the idea of what we define as a disaster tends to be gendered, and as she notes throughout the book, many women face “mini disasters” on a daily basis as they navigate poverty, racism, and disability along with sexism. Ensuring that women have an equal place in both disaster planning and recovery efforts is a key to removing the “gender blinders” (p. 46) in the disaster field.
The themes in Enarson’s monograph are further expanded in The Women of Hurricane Katrina: How Gender, Race, and Class Matter in an American Disaster edited by Emmanuel David and Elaine Enarson. This volume is a collection of primary documents, personal essays, research articles, and commentaries that highlight the role of gender in Hurricane Katrina in conjunction with the effects of race, class, and other social characteristics.
The collection begins with a series of documents originally published immediately after the storm that were critical of the gender disparity in Katrina’s effects. These statements are included to quell claims that “gender was simply an afterthought included in the rewriting of the Katrina narrative” (p. 1). Part two is a collection first hand testimonials by women involved in the storm. There’s a good range here, from a detailed account of the practical steps one woman took in the first 12 hours of being in a flooded house, to the experience of a doctor working at the charity hospital that lost power but couldn’t evacuate patients. These accounts paint a vivid picture for the reader of women’s firsthand experiences with the storm.
Part three turns to empirical study of the experiences of women before, during, and after Katrina. The intersectionality of gender, race, and class comes across clearly in these articles, whether the focus is on how pregnant women made evacuation decisions during the storm or how poor African American women who were living in public housing were displaced initially by flooding and then by the urban planning process.
The primarily qualitative methods also highlight how important mundane and practical considerations and obstacles are in trying to make decisions about impending disasters and rebuilding afterwards. Transportation and child care issues dominate the interviews, as does the importance of informal networks for making ends meet. The difficulty of dealing with various forms of bureaucracy was also a common theme. FEMA checks could only be used to pay rent, and not to pay for other needs like food, transportation, or paying back money owed to friends or family, and this was a significant problem for many women. Other women described the “flood” of paperwork that was involved in dealing with insurance companies or enrolling their children in new schools because their immunization paperwork had been lost in the flood.
The one primarily quantitative piece from the book is also included in this section. Titled “Women in New Orleans Before and After the Storm,” this is an excellent statistical summary that meticulously uses data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to show how demographic characteristics placed some groups of women at much greater risk before the storm than both men and other groups of women.
In Part four, women’s formal and informal efforts to rebuild their communities and lives are well documented. From the Women of the Storm who repeatedly invited members of Congress to visit affected areas firsthand (using their signature umbrellas the color of blue tarps as their moniker) to the efforts of Vietnamese women to close the Chef Meneur Highway landfill in their community, the role of women in disaster recovery and rebuilding is highlighted.
The volume ends with essays by Brenda Phillips and Kathleen Tierney, two leading disaster researchers. These essays are overviews of the field, including the findings contained in this volume, and they offer ideas for a path forward in incorporating gender in disaster work of all kinds. They could just as easily serve as an introduction or overview to gender and disaster studies as stand-alone pieces.
Both books are careful to note that examining the role of gender in disasters does not mean ignoring the experiences of men and focusing only on women. Most of the disaster field has focused either on men’s experiences or has simply not differentiated at all. By beginning to fill in women’s experiences and perspectives in the field of disaster research, these authors lay the groundwork for future work in the field that will benefit everyone who is touched by disaster.