Women Confronting Natural Disaster : From Vulnerability to Resilience [1 ed.] 9781588269560, 9781588268310

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Women Confronting Natural Disaster

Women Confronting Natural Disaster From Vulnerability to Resilience Elaine Enarson

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2012 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2012 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Enarson, Elaine Pitt, 1949– Women confronting natural disaster : from vulnerability to resilience / Elaine Enarson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58826-831-0 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Disasters—Social aspects. 2. Disaster relief—Social aspects. 3. Women—Social conditions. 4. Women—Psychology. I. Title. HV553.E52 2012 363.34082—dc23 2011034702 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

vii ix

List of Tables and Figures Preface 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Women and Disasters in the United States Representations of Women in Disasters How Gender Changes Disaster Studies Measuring Vulnerability and Capacity Health and Well-Being Violence Against Women Intimacy and Family Life Houses and Homes Work and Workplaces Grassroots Groups and Recovery Building Disaster Resilience Fighting for the Future

Appendix: A Guide to Online Resources References Index About the Book

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1 7 21 41 59 71 87 105 121 143 167 195 199 203 231 245

Tables and Figures

Tables

1.1 3.1 10.1 10.2

Challenges of Women’s Everyday Lives: Selected Indicators Evaluating Feminist Theories Relevant to Disaster Risk Reduction How Women’s Collective Disaster Work Varies Research Questions About Women’s Work to Reduce Disaster Risk

3 39 164 165

Figures

3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 11.1

Feminist Frameworks for Understanding Hazards and Disasters Cautionary Notes on Selected Vulnerability Indicators Illustrative Sex-Specific Census Data by Census Tract From Numbers to Relationships: Anticipating Needs and Capacities Potential Risk-Reducing Partnerships

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27 54 55 56 192

Preface

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y feminism and my approach to sociology were framed by the 1960s, marriage and motherhood, violence and mobility—and then I moved to Miami, Florida, just in time for the 1992 hurricane season. Like many newcomers, my family and I were blissfully ignorant of natural hazards and the history of storms along the Florida coast. We trusted that this storm would swirl away at the last minute. With time short and my husband on a business trip in Australia, my young sons and I struggled to cover our home’s windows with the unwieldy plywood hurricane shutters left by the previous owners. In the end, not a single one fit. Finally, we evacuated before Hurricane Andrew struck, but not until local automated teller machines were empty, food was scarce, and nearly all of the gasoline pumps were dry. Weeks later, our lives and neighborhood utterly transformed, we began the hard work of rebuilding, grateful for the benefits of good income, good insurance, good credit, and good health. Once the boys were settled in school and our temporary house in a different part of Miami was functional, I put my high school Spanish to use as a Red Cross volunteer. Greeting me early in the morning were women who had risen much earlier to claim a spot in line: tearful, exhausted, impatient African American and Latina women with babies, children, teens, and grandmothers in tow. Disaster vulnerability, gendered impacts, resilience, and recovery—it was all on display in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. And so I began my journey to disaster sociology. For me, the silver lining of this horrific storm was meeting new colleagues at Florida International University who helped me to understand it, Betty Hearn Morrow first among them. I then moved to Australia and on to Canada, becoming increasingly involved with the global Gender and Disaster Network, which helped me to see my US experience in a new light. Soon I was studyix

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ing gender issues on both sides of the US-Canadian border in the wake of the 1997 Upper Midwestern floods and researching violence against women in disasters. Working in India (post–2001 Gujarat earthquake) and then in Southeast Asia (post–2004 tsunami), I came to appreciate the strong connections among gender, development, disaster reduction, and the creativity displayed by communities of women at risk. I was en route to Sri Lanka on a gender mainstreaming project when, like other Americans, I was transfixed by television images of the suffering following Hurricane Katrina. My next stop was Brandon University in Manitoba to teach in its new Applied Disaster and Emergency Studies program. This sojourn brought the word “applied” to life for me and inspired a focus on training materials and the education of emergency management students. Now back in beautiful Colorado, I want more than ever to help shift my own country’s approach to hazards and disasters. This book is one step, an empirical retelling of many women’s stories. We are driven to apply what we know in this field, so I include a practice-based appendix. Moving between the social universes of gender studies and disaster studies, I am conscious of how fiercely we defend our borders, and I plan to breach a few. I hope the book brings gender scholars to the fascinating subject of disaster and disaster prevention—and that disaster scholars and practitioners will find their way to gender analysis. Newcomers to the topic, warm welcome! Finally, the book is a coming home for one who has known many homes and once lost a house to a hurricane. I offer it with enormous gratitude to those whose ideas have shaped my own, to the women who endure and build anew, to the men who toil beside them, and to all those who bring these ideas to life in practice and policy. * * * More than the usual passing nod goes to Andrew Berzanskis of Lynne Rienner Publishers, who sought this book and brought it to fruition. He was everything an editor should be and more. Despite my protestations, the book is shorter— and better—for his guidance, helped along by a careful reviewer who saved me from myself time and again. The firm hand of Karen Williams was also much needed and appreciated. I thank you all and readily claim all remaining flaws. For joining me in focusing this lens on gender, I am eternally grateful to colleagues, students, and activists in disaster risk reduction networks around the world, and especially to women’s health networks in Canada and the United States. The greatest debt of all researchers, of course, is to those who say yes when we ask for their time and ideas. Everything I know about women, gender, and disaster, I have learned from you.

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enerations of researchers have asked how privilege creates disaster risk and how suffering is produced and endured. This book represents one slice of what has been learned, specifically about the United States and more specifically about women and gender relations. Most of this literature is academic and appears in books and peer-reviewed journals, though I also draw on personal narratives, governmental and nongovernmental reports, online reports, and other “gray” literature. Occasionally readers will learn something of nations quite unlike our own, when examples cannot be resisted, but for the most part the literature reviewed is from the United States. It is also predominantly from the social sciences, more sociological than psychological and more from the library of disaster case study than from cross-case or meta-analysis. The work reviewed also best reflects research conducted between 1990 and 2010. To authors of other work, know that readers will find you. Disaster sociology is itself a social production, so I begin with observations on the different angles of vision through which we see (or fail to see) women, men, and gender. As Americans, we thrill to the fictional narrative of disaster on our movie screens and, perversely, to the human drama of the real earthquakes, fires, and explosions occurring with depressing regularity. How do we make sense of this? In the first three chapters, I explore different perspectives. Chapter 2 examines US disasters culturally through the eyes of the journalist, filmmaker, author, and artist. Chapter 3 asks a different question about “seeing”: What best frames gender and disaster theoretically? This discussion surveys competing strands of feminist thought before narrowing to a more focused discussion of gender as a social institution undergirding all social life. Chapter 4 then explores “the gendered terrain of disaster” with respect to the distribution of risk, examining gender as a crosscutting and root cause of so.

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cial vulnerability. This is a practice-oriented discussion, perhaps of most interest to emergency planners. In over fifty years of research on emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes in the United States, a conspicuous silence around gender has been maintained—a looking away, perhaps a calculated blindness. The policy, law, and corporate interests that frame fundamental decisions about hazards are based on unexamined assumptions. While important exceptions exist, students of disaster mainly investigate family decisions without accounting for gender power, and they seek to measure economic impacts without attention to women’s livelihoods or the informal sector. The psychosocial effects of disasters on women are measured without examining the larger context of gender relations, and disaster-related interpersonal violence is conspicuously underexamined, whether against women or men, boys or girls. Studies of postdisaster sheltering, temporary accommodations, and permanent rehousing are conducted as if homes were filled with “occupants” and not by women and men of different ages and ethnicities. Organizations and “communities” are examined without regard to women’s collective presence and leadership. The striking disregard for gender in disaster studies is derived in part from generalizations about “human” behavior arising from decades of gender-blind research studies on preparedness, risk communication, emergency response, economic recovery, emergent organizations, public administration, and vulnerability. The result is a body of knowledge that both fails to specifically investigate gender in men’s lives, and generalizes the knowledge gained “through men’s eyes” to all persons. This covert grounding of disaster theory in men’s lives benefits neither women nor men. Perhaps when critical gender studies are integrated into the canon and gender analysis comes to life in practice, we can speak of human experience in disasters. For now, because the knowledge gaps about women and girls are so egregious and because this has real consequences for how we prepare for and cope with disasters, this book is about girls and women in the United States. Women in the United States, it is said or implied, are “beyond feminism” because they are “beyond inequality” and hence by implication “beyond vulnerability” in disasters. Certainly, elite US women inhabit a social universe with substantial shelter from the storm. From a comparative perspective, many millions of US women do live well and long—but which women and how well? Gender relations are never stable, but some patterns, even if contested, prove highly resistant to structural change. They make a difference in everyday life and in a period of crisis. Table 1.1 provides a bird’s-eye view of some of the most salient patterns, rendered from readily available statistical data. It is important to bear in mind that differences within groups of women are often larger than those between women and men. As employers, supervisors, clients, customers, and teachers, large numbers of women in the United States are privileged over men due to intersecting patterns of gender, race, and class.

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Table 1.1 Challenges of Women’s Everyday Lives: Selected Indicators Women compared to men, overall

More likely to live below the poverty line More likely to live into old age (80+) and to be widowed More likely to head households alone More likely to head households below the poverty line More likely to rent More likely to work part-time Lower earnings with comparable education and work patterns Less likely to have pensions Less likely to have advanced college degrees More likely to work in low-status occupations More likely to be major family caregivers Contribute more hours to domestic labor and volunteer work Higher rates of obesity and hypertension More likely to live with disabilities or mental illness More likely to be nursing home residents More likely to experience partner abuse and sexual assault More need for medical services including reproductive health

Women of color

Most earn less than other women Most earn less than men in same ethnic/racial group More likely than other women to live in poverty More likely than other women to live in poverty in old age More likely than other women to head households alone More likely than men in their ethnic/racial group to be poor More likely than other women to live with health problems More likely than other women to live in poor health More likely than other women to lack preventative health care More likely than other women to lack prenatal care

Senior women

Most live on lower incomes than senior men More likely than senior men to live in poverty More likely than grandfathers to care for grandchildren More likely than senior men to live alone in old age Less likely than senior men to be married More likely than younger women to be limited physically

Note: For detailed information, often available on a state or county basis, see the American Community Survey and other US Census Bureau data, as well as reports from the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, the Administration on Aging, the Office of Women’s Health, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and Department of Justice, and other government agencies. Advocacy groups and think tanks also provide statistical profiles based on survey research, including the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the Family Caregiver Alliance, and others.

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Before turning to health, safety, family, housing, and work, some important limitations must be acknowledged in this new subfield. First, we have learned more about women than men, a problem that awaits the interest of a new generation of men in emergency management and gender studies. For the most part, the research questions asked have been answered largely through qualitative research design or mixed-methods. As a devoted field researcher myself, I make no apology for this—we are in excellent company. But different questions are also important and will be answered differently; our field cannot remain so wedded to the qualitative, exploratory case study. Happily, each year brings more publications by gender and disaster researchers who take a mixed-methods or quantitative approach. Research and writing about women and disasters in the United States also relate primarily to just four major events of the past two decades: Hurricane Andrew in 1992; the Upper Midwest floods of 1997; the September 11, 2001, attacks; and the Gulf Coast storms of 2005. Sex-specific data available in other studies are included when they bear on the themes explored here, as are some preliminary findings from the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, but these four major events define the field to date—for better and for worse. As much as we might wish otherwise, gender relations in disasters do put the majority of women in the United States at increased risk, whether through poverty or physical challenges, racial or ethnic marginalization, insecure housing, language barriers, violence, or lack of voice—or some combination of these interwoven factors. Understanding these vulnerabilities and impacts from a gender perspective is the essential precondition for building on and enhancing women’s leadership in crisis. So, with sympathy for readers inclined to fastforward from vulnerability to resilience, the hefty midsection of this book revolves around five data-rich chapters on areas of major concern facing women in this country when disasters turn their world upside down. Chapter 5 discusses sex- and gender-specific reproductive, mental, and physical health issues to be addressed in emergency planning. Here I argue the need to integrate what women know through their formal and informal providers of health care and through their care work in the family and neighborhood. Safety concerns, too, are critical, so Chapter 6 introduces the growing body of knowledge regarding domestic and sexual violence against women. I seek to explain the counterintuitive occurrence of gender violence at just the time when, ideologically, we all pull together. Wary of overly neat divisions superimposed on our muddled social worlds, I take a close look in Chapters 7, 8, and 9 at what happens to women in disasters with respect to family life, housing, and work. The intimate relationships of women before, during, and after these events are the context within which everything else occurs, as Chapter 7 explains. There is a great deal more to be learned here about women’s sexual lives and the other intimacies they share with partners, as well as about how women negotiate disaster-related conflict with family. Chapter 8 grounds the

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preceding discussion of health, safety, and intimacy, focusing on the material and psychic meanings for women of safe and secure housing. Barriers to housing security are of major concern, and readers will also learn about how women hear and respond to warnings, ideally finding their way back to home and hearth. The last chapter in this section of empirical findings examines patterns in work and employment, especially how women in different work contexts are impacted and how they respond. Here the research is underdeveloped, so Chapter 9 is more exploratory. The focus of Chapters 5 through 9 is reactive, in response to the most basic of research questions: Where are the women and girls? How are different women differently impacted? The answers are not conclusive, of course, but these chapters sketch out in more detail than before the gendered terrain of disaster seen through women’s eyes. Expanding this view, the final three chapters of the book examine the real and potential contributions women make to disaster resilience. These chapters explore in different ways how gender equality goals intersect with those of disaster risk reduction. Chapter 10 is a snapshot of the many ways US women have intervened to help prevent or respond to past disasters here at home. Chapter 11 then considers progress and obstacles to gender mainstreaming in the practice of emergency management. I close, in Chapter 12, with thoughts on the potential significance of US women’s social movements to the larger project of disaster resilience. While more analysis and research are needed, I hope this discussion leaves readers as encouraged as I am about women as key actors in building a safer, more just, and more disasterresilient future.

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ender themes are salient in the popular culture of disaster, where disasters are made real to Americans in ways to which emergency managers can only aspire. This important symbolic telling of the disaster story in women’s lives is examined below, first with attention to how gender is distorted and then through women’s multiple voices as they tell their own stories in different ways. The chapter concludes with a close look at disaster quilting as one dramatic counter-narrative.

Making Sense of Disaster Through Popular Culture The “popular” culture through which interpretations of disaster are produced and shared is, like the notion of “disaster” itself, an expansive concept. As disaster sociologist Russ Dynes (2000b, p. 2) cautioned over a decade ago: “Conceptual limits on the definition of popular culture can become latent shipwrecks and restrict our course. At some point, we may have to reconstruct our notions, using the debris of the past. So let’s not make rigid square boxes of definitions until we know that most of the elements of popular culture are square.” Jazz, posters, food, public art and celebrations, YouTube videos and the bloggers of our increasingly influential social media, along with more familiar artifacts of popular culture such as graffiti, t-shirts, photographs, and fiction, all serve different functions and convey different feelings and ideas. Studying these cultural texts and practices produced at the local level by survivors (what we might call “indigenous” disaster culture) helps researchers and practitioners situate the disaster experience in the cultural worlds of potential victims or survivors. For this reason, many students of disaster now share with contemporary cultural studies theory a concern for how people actively construct and 7

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reconstruct their symbolic universe, rejecting the notion of human action as passive and overdetermined by social structure, including powerful media forces (Eyre, Wachtendorf, and Webb, 2000). “Meaning is therefore a social production; the world has to be made to mean,” writes John Storey (1996, p. 4). This is a social process; no definition of “disaster” goes uncontested (see Rozario, 2005, on rebuilding mythologies). Disaster social scientists have long examined the extraordinary influence of disaster journalism and mass media, new and old. Are “survivors” or “victims” depicted? “Panic” or “resilience”? Was it “looting” or “finding” that photographers captured and defined differently for blacks and whites, males and females, in the desperate days following Hurricane Katrina? Powerful elites have a storyline to project and use diverse media outlets to their advantage, including those they wholly own or control. Following the 1916 San Francisco earthquake and fire, to cite an early instance of disaster “spin” (Steinberg, 2001), the dominant message conveyed was not of civic failure and the consequent burning of the city, but of “natural” risk due to seismicity and so beyond (their) human fault. Emergency managers care about popular culture because they, too, have vested interests in telling the story their way. Excellent resources have been developed for forging positive and mutually beneficial relationships between professionals charged with protecting public safety and journalists on the disaster beat. Stronger partnerships are sought with journalists, hoping that in this way preparedness and risk reduction can become the main storyline rather than the rescue of innocents, one victim at a time. Disaster risk communicators also recognize that making their forecasts, warnings, and recommended actions known is just one phase of a very complex social process through which public perceptions can be shaped and protective actions promoted (Sorenson and Mileti, 1991). When people write letters to the editor, compose songs, or decorate the sides of their homes with graffiti, they are expressing the anxieties and conflicts of a much broader public. These cultural texts are important. Disasters do not simply happen to people, but are social productions in a cultural sense as well as in the very material process of making decisions about the social organization of society and the uses of our natural environment. Women and men may interpret a drought or landslide or threatened biological attack differently (or not). Following American sociologist W. I. Thomas (1923), these “definitions of the situation” have very real consequences, including those that greatly concern emergency managers. Academics, emergency managers, and policymakers regularly overlook sex and gender in disasters, but popular commentators rarely miss it. Highly feminized representations vie with those that are misogynist or simply sexist, reworking or reasserting masculine privilege, as Susan Faludi (2007) argues for the case of 9/11 and the resurgence of “ten gallon hat” men. How many women might want to purchase t-shirts emblazoned “Katrina, you bitch” or “Katrina,

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best blow job ever,” or the t-shirt from Winnipeg proclaiming “I bagged a dyke,” referring tongue-in-cheek to the sandbagging of the Red River banks? Social scientists like to speak metaphorically of storms stripping away social edifices to reveal the bare bones of social order, but others cut to the chase by posting online photos of near-naked women whose clothing was ostensibly torn away by hurricane-force winds. Hurricane Katrina is only one recent and vivid instance in which “everything about the social, economic and racial injustice of American society floated to the surface” (Bettina Aptheker, quoted in Stockemer, 2006, p. 140). But who noticed? With this question, feminist geographer and environmental activist Joni Seager (2011, p. 40) frames her biting critique of the social criticism following Hurricane Katrina: “The ‘not-noticing’ of the gendered dimensions of this disaster by the American media and by the panoply of experts who interpreted the disaster to the public through the media is alarming and warrants attention in itself. Feminist theorists have long pointed to the public invisibility of women, especially women of racial minorities. . . . In the real world of an unfolding disaster, this comes at a price.” The follow-up question is: Who notices what about gender, and why and how? The popular culture of disaster offers some answers. What does it convey? Religion is often a subtext (see Dynes, 2000a, on scientific and faith-based rationales for the 1747 Lisbon earthquake). The “low” culture of everyday people may also convey powerful political critiques of elites. An example comes from the 1889 Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood that killed more than 2,000 poor people when a dam built for elite sportsmen was not maintained and failed catastrophically. Survivors sang: “All the horrors that hell could wish / Such was the price that was paid for—fish!” (McCullough, 1968, p. 250). Class privilege was criticized in popular cartoons and song lyrics following the Titanic disaster as well: “They sent them down below / Where they’d be the first to go” (Hirshberg, 1997, p. 71).

Gender in the Popular Culture of Disaster Gender themes are never lacking in the popular culture of disaster (remember that all hurricanes took female names until 1978). One of the first explanations for the attacks of September 11 came from fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell, who readily blamed nonconforming women, especially (predictably) lesbians (CNN.com, 2001; see also Richards, 2010). Others blamed single women who bore children outside marriage, ostensibly undermining the solidarity of a people facing disaster (Bonavoglia, 2005). As Mike Davis writes in Ecology of Fear (1999, p. 341), the subtext of many disaster films is “sexual hysteria,” often symbolized by the threatened rape of (white) women by (nonwhite) men (or aliens), neatly marrying racism, nationalism, and sexism. Looking back at

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turn-of-the-century disaster fiction, he also finds evidence of women as “motherly angels” stepping in to clean house and set a wayward nation back on the track of righteousness. Journalism warrants special attention. Disaster stories are told and sold to the American people through thick lenses sensitive to race, class, and gender too, if only covertly; no matter whose hand holds the camera, this is the master narrative against which women and men, and boys and girls, make sense of “disaster.” Women stand just out of view, while intrepid reporters search for (male) heroes, profile (male) first responders, interview (male) government officials, and give air time to (male) pundits and commentators back home. But are women so irrelevant? Is gender? Important safety messages can be overwhelmed by the breathless reporting of weathermen (nearly always young as well as male) who stand in harm’s way to report from the “front lines.” Is safety their message, or the manly thrill of danger? Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, some CNN broadcasters in snug t-shirts were criticized for drawing more attention to their physique than to the information they were reporting (see Triplett, 2010, on the “Anderson Cooper effect”). In contrast, following Hurricane Katrina, women reporters such as Soledad O’Brien were credited with pressing then–director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Michael Brown and others about unfathomable delays in delivering food and water to residents trapped in New Orleans’s Convention Center or still clinging to their roofs. The urgency and incredulity of their voice are recalled today, not the clothing these young women wore as they questioned powerful men about this uniquely American horror. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, the hands that held the cameras frequently turned to women, capturing the raw emotion of the event and aftermath (weeping women, exhausted female responders), the appalling conditions in emergency shelters (where women cared for young and old and ill), the pain of family separation (mothers reaching out for children torn from their arms), the frustration and anger of survivors seeking just the essentials (women in long lines, couples arguing), and the bleak facts of death (old women dying in wheelchairs in sweltering heat). The camera lens for the most part captured the familiar gender line (dependent women, heroic men) though some photographers showed women organizing collective care and young men keeping the peace in the Superdome of New Orleans. Contradictions abound. Women may be portrayed as passive observers through one cultural lens and as active leaders through another. In one of the few empirical studies on gendered popular culture regarding disasters, Australian academic and activist Merilyn Childs (2006b) examined sixty-five images posted on the websites of nongovernmental organizations active in disasters after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, finding that 60 percent highlighted men. Of those depicting women, the passive “weeping woman” image was common; more common yet were images of women acting out traditional family care

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roles while men, figuratively and literally, did the heavy lifting. In the end, the media are critical players in disasters, perhaps more for the emotions they reflect and reinforce than for the useful information or analysis they may present. Media images remind us of the desired (or imposed) gender order of our time: male invulnerability and assertion of control over uncertainty; female vulnerability and dependence. This is not an indictment of our partners in disaster journalism, but points out how disasters become gendered culturally. Fictional disaster stories (like romance novels) affirm traditional notions of femininity and masculinity. For instance, a novel about the massive 1917 wartime explosion in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, is an example of what Joseph Scanlon (1999) terms the “myths of masculinity.” These contrast starkly with empirical observations recorded at the time by Samuel Henry Prince, considered by many to be the founding father of disaster sociology. In the fictionally rendered crisis, women waited for men to help, but in fact it was wives and mothers who were best able to respond to the injured, immediately and from their homes. The metaphor of “man against nature” is pervasive in the cultural stories of social crises. To take just one example, in the popular retelling of the destructive 1927 Mississippi flood, author John Barry (1997, p. 209) writes, in an otherwise trenchant analysis, that “the struggle against the river had begun as one of man against nature. It was becoming one of man against man.” Indeed, the story he tells is, literally, all about men’s relationships with other men, in this case organized around race and class. And, of course, television stories with hazard and risk themes (remember Homer Simpson at the controls of the nuclear power plant) elaborate contradictory messages about men, women, and gender. The 1986 explosion of the Challenger space shuttle confronted Americans with the reality of women (even mothers, even schoolteachers) dying during space travel, revealing assumptions about gender and risk underlying the space program. Anthropologist Anne Larabee (2001) studied this working culture, finding that humor mediated the official narrative of invulnerable masculinity and technological invincibility. The sinking of the Titanic provided ample grounds for contrasting interpretations of both gender and class relations, often expressed through humor and song. Some cast elite men as self-sacrificing saviors of dependent women (most women were in steerage below deck), perhaps in part to rebut the charge of class privilege, for swimming pools set aside for exclusive use had reduced the space available for more lifeboats. Women’s rights activists promoted songs and popular poems highlighting women’s own efforts to escape, instead. Socialist feminist Emma Goldman, however, derided those who sought rescue rather than cheerfully accepting death alongside men (Biel, 2001, p. 309), thereby reinforcing stereotypes of women as dependent and undermining claims to full citizenship. She was joined, of course, by a chorus of antisuffrage voices driving home the point that it was men, not votes, that would save women. Oth-

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ers lauded the manly sacrifice of working-class ship handlers and operators who stayed at their posts while accusing elite men of coming late to their “manly obligations” due to decades of (unmanly) self-indulgence. Larabee (1990) relates the counter-narrative that it was socialism that would best protect women; capitalists truly concerned about women and children should focus on liberating women from horrific industrial working conditions, rather than rescuing them from certain death. Masculinity was at the center of the Titanic disaster culturally, with poems and songs positioning male chivalry (“women and children first we save”) as the core of manhood—“each was a MAN, and unafraid” (Larabee, 1990, p. 11, emphasis in original). Gender relations were in flux and “modern” masculinity was closely monitored and contested. Controversy soon arose, for example, around a cartoon published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that depicted an elite man poised indecisively between a woman seeking a seat on a lifeboat and a woman awaiting him, already seated, asking, “Should the bridegroom take the last seat with his bride, or surrender it to the unknown woman behind him?” (p. 13). Wealthy women answered the question by funding a sculptural monument dedicated to “the brave men who gave their lives that women and children might be saved.” In fact, fewer than half of all women in third class survived (survival rates as high as 94 percent were reported for women in first and second class), while mainly poor male immigrant passengers lost their lives, virtually all of whom were sailing in third class. Disaster sociologists take disaster films seriously. E. L. Quarantelli (1985), a leading US disaster scholar, developed a typology for analyzing myths about human behavior that may be present in disaster films. A content analysis of a host of other modern films further highlighted gender stereotypes, including the representation of women as panic-stricken and men as stoic (Mitchell, Hill, and Cutter, 2000). Disaster films may have the intended effect of reestablishing male power over women and over natural forces, bastions of power imagined to be under assault. Volcano (1997) is a case in point. The tension between a professional scientist (Anglo female) and a professional emergency manager (Anglo male) is played out in gender terms, with male authority firmly reestablished at the end. Not coincidentally, the scientist becomes a love interest and her partner (the lesbian icon) is killed off early—she who was short-haired and short-tempered, and spoke out against male dominance in the workplace. The work and family tensions that do often arise for disaster responders are developed in the film’s portrayal of a female emergency room physician under pressure from her partner to put family first. A divorced single father experiences the cross-pressures of work and family life in emergency management, too. By the end of the film, women and lava (both unruly) are returned to their natural and subordinate place. Feminist analysis further develops this theme, informed in part by some dominant streams of late-twentieth-century ecofeminism. According to Cynthia Belmont (2007), women are cast in such roles as natural sci-

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entist or elected official, both standing in for “women’s liberation.” But their powers are systematically undermined when the women prove themselves incompetent, revert to incapacitating gender norms, or are simply killed off.

Retelling the Story: Women’s Popular Culture of Disaster Women historically have used “popular” media to speak, sometimes expressing radical ideas about power (girls’ detective novels, feminist rock bands), conveying dangerous knowledge (slave quilts that incorporated directions to safe houses), protesting inequalities (suffragist songs, feminist cartoonists), and promoting radical alternatives (Chilean women’s post-Allende arpilleras, or fabric collages). Happily, a treasure trove of women’s popular disaster art shines a bright light on the gender politics of disasters and pushes back against received wisdom about women in crisis. The 2004 “Age of Beauty Calendar for Flood Relief” is a striking example. Produced by eighteen elite women (aged fifty-five to eighty-six) in the flooded city of Petersborough, Ontario, the calendar presented strong images of nude older women. This venture raised $200,000 for flood relief while taking on disparaging myths about women and aging along the way (Roy, 2005). Film is a useful medium for women and men alike in disasters, and many of these recordings can now be found on YouTube. Women film their own workshops on gender and disaster, let survivors speak out on gender violence in relief camps (such as in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake), and show through images and words what “resilience” looks like (see Resilient Women [2010] and From Chaos to Creativity [2005], both available on YouTube). The Indian film Our Life, Our Film (2004, also on YouTube) was conceived and executed by women hit hard by the 2001 earthquake; they were given video equipment and training to document through their own eyes both their losses and their recovery. In the same spirit, the Ms. Foundation supported teenaged girls and boys affected by Katrina in a project designed to teach them interviewing and documentary filmmaking skills. Their blogs, photos, and original videotapes are available through the Ms. Foundation’s Katrina Women’s Response Fund (2007). Funds were also made available by the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund to transform some of the profiles collected in the book Women of Ground Zero (Hagen and Carouba, 2002) into a compelling short video of the same name that contests the received wisdom about women. The authors collected the stories of thirty-three women who responded to the immediate challenges of the September 11 attacks. This short film self-consciously rebukes the consistently male representation of heroic action in uniform. In one vignette, for example, a single mother whose young son is home alone wrestles with her decision to cross the Brooklyn

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Bridge to put her skills as a professional carpenter to use. One of a handful of women firefighters defending New York City took pains to say that women mattered, too: “When everything around us turns to chaos, we seek security in what feels comfortable and familiar. Thus, the world has honored—and justly so—the strong, brave men who came to the rescue on September 11. Yet the world has too often forgotten a less-familiar face of heroism: that of the strong, brave women who came to the rescue as well” (Terese Floren, cited in Hagen and Carouba, 2002, p. i). In the United States, Hurricane Katrina may well be the benchmark for women’s disaster film. In Trouble the Water (2008), one young African American woman holds the camera as the waters rise and recede. Rap artist Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband Scott evacuate, relocate, and then return again to New Orleans. Viewers see this young woman’s continuing struggle with drugs as she vacillates between hope and despair, but in the end she lands on her feet, finding her voice (and income) through music. The Spike Lee documentary When the Levees Broke (2006) gave voice to another woman in the eye of the storm as she witnessed the blows to her neighbors and community and questioned the response of authorities. Anthropologist Kate Browne (2008) offers a positive account of women’s rite of passage through the storm, in this case working with documentary filmmaker Ginny Martin to tell the story of one extended African American family. Still Waiting: Life After Katrina (2007) explores their challenges, strengths, and paths to different futures. We are drawn into their kitchens, their sorrow, and their outrage as one government promise after another misleads and betrays them. The family recovers as much as it loses, though not in any linear way. They recover one another and their kitchens and church; they recover a cherished token when all else is rubble; and they recover their power individually and collectively as authors of their own stories. Still Waiting also helps answer the questions on many Americans’ minds: Why did they stay? Why do they want to go back? In the prairies of North Dakota, Minnesota, and the Canadian province of Manitoba, an unrelenting series of winter and spring blizzards in 1997 set the stage for floodwaters that could not be absorbed and ice floes that dammed up rivers. When local dikes were unexpectedly breached in East Grand Forks, Minnesota (population 9,000), and in Grand Forks, North Dakota (population 50,000), emergency managers implemented a mandatory midnight evacuation. The extensive flooding that followed is remembered vividly for the resulting fire that engulfed the historic downtown of Grand Forks. Nearly three-quarters of all residences in Grand Forks were flooded; across the river, in lower-income East Grand Forks, only a handful of homes were untouched. Material damages were extensive, with estimated losses in the billions of dollars. How did the people of the prairie respond? I traveled three times to the area, every six months for a year and a half after the flood, wanting to understand what women were enduring and how they were

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responding (Enarson, 2000b, 2001). I was fascinated by the diversity of media used by women to tell their stories. One North Dakota pastor I met observed that women more than the men in her congregation seemed determined to “make meaning out of this” horrific event, all the more painful for its speed and ferocity. But women often lacked time for self-expression and spoke poignantly about disrupted scholarly writing, journaling, poetry, and other cultural projects. Noticing first that only a few women’s voices were included in collections of official oral history projects, I was heartened later to learn much more about women’s experience of the flood through the materials in the University of North Dakota’s Special Collections Library and the Grand Forks museum. Among other artifacts from the university was an audiotape of a high school musical, produced before most businesses had been restored, showcasing wonderful original songs such as “Berm Envy” performed by teens. I found women’s journals, poems, Christmas letters, drawings, art work, photographs, letters to the editor, and organizational newsletters, all donated to the library for the benefit of future generations. One young artist, for instance, resisted the cynical mood around her by creating and selling folk art highlighting rainbows and rising suns instead, illustrated with words like “faith,” “hope,” and “charity.” Another wrote in her oral history about salvaging her mother’s cedar chest and a water-logged piano, both used later in her sculptures. At least two local women published children’s flood books, and local poet Madelyn Camrud (1998, p. 105) employed strikingly domestic imagery in the poem The River: Like leavened bread it rose, swelled and bubbled across my lawn, eked its way into my house, leaving molds in the basement, seeding yeast between walls, smearing slime on hardwood floors, staining and miring like a black ketchup. Knotting the Threads, Stitching the Story Women’s postdisaster family and community work after the 1991 fires in Berkeley and Oakland, California, “reinforced community . . . and tatted back neighborhoods like so much lace,” observed anthropologist and fire survivor Susanna Hoffman (1998, p. 61). This can be a literal truth, too, in applying the craft of quilting, a domestic art that can be both personal and political. Often solitary and undertaken to furnish a household, quilting is a means for artistic expression, an interpretation of family history through clothing scraps, a leisurely pastime, and an occasion for sociability and travel. Quilts are also practical contributions to people in need. Many American quilters donate their creations to victims of violent crime or car accidents, bereaved families, or those left homeless due to house fires, often working through relief

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agencies such as the American Red Cross. Women in Paducah, Kentucky, brought novice and experienced quilters together to create the “Patchworks of Remembrance and Hope” quilt, which memorialized the victims of the school shooting in their town; quilters from thirty-five states and five other countries contributed over 400 quilt blocks (Alexander, 1999). American women volunteered through Lutheran World Relief (and other faith groups) to piece together quilts of comfort for those caught up in global or national disasters at home; in 2009, over 400,000 quilts were distributed globally by women wanting to feel “part of the big picture” (Sullivan, 2010). Alternatively, the Miami Museum of Science uses the quilt motif on its website to draw in cyberspace visitors and increase their awareness about natural hazards. Viewers are also encouraged to click on one section of this interactive virtual quilt (called the “Healing Quilt”) and then write their own disaster story. I visited the Miami museum months after Hurricane Andrew and marveled at the “crazy quilt” stitch so many quilters chose. In the art museum in Homer, Alaska, passing through some time after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, I saw a number of starkly black quilts hung against the white walls, conveying through texture, shape, and color the blackness created by the oil spill. One quilt, designed and sewn by Riki Ott of Cordova, Alaska, commemorates instead the time before the spill, capturing in playful images and vivid colors all that came before and had since been lost. Titled “Slice of Life,” the quilt is on display still at the Valdez Museum and Historical Archive. Following the BP/Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010, which spewed untold millions of gallons of oil into the waters of the Gulf Coast, women began stitching their critique into quilts, including local resident Mercedes Rodgers, who organized a community quilt project in Florida. Each quilt block conveys a message about our overdependence on oil-based products (Reinlie, 2011). Disaster quilts tell many different stories. Inspired by a son lost to the attacks of September 11, four women coworkers from the Pennsylvania-based US Steel Research and Technology Center initiated a remembrance quilt in which a thousand persons from fifty states and four countries were eventually involved. Their “National Tribute” quilt commemorated name-by-name, blockby-block, all those who perished. The quilt was produced in six panels with a corresponding book and guide to help viewers locate named blocks. One of the original quilters explained their project as an effort to use a uniquely American craft tradition to comfort a beleaguered nation. In a ceremony beginning with the song “America the Beautiful” and ending with prayer, the quilt was placed on permanent display in the American Folk Art Museum in the nation’s capital (for more on this project, see www.folkartmuseum.org/911quilt). The national AIDS quilt had a similar function, both through its creation in response to collective trauma and through the ritual practices of display: “The wearing of white clothing by those who first unfolded the panels . . . now is a tradition invested with symbolic significance [and] testimony to the centripetal force of collective

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trauma” (DeYoung, 1998). These rituals codify memory in the same way that museums “hold” collective American experience, not always commended or commendable yet never to be forgotten. Contrasting Narratives in Two Flood Quilts from the Prairie States Quilts are sometimes explicitly political texts, including women’s history quilts, human rights quilts, and breast cancer quilts. Certainly, not all are created to comment on or critique dominant ideology, but this is a powerful medium that enables (some) members of disempowered groups to claim the prerogative of the storyteller. Following the 1997 flooding of the Grand Forks area and subsequent evacuation of Grand Forks, North Dakota, and East Grand Forks, Minnesota, women recorded their experiences in many ways. When I visited the area to understand this event through women’s eyes, I sought out artists, businesswomen, and others. No single meaning can be ascribed to any disaster, nor to women’s sense of disaster. Two quilts I saw in this still-reeling community made the point, each one rich with meaning and detail. In the first example, a professor teaching a college course on ecofeminism invited her predominantly female class to design painted quilt blocks for a group flood quilt called “The River Ran Through Us.” The course syllabus disputed the “naturalness” of this natural disaster, asserting that it “occurred because we live in the River’s home. The Earth speaks through poets and artists; this is a time to listen to what she is teaching you and me.” The project also gave women voice: “Our experience was a unique moment. If we don’t tell our stories, who will?” (author interviews, October 27, 1997). The tenets of ecofeminist theory have been critiqued as essentialist by those urging a more materialist feminist environmentalism (Agarwal, 1992). Yet here they provided quilters a logically coherent interpretative framework for the flood. As ecofeminist thought was not otherwise represented in public discourse about the flood, the quilt can be seen as an oppositional text. In the second example, women in the North Star Quilter’s Guild created a “challenge quilt” constructed in three panels, designed in advance for easy transport and display around the nation. Using scraps of donated fabric sent from around the country (materials evoking icy prairies, barren trees, and muddy waters), theirs was also an oppositional text representing gender themes. First, quilters affirmed the significance of cultural work in their lives. “Sunbonnet Sue” is shown evacuating her marooned home with a quilt draped over her arm. The text reads: “With the motor running, carrying the quilt half-quilted, she ran into the car.” Second, the flood significantly expanded women’s domestic workload, for example when hosting evacuated families for long periods of time (often in addition to paid jobs). One block in the guild quilt represented a mother’s struggle with depression. Flood preparations kept her from an ap-

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pointment with her psychiatrist to adjust her medications, yet she worked through her illness: “Crazy patch was the only choice for this block! My struggle with major depression became overwhelming during the flood and I spent much of the time in hospitals in Fargo.” Third, women’s care work continues throughout the life-span when families and kin need their help. An older woman’s design (little gingerbread boys) evoked the hard work of (grand)mothering during this period, when older women cared again for the young. This idea was also conveyed by the block depicting a portable toilet on a rubble-strewn street. The mother/quilter “was potty training her son during the flood and so they walked back and forth many, many times a day from their house to the port-o-potty!” Fourth, the quilt helped viewers understand that women as well as men worked to repair their households physically. One block whimsically represented the colorful building permit in the window of a home still under repair. The quilter had primary responsibility for managing the home repair process. Many women like her along the river learned or developed nontraditional construction skills during the reconstruction period. Finally, a fifth theme conveyed by quilters emphasized women’s indirect emergency response work. Near retirement age, one woman had no choice but to commute when the insurance company she worked for transferred its key staff to Fargo. Her block showed “Quilter’s Quarters” relocated and her small red car in transit on a long road through the flooded prairie, noting: “75 miles one way comes to 150 [miles both ways] for 19 weeks, which is a lot of driving.” Flood recovery competed with women’s responsibility to employers and sometimes intensified it; over two-thirds of all women in Grand Forks were employed at the time, many in service, clerical, and professional occupations, which drew them indirectly into relief and recovery work with flood victims. The cultural practices of popular organizations can be a powerful avenue for community organizing around disaster vulnerability (Blaikie et al., 1994, p. 237). Women’s local, regional, and national quilting guilds offer just such an opportunity. While not manifestly subversive or emancipatory texts, women’s flood quilts, including those discussed above from the flooded Upper Midwestern United States, are important both for the occasions for social solidarity they afford women and for what they teach us about women’s lives in disaster.

Conclusion Women’s voices bring the underside of disaster to life. The stories they tell through such traditional cultural artifacts as music, poetry, film, books, and fabric art—as well as through newer social media such as videography, computer graphics, and gaming—are a critical piece of women’s history and of US history at a time when emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes are entering our

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everyday vocabulary. There are important lessons here for the practice of disaster management at the community level. Wherever they labor, disaster responders and emergency planners need a critical understanding of the many “publics” in their local communities. They need specific knowledge about local history to craft meaningful recovery programs and to help rebuild the fabric of social life as well as the structures and infrastructures that support it. They need to know with whom it is most critical to communicate, what these people most value, and how gender shapes perceptions and feelings in disaster contexts.

3 How Gender Changes Disaster Studies

W

ith a grateful nod to Havidán Rodríguez and Russell Dynes (2006), leading figures in US disaster sociology, I cheerfully appropriate the analogy of “finding and framing” gender. Rodríguez and Dynes refuted the Oz theory of authority, in which the benign wizard behind the curtain shields us from chaos. There is no Oz theory of gender relations in disasters, which is to say there is no single gender lens, no privileged point of view, and no one dominant typology, but many ways to think theoretically about sex, gender, and disasters. This chapter first makes the case for gender theory as part of the core body of knowledge that frames (or should frame) gender for students of disaster and emergency managers. It then moves from the “how” of gender relations in disaster to the “why,” offering a short tour of contemporary feminist theories that illuminate in different ways the everyday realities that women confront in emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes.

New (and Old) Thinking About Gender and Disaster At the heart of disaster studies is the search for useful answers: What causes disasters? What effects can be predicted? How will women and men, boys and girls, and the organizations that structure their lives, respond? Though practitioners are rarely enthusiastic about social theory, they have something in common with researchers—they want to know why, how, when, and with what effect? Communication can succeed or fail; responses can be anticipated and initiatives that are known to be counterproductive can be avoided; some places and people will need more help than others. Because practitioners see disasters in their immediacy (up close and very personally), most practitioners are passionate about what needs to be known to reduce social vulnerability and prevent 21

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hazardous conditions or emergencies from becoming disasters. They may be unable to single-handedly act on the lessons learned through postdisaster assessments and research, but not for lack of caring about what went right and wrong, and why. Like all of us, emergency planners act toward others on the basis of their “definition of the situation,” as American sociologist W. I. Thomas (1923) wrote about teenaged girls. It is positive that, in an era of professionalization, these perceptions are increasingly informed by research or, at the very least, by personal exchange of ideas between researchers and practitioners. All the more important, then, that gender and disaster research become part of the core body of knowledge. Monographs such as Alice Fothergill’s (2004) Heads Above Water: Gender, Class, and Family in the Grand Forks Flood, and the collected papers in The Women of Katrina: How Gender, Race, and Class Matter in an American Disaster (David and Enarson, 2011) are useful teaching and research resources. Today, many more undergraduate students are introduced to gender issues as they learn about social vulnerability to hazards and disasters (e.g., Enarson, 2009a; Enarson, Fothergill, and Peek, 2006), or about gender issues in climate change mitigation, impact, and adaptation (e.g., Dankleman, 2011). Numerous young scholars have focused closely on gender and disaster, offering critical analysis of upper-class women’s activism (David, 2009), women’s antiviolence organizations (Brown, 2010 and 2011; and see Houghton, 2009), women in public housing (Pardee, 2009), and gender patterns in evacuation and response (Jencik, 2010). Overall, it is hard not to notice gender blinders at the foundational level in the social construction of disaster theory (among others critiques, see Enarson and David, 2011; Tierney, 2011; Bolin, Jackson, and Crist, 1998; Enarson, 1998). Theory matters. As feminist theorist Marjorie DeVault (1996, p. 30) writes: “the apparatus of knowledge production [is] one site that has constructed and sustained women’s oppression.” Because how we think about these events significantly shapes human action in hazardous environments and in crisis and reconstruction, theoretical blinders have real consequences for women and men in crisis. Gender and disaster analysis is still seen as “too narrow” or perhaps “too divisive” and is less accessible than other recent writing on children, ethnicity, (dis)ability, or animal care in disasters, among other growing fields. A cursory look at core readings, training materials, college syllabi, and other teaching resources reveals this, especially in the United States where the gender curtain in disaster studies is most opaque and the “excluded perspective” of women is still marginalized (Hewitt, 1998a). It is common for researchers to not report on the sex composition of their study population or sample, or to not consider the implications of these patterns for their findings; sex-specific data that could be used in secondary analysis are not always shared even when collected. This lack of intellectual curiosity is striking after nearly half a century of gender scholarship and must be challenged; it renders virtually half of human experience invisible.

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To foreshadow the findings reported in subsequent chapters, however, these conditions are changing for the better. Knowledge in this area has expanded dramatically over the past two decades, especially in wealthy nations like ours where researchers have more institutional support and better access to publication outlets. Reviewing over a hundred disaster publications with gender as a primary research question, my colleague Lourdes Meyreles in the Dominican Republic and I found that two-thirds were written about women in affluent nations (Enarson and Meyreles, 2004); over a third were from or about the United States. In our review of this new field, we determined that two “parallel tracks” were evident, each with differing research questions and theoretical orientations (see also Fothergill, 1998, and Enarson, 1998). For the most part, questions of concern to US researchers working in this area revolve around individual women, risk communication and evacuation, women in the family and in nontraditional emergency management roles, psychosocial effects, and short-term recovery. In contrast, gender work from Africa, Latin America, and Asia attends more to gender relations as they relate to development and the production of disaster risk, to collective action, to work and employment, and to community mobilization. Overall, gender concerns in disasters (especially for women but also including men) are more visible to those who work in developing nations.

Disaster Sociology and the Sociology of Gender One barrier to gender analysis in disaster research and theory is misunderstanding. Disaster students and practitioners are quick to read “gender” as “women,” and likely to think at the individual or interpersonal level only. But this flattens out a very nuanced concept. Gender is shorthand for very complex and dynamic social processes based on difference and inequality with respect to biology (reproduction, health, sexuality), the gender identities to which we are socialized (personality, interaction, gender norms), and the dominant gender relations of the societies we inhabit (life chances, opportunities for personal security, achievement, and self-determination). All are powerful forces at the individual and collective levels. Gender is a marker of difference, a source of identity, a force for constraint or liberation (or both), and, most important, the basis for the division of labor in the household, community, and labor force. For those charged with protecting the public’s safety and for academics who take disaster studies to heart, these are critical core characteristics of gender, all derived from gender theory written largely by sociologists. A number of important points follow from the preceding and successive general observations (for classic statements, see Lorber, 2008; Hess and Ferree, 1987; Wharton, 2005; Chafetz, 2006; Anderson, 2010). Like disasters, gender carries a hint of naturalness or inevitability but is, in fact, a social production—all the more powerful for being socially, not biolog-

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ically, defined, although never divorced from our embodied selves (Ariyabandu, 2010). Like other “master” statuses (racial identity, age, disability), it is readily apparent or made apparent (think of color-coded diapers, or legal barriers to marriage). Far from being received or bestowed, gender is an accomplishment—something to be demonstrated through concrete interaction and social practices (West and Zimmerman, 1987), in the nature of a verb rather than a noun. Sociologists study the “gendering” of families, organizations, communication, and so forth—the family, for instance, is a prime “gender factory” (Berk, 1985), and all organizations are in the process of being (re)gendered symbolically and materially (Acker, 1990). Gender is realized through material practices in “the real world” that are sometimes desired and sometimes enforced. It is through these everyday practices, whether we conform to gender expectations or not, that we come to know the gender norms to which we are held. Equally important, gender is relational, meaning that it is realized by women interacting with women, men with men, and women with men, both symbolically and materially. To grow into adulthood is to come to terms, one way or another, with the gendered social worlds around us and the prevailing sets of beliefs about what appropriate ways of feeling, looking, speaking, moving, and acting are for women and men, and boys and girls. Gender identity (feeling ourselves “feminine” or “masculine,” however these are defined) has powerful effects on the lives of women and men, boys and girls, in every culture and historical era, whether we resist (as we often do) or whether the identity others perceive is the one we claim. Gender identities conveyed, imputed, or enforced inevitably shape people’s behaviors in disasters, from volunteerism in the early moments, when men help others and women help their own, to long-term recovery, when women seek counseling and men seek solace in alcohol or drugs. Gender is multidimensional, gaining meaning through emotion, action, appearance, music, clothing, use of space, body language, and other ways in which we express ourselves as “real men” or “real women.” This is contextual, of course, so gender behind closed doors may have quite a different feel. Gender is also relational in a second sense, for gender always has a class, a race, an age dimension, and a cultural context, intersecting all other power structures. There is no single “his and hers” as feminist analysis of intersectionality attests (see the classic statements in Collins, 1990, and Crenshaw, 1994; and contributors to Anderson and Collins, 2010). The tightly interwoven cultural and generational patterns that position women differently before, during, and after disasters are just as real for boys and men (for an overview of masculinity studies and examples of recent research, see Connell, 2005, and Kimmel and Messner, 2000). The characteristics and dynamics of gender foreshadow the conclusion of gender scholar Judith Lorber (2004) and others that gender is, in effect, a social institution of human creation, with as much significance in disasters as the social institution of the family or the military or the economy, at any given time.

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Importantly for disaster studies, gender is a primary organizing principle in social life, including the division of labor in the home, workplace, and community; this is one way gender becomes the linchpin of stratification systems through which rewards and sanctions are distributed. Early on, sex role theory was thought to explain all that was important about masculinity and femininity, bringing with it new work on gender socialization and the social psychology of gender. Most gender scholars now accept that gender is a distributive factor in society as well as the bedrock of individual identity. Conflict theorists soon identified gender-based power structures in the larger society and gender stratification as the main dynamic for distributing differential and unequal life chances. Women’s and men’s different family and job responsibilities, how and when they use public spaces such as parks or city streets, their modes of transportation—these and a host of other gender patterns put women and men in different places at different times during the day and week. This is true in affluent societies and poorer nations, and cuts across all cultures, faiths, and social groups. Gender is not only known to us at the individual level but realized institutionally, too, through the everyday practices and symbolic interaction in gendered institutions. This is especially evident in highly masculinized occupations and workplaces where supporting ideas (“women firefighters are not strong enough”) and institutional constraints (physical standards based on male bodies) combine to reflect and reinforce the gender hierarchy. The formal and informal structure of emergency management agencies, as in other complex organizations, are organized in part around gender norms and the respective interests and needs of women or men. Gender is a politic, too, as the histories of women and men around the world mobilizing for gender-based rights attest. It is the cornerstone of a broad set of relationships tied to macroeconomic and international patterns, including a highly gender-stratified workforce of care and of production (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003). We are all born to a regime marked, in our era, by gender (male privilege and power), class (global capitalism), and race (white privilege). Gender relations are collective and patterned sets of social relationships within which individuals and individual couples or other group relationships are forged: we do not opt in or out at will. Finally, gender is dynamic. Like race relations or age relations, the gender order of any era has evolved over time and will continue to change. The lives of women along the Gulf Coast today, striving to cope with the detritus of recent hurricanes and the largest oil spill in US history, are radically different from those of their foremothers who cleaned up their cities after turnof-the-century hurricanes or struggled to cope with the wind and drought of the 1930s. The shifting terrain of gender, so evident in the tensions of working families today, in advertisements pitching products to the “new man,” in political campaigns maligning those not “manning up,” and, of course, in

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covert employment practices, is the beginning point of useful gender analysis in disasters. All these paths in the sociology of gender lead, in my view, to greater understanding of disasters and disaster resilience. Yet there is deep resistance to gender in disaster studies and in emergency management. Why? Disciplinary blinders are certainly one barrier, even in such a wide-ranging area as disaster studies. But let me try to dispel the concern that thinking about gender in disasters is too “feminist,” a project overly political, or even a game of identity politics. Activists and theorists have always used the word “feminist” differently and will continue to; for me it is the simple premise that the lives of women and men, boys and girls, are equally valuable, and the rights of one are contingent on the rights of all. Gender justice cannot be attained in an unjust world, so feminists strive for people’s liberation from all structures of domination, including those based on economic, racial, political, and cultural power in our globalizing world. In disaster work, this means that gender justice—just like the other facets of social justice in the United States—is not optional but imperative in the challenge to build safe and more sustainable communities.

Putting Feminist Theories to Use in Disaster Work Happily, gender analysis is not without support, and some trends in disaster studies support its growth. A pivotal work in the field by sociologist E. L. Quarantelli (1998) addresses a question at the heart of disaster research: What is a disaster? Contributing authors, primarily Western, white men, represented the countries from which most of the social science of disasters was written. No unanimity or single answer to the question was achieved in the first book or its sequel a decade later, reflecting the multidisciplinarity of the field, its relatively short life-span, and its contested politics. Significantly, more support was expressed for a more inclusive approach to “disaster” that integrates new hazards and older, formerly excluded topics such as HIV/AIDS or famines, both highly gendered. Quarantelli wrote in conclusion that “feminist scholarship has sharply questioned traditional views of and approaches to social phenomena . . . this could [illustrate] another way of looking at disaster phenomena” (p. 268). Gender-focused disaster analysis is often charged with being underdeveloped theoretically. We are in good company, for disaster social science as a whole tilts heavily toward the empirical case study, if not the “rank empiricism” of the kind critiqued by leading sociologist C. W. Mills (1959). While a “grand theory” of gender and disaster is neither desirable nor possible, thinking about disasters from the standpoint of women is a sorely needed corrective to mainstream disaster studies in which women’s lives are overlooked or distorted.

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Both practical and theoretical arguments can be advanced for a marriage of convenience between students of disaster and feminist theorists. In an earlier essay with Brenda Phillips, who also brings a women’s studies background to disaster studies, we developed some of these lines of argument and research, as well as overlaps between feminist methods and those used by disaster students (Enarson and Phillips, 2009). As Figure 3.1 suggests, each theoretical vein of feminist thought can be mined to help reduce the “omission and distortion of women’s experiences in mainstream social science [including disaster research], the tendency to universalize the experience of men (and relatively privileged women), and the use of science to control women” (DeVault, 1996, p. 30). In Kenneth Hewitt’s terms (1998a), feminist theory brings the “missing voice” of women to social theory about disaster and hence to new forms of practice. Beyond gender, feminist scholars seek to recognize, theorize about, and analyze diversity independently and through an understanding of intersecting racial, developmental, cultural, economic, and sexual social relations and institutions. These strains in feminist thought do not dilute but strengthen it. Thumbnail sketches of complex bodies of thought are offered in the following sections, with attention to how these ideas translate into action at the level of emergency planning (among other accessible accounts of feminist theory, see Lorber, 2008; Tong, 1998; Jaggar and Rothenberg, 1993).

Figure 3.1 Feminist Frameworks for Understanding Hazards and Disasters

Feminist political ecology

Gender and development

Multiracial/global feminism Liberal feminism Socialist feminism Radical feminism Postmodern feminism

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Using Liberal Feminist Theory Liberal feminist thought has galvanized women’s movements around the globe and remains the dominant discourse. Rooted in Enlightenment convictions about “natural rights” and human freedom, liberal feminism in the eighteenth century promulgated the then radical notion that women are fully human persons and are (or should be) accorded the rights and duties of citizenship. It follows that the challenge of the liberal state is to create conditions guaranteeing all women equality of opportunity in social institutions and political life. No less than men, women are governed by reason rather than nature and advance their interests and lives through education. In this view, neither difference nor inequality are based on biology but understood to be socially produced and maintained through gendered structure and practice in social institutions and lifelong socialization into gendered cultures. Resulting differences in turn disadvantage women in “a man’s world” that privileges male bodies, skills, ways of being and knowing, and language. The core concept of liberal feminism is discrimination and the core value a commitment to gender equality by increasing women’s opportunities. “Women, their rights and nothing less; men, their rights and nothing more,” reads the Una masthead, the voice of the nineteenth-century US women’s movement. Two centuries later, the deceptively simple proposition that women are global citizens undergirds the global movement to interpret women’s rights as human rights and apply international conventions guaranteeing such rights as political voice and freedom from violence both to women and to men. Liberal feminist theory informs much of contemporary disaster social science. Barriers to women’s participation—in community planning for emergencies or in political decisionmaking—effectively limit women’s capacity to exercise full citizenship rights. Some disaster research suggests that “growing up female” increases women’s risk, for example when women socialized as caregivers ignore their own physical or psychological needs and put the safety of others first—or are placed second or third in cultural contexts that value the lives of girls less than those of boys. Gendered patterns in work and use of living space help explain the common (though not consistent) finding that the lifespan narrows between women and men in disaster-struck countries, especially in less developed nations, and women’s higher reported rates of posttraumatic stress disorder, topics explored in Chapter 5. Liberal feminism also stresses women’s voluntary social action and civic “good housekeeping” role, evidenced in affluent white women’s activities following the 1900 hurricane in Galveston, Texas (Turner, 1997) and in research on neighborhood environment action (Neal and Phillips, 1990). Disaster organizations often evoke stereotypical notions of femininity limiting women’s career potential or work roles in relief efforts. Phillips’s (1990) account of women in emergency management demonstrated how women’s dif-

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ferent voice reduced their credibility and effectiveness in male-dominated emergency response organizations. Susan Gibbs (1990) documented gender bias in the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, as did Doone Robertson (1998) and Ruth Wraith (1997) in Australian relief and emergency management agencies, and Jennifer Wilson (1999) in the United States. Students of disaster working in this spirit might examine how gender divisions of labor put women and men differentially at risk in different contexts; investigate how socialization to masculinity affects the vulnerability of boys and men (e.g., in help-seeking, household preparedness, risk-taking, or coping mechanisms); evaluate organizational initiatives against gender bias in disaster practice; and incorporate women’s life chances and everyday living conditions into research on postdisaster stress. At a practical level, this perspective suggests the need to: (1) identify the specific practical needs of women and girls throughout the disaster event; (2) analyze gender stratification and segregation patterns in all disaster organizations and work affirmatively toward equal opportunities for women; (3) recruit and retain women staff in decisionmaking roles in disaster planning and response organizations, targeting women in disaster-vulnerable populations; (4) integrate gender analysis across the curriculum in postsecondary coursework and in training programs for emergency planners, responders, and relief workers; (5) diversify emergency management workplaces by fostering the development of gender-focused coursework in disciplines that are traditionally male or female and mentoring female students; (6) target women-owned businesses and female-dominated nonprofits in business recovery programs; and (7) monitor relief and recovery programs for possible gender bias. Using Socialist Feminist Theory Socialist feminists argue that exploitation, not discrimination, is the key to women’s status, and that both capitalists and men benefit from patriarchal structures built around the gendered division of labor. At a practical level, they are less concerned with affirmative action policy than with achieving comparable pay by challenging corporate power to reward traditionally male working conditions and job skills (e.g., outside work, operating heavy equipment) more than women’s (e.g., public contact, providing personal body care). Socialist feminists have focused on women’s historical struggles not simply for economic equality but also for “bread and roses” earned through labor struggle and through feminist struggle against male privilege. For students of disaster, these ideas urge attention to women’s capacities and vulnerabilities in and out of the household. Women’s social reproductive labor helps children and other dependents survive cyclones, recover from the health effects of toxic contamination, and evacuate from dangerous areas; their income-generating activities in the formal and informal sectors help households

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Women Confronting Natural Disaster

prepare and recover; and their community roles often include informal leadership in disaster-stricken communities. This attention to women’s reproductive, productive, and community labor makes women visible as behind-the-scenes emergency responders, economic providers, community activists, and household preparers (Morrow and Enarson, 1996; Fordham, 1999; Enarson and Fordham, 2001). Socialist feminist thought also stresses the gendered and racialized nature of poverty. Like women lacking land rights or credit, farming small plots, or employed in commercial agricultural, women employed as contingent workers (part-time, casualized, contract labor) and consigned to underpaid sex-segregated industries and jobs are economically more vulnerable to disaster—less able to replace livestock or household possessions after an earthquake in India or to buy window shutters before a hurricane in Louisiana. In some cultures, women lose dowries in floods and are left even more impoverished; lost dowries may mean lost opportunities to escape violent situations in the aftermath of disastrous environmental events. Certainly, women’s high predisaster poverty rates compound the effects of economic loss, particularly for women maintaining households, as Raymond Wiest, Jane Mocellin, and Thandiwe Motsisi (1994) discuss theoretically and Wiest (1998) demonstrates empirically in a study of women farmers heading households in Bangladesh. Women’s home-based work in the informal sector puts them at high risk of secondary unemployment when homes are destroyed or must be evacuated, and their concentration in the “helping” professions (e.g., crisis work, counseling, teaching, social work) makes them significant disaster responders. In this view, both economic insecurity and patriarchal social structures increase women’s risk before, during, and after disasters (for cases studies from Nicaragua and Brazil, see Bradshaw and Linneker, 2010, and Branco, 2010, respectively). What new research questions arise? As discussed in Chapter 4, social vulnerability mapping must include indicators of women’s economic and social status. Emergency managers who draw on feminist disaster sociology will know not to neglect women’s home-based work in business recovery planning and where to look to partner with women and women’s groups. When disaster sociologists study household and workplace emergency preparedness, they must examine gendered patterns of decisionmaking between couples and between workers and owners/managers. When studying postdisaster mobilization, they need knowledge of women’s global participation in formal and informal labor movements and campaigns for safe working environments. Finally, theorizing disaster from this perspective maintains a sharp focus on patterns of privilege and power between women based on class and racial differences. More specifically, emergency planners drawn to these ideas would expect to: (1) collect data on the root causes of women’s economic insecurity and social status for use in local-level vulnerability and capacity assessments; (2) incorporate data on women’s unpaid domestic work and community work into

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vulnerability assessments; (3) target low-income women and women maintaining households for economic recovery assistance, including migrant workers, home-workers, domestic workers, the self-employed, and undocumented workers; (4) engage working women’s associations and unions in communitybased disaster mitigation; and (5) affirmatively recruit and retain low-income women in emergency management professions and training programs, and in community partnerships with practitioners. Using Radical Feminist Theory In contrast to other feminist theory, radical feminism is less concerned with discrimination or exploitation, though it considers both, than with women’s oppression. Women’s subordination is rooted in a universal sex/gender system through which men seek power and control over women—and over the natural world, nonhuman species, and other men. Women’s primary struggle is for self-determination in the face of male domination. Control over women’s sexuality is seen as a root cause of subordination and physical and psychological violence a primary weapon. Men’s efforts to control women’s sexual and reproductive lives undergird the norm of “compulsory heterosexuality” (Rich, 1980) in the intimate lives of all women and men. Among other topics, radical feminist theory encourages the study of female resistance to male power and manifestations of women’s solidarity, including lesbian history and culture, women’s collectives, and women-only institutions. Ecofeminist thought is grounded here because of men’s asserted domination over nature and women’s asserted connection to natural cycles and values as birth mothers or guardians of natural resources. In disaster contexts, these ideas again suggest both vulnerabilities and capabilities. Women outside patriarchal control (or “protection”) may be highly vulnerable, for example experiencing restricted access to relief systems, as women in seclusion, single mothers, widows, divorced women, and lesbians conspicuously lack access to male-controlled relief and recovery resources. Women on their own as new immigrants or transient migrant workers may be especially isolated, both from men and from other women, and more vulnerable to violence. This was certainly the case for the destitute women studied by Sharif Kafi (1992) and in field accounts of women in refugee camps and temporary accommodations (League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1991). Seeing and responding to gender-based violence in the aftermath of disasters is rooted here, especially in the case of women and girls (among others, see Fisher, 2010, for the case of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and Sayeed, 2010). In highly sex-segregated societies, women in families able to afford the practice of sequestering women (purdah) are at great risk to the degree that male honor is contingent upon constraining women’s contact with nonrelated men,

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Women Confronting Natural Disaster

for example in a public emergency shelter (Hossain, Dodge, and Abel, 1992). Conversely, living alone or outside of male contexts does not cause vulnerability but may increase it when male-dominated relief efforts or mitigation initiatives systematically exclude women. The accounts of relief workers leave little doubt that women are primarily responsible for securing essential relief resources for their households, yet in many circumstances are unable to publicly approach nonrelated men distributing relief without risk of male harassment or assault (Begum, 1993). Disaster researchers working in this vein will have an interest in women alone—for example, the coping strategies of rural women raising families alone on the cash remittances irregularly arriving from partners who migrated for wage work to urban centers. Other topics include the function of women’s friendship and kin networks in promoting disaster resilience and women’s selforganization in the aftermath of devastating environmental or technological events. The feminist coalition that arose following Hurricane Andrew in Miami (discussed further in Chapter 10) focused on female solidarity across class and cultural barriers to unite women against a male-dominated recovery initiative. Women’s autonomous movements after disastrous events have helped restore community solidarity and win gains for disaster victims, for example after the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India (Fortuna, 2001). These warrant more attention in the study of postdisaster politics. Radical feminist thought can inform practical action in the following ways and others: (1) engage woman-dominant households particularly in mitigation, preparedness, and relief projects, including single women, widows, single mothers, lesbians, and foreign domestic workers; (2) anticipate and address the risk of increased physical and emotional violence against women and partner with antiviolence women’s groups to mitigate these effects; (3) anticipate the need in some circumstances for outreach to sequestered or especially isolated women, including increased hiring of female relief workers; and (4) capitalize on the knowledge of women’s community-based organizations about locally vulnerable women (older women, women with disabilities, immigrant women) and utilize their networks and resources in disaster planning and interventions. Using Multiracial and Global Feminist Theory Just who is the implicit subject in these theories? The easy conflation of “women” or “gender” with a global minority of Anglo, middle-class, married, able-bodied women in the North left the lives of majority women across the globe undertheorized. Focusing on intersecting patterns of subordination based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality, race-conscious feminist thought moves discussion of women’s differences to the center of debate. Multiracial feminists observe a complex “matrix of domination” (Collins, 1990) within which women’s choices may be both expanded and limited. Border-crossing

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narratives from US women of color draw attention to the ways “minority” cultures can sustain women marginalized by the dominant culture. Racial identity and power fracture relations between and among groups of women and produce conflicting interests. Multicultural feminist thought problematizes the concept of “race” in the lives of all women by analyzing racial privilege and power in the lives of all women, so conspicuously on display, for instance, in the social relationships of “maids and madams” in domestic service. Global feminists add a focus on the global political economy and patterns of neocolonialism that privilege some women at the expense of others (e.g., Mohanty, 2003). The politics of tourism are a case in point. Women’s labor and sexuality are exploited in low-wage tourism jobs servicing an international leisure class that now includes many affluent women. Though the environmental costs to tourism industries are often very high and put people in harm’s way on fragile coastlines, the economic gains to low-wage workers, including large proportions of women, are very small. When threatened by a mudslide or cyclone, the immediate needs of women hotel guests may well conflict with the urgent needs of racially subordinate women working in low-level tourism jobs to help themselves and their families. Not yet influential in disaster sociology, which still tends to undertheorize race and ethnicity, this body of thought challenges students of disaster to understand gender, race, and class relations in a global system that produces and distributes hazards and disaster risk. Increasing numbers of women across the globe now experience disasters on their own as single mothers, but the social significance of this varies. The single mother earning below-poverty wages as a garment-industry home-worker in the San Francisco Bay Area differs in nature and extent from the relative poverty of a professional woman in the same location who divorces and retains custody of her children. Do disaster studies seek out marginalized residents like foreign domestic workers from the Philippines, maquiladora workers in border export-processing zones, or indigenous women farmers when they evaluate identify or unmet needs? Is their labor considered in studies of long-term economic recovery? Are racialized gender issues investigated in studies of postdisaster conflict? With respect to community action by women against hazards before and after disasters, multiracial and global feminist thought challenges disaster sociologists to analyze responses that are manifestly raced, gendered, and classed, for example in women’s work against toxic hazards (for early examples, see Krauss, 1998, and Taylor, 1997; after Katrina, see Luft, 2008; Eisenstein, 2005; Ross, 2005; and papers in David and Enarson, 2011). Multiracial global feminists highlight the significance of racialized and gendered political-economic structures in disaster mitigation, impact, and recovery. As disaster theory and practice begin to incorporate gender analysis, it is critical that these patterns of difference be part of the analysis. How, for example, are women’s employment and livelihood options structured racially, and

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Women Confronting Natural Disaster

with what differential effects for different women’s economic security in the face of a drought or hurricane? How are Native American women and men differently impacted by hazards on rural reservations or in urban centers, and how are wealthy and poor Latinas differently affected by coastal storms? Do women from different cultural communities organize in different ways or have different priorities? From this perspective, the following steps are useful: (1) work through women’s community-based organizations to identify patterns that put women of color at greater risk, and build informal networks between disaster organizations and these organizations; (2) foster formal and interpersonal social networks between women active in antiracist, social justice, and environmental organizing, and women in disaster agencies; (3) identify and utilize the institutional and interpersonal resources of women’s groups involving women of color, for example in preparedness exercises, project evaluations, research initiatives, and vulnerability assessments; (4) facilitate the active participation and leadership of women from subordinated racial/ethnic or cultural groups in disaster planning and response at the local, regional, national, and international levels; and (5) affirmatively recruit and retain women from underrepresented racial/ ethnic groups into community-based mitigation coalitions, emergency management professions, humanitarian relief management roles, and international leadership roles. Using Gender and Development Theory Moving from a narrow focus on women in development (e.g., the special needs of women subsistence farmers) to a more complex analysis of gender relations in global development, engendered development theory examines shifting power relations embedded in global development patterns (e.g., Currie and Wickramasinghe, 1997; Momsen, 2008). From this perspective, women struggle not only for economic survival but also against development projects that accord men control over traditionally female domains or undermine traditionally female skills and resources. Situating women’s subordination in global economic and cultural power structures, these theorists identify barriers to women’s education, training, and productivity as barriers also to sustainable national development. A feminist political economy of development grounds disaster vulnerability in the social relations of gender in postcolonial societies, directing researchers toward gender-specific analysis of macroeconomic trends that tend to increase global vulnerability. For instance, export-oriented trade policies that undermine local markets increase pressure for wage work and induce male migration from impoverished rural households to more disaster-vulnerable urban residences and workplaces, leaving women and children increasingly dependent upon uncertain male remittances. Under different conditions, women are

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more likely than men to migrate, taking up employment as foreign domestic workers or in cross-border maquilas. These theorists also focus on women’s skills, social networks, and local knowledge of ecologies, communities, and social histories. In communities hit by drought or by earthquake, they document women’s active coping strategies, helping people survive by planting “famine crops,” disposing of such assets as jewelry, combining households, seeking waged work, engaging in survival prostitution, or taking up other work in the informal economy. When their livelihoods depend on natural resources, women are very likely to respond proactively to environmental degradation and disaster, including mobilizing in ways that unite women and promote more sustainable development (for a case study, see Fordham, 2010). The considerable work of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) around risk reduction and gender is rooted in this theoretical context. International humanitarian relief practices are increasingly likely to reflect these views. Training materials, gender guidelines, and checklists for practitioners developed by Oxfam and other NGOs are widely available if not fully utilized (for an early example, see Eade and Williams, 1995). Good practice is understood to advance both risk reduction and development, including gender equality. For instance, the NGO Pattan addressed a massive flood in rural Pakistan using gender analysis, subsequently promoting all-women village groups and the registration of homes built after the flood in the names of both wife and husband (Bari, 1998). Accepting the urgency of relief supplies, personal safety, income, and women’s other practical needs, the more important goal from this approach is to implement strategic responses to disaster that undermine male dominance and hence reduce women’s vulnerability to future disasters. At the same time, recent development writing taking up hazards, disasters, and climate change shines a light on how approaches targeting women only also affect men, and on the role of men in working with communities to reduce risk (Mishra, 2009; Cleaver, 2002). Sociologists working in this spirit can contribute longitudinal evaluation studies of gender-fair disaster practices and track the long-term effects of disasters on development and gender relations over time. Local emergency planners need data, for example, on the housing conditions, social networks, health, and economic status of Asian American women in the garment industry in California; maquiladoras in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez; street vendors in Honduras; small businesswomen in Grand Forks, North Dakota; and foreign domestic workers housed in employers’ homes during floods. Feminist development theory makes these highly vulnerable groups more socially visible. In the United States, these ideas can and should be used to: (1) expand vulnerability analysis to include women’s economic status, kinship relations, cultural proscriptions, age and racial/ethnic stratification, family structure, housing conditions, health, and other vulnerability factors; (2) develop and monitor indicators of women’s disaster vulnerability before and after disasters through

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environmental conditions, working conditions, social and political rights, literacy, and health and nutritional status; (3) assume women are primary economic actors and distribute recovery resources accordingly; (4) design operational guidelines reflecting gender power differentials in disaster decisionmaking and in access to and control over key survival and recovery resources; (5) mainstream gender issues into our national, multisectoral disaster planning and response systems through training and accountability structures; (6) develop and reward the capacities of disaster organization staff to utilize gender analysis in all aspects of program development, implementation, and evaluation; and (7) engage men in the United States and across our borders in thinking about links among development decisions, gender, and disaster resilience. Using Postmodern Feminist Theory Like multiracial and global feminists, postmodern feminists reject dualistic and essentialist thinking (male/female, nature/culture), the presumption of women’s collective subordination, and the presumptive power of any group of (elite) women to represent purportedly universal interests. It makes little sense, then, to analyze women’s disaster experiences (or any other collective experiences) in general terms—a formidable limitation for most sociologists. Yet disaster sociologists would profit from this insistence on women’s subjectivity and agency, which rejects an overdetermined notion of women as disaster “victims” (see Cupples, 2007, for the case of Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua) and questions all master narratives. These theorists find liberatory potential in the marginalization of women as “other,” as it sustains a female voice arising in opposition to dominant phallic language and imagery. Less active than other feminist theorists in public policy debates, these feminists focus on women’s subversion or alternate reading of dominant texts and the production of symbolic systems privileging the otherness of femaleness. Attending to women’s voices and symbols might help us see the disastrousness of daily life for many women and the routine nature of events like floods. It might foster an alternative symbolic interpretation of disasters expressed, for example, through the famine songs that Megan Vaughan (1987) recorded from women in Malawi. Postmodern feminists insist on the significance of living through sexualized bodies. Male and female bodies come into play differently, for example in Anne Larabee’s (2000) cultural analysis of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, in which the ship’s captain was cast as a “romantic symbol of an outmoded laboring masculine body” (p. 84). For disaster sociologists, more familiar with case studies of organizational practice than with postmodern cultural or feminist studies, postmodern feminism may raise as many questions as it answers—an excellent quality, in fact. These ideas point the way for planners to pay closer attention to the imagery of disaster. Among other lines of action, postmodern feminism may encourage

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emergency managers to: (1) expect and seek out multiple “women’s voices” when striving to increase public participation in local activities; (2) critically consider the assumed “we” in disaster work and the competing interests of diverse actors; (3) support gender-aware cultural productions that express alternative interpretations of local disaster risk and security; (4) consider alternative cultural markers to analyze women’s and men’s distinctive views on disasters as expressed in multiple voices and venues; and (5) monitor disaster relief appeals to help prevent the use of exploitative images of women and children for fundraising purposes. Using Feminist Political Ecology Weaving together strands of multiracial, ecofeminist, and development theory, feminist political ecology rejects a naturalized relation of woman (e.g., contributors to Warren, 1997). Instead, gender is seen as a neglected ideological and material force shaping environmental thinking and action, beginning with the “gender division of power to preserve, protect, change, construct, rehabilitate, and restore environments and to regulate the actions of others” (Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangarai, 1996, p. 10). This emerging body of thought focuses on how women have historically and in varying contexts drawn on the material circumstance of their lives, their social networks, and their place-based environmental knowledge to respond to emerging crises, challenging both male dominance and environmental degradation in the process. Gender is central, not marginal, interacting with “class, caste, race, culture, and ethnicity to shape processes of ecological change, the struggle of men and women to sustain ecologically viable livelihoods, and the prospects of any community for ‘sustainable development’” (Rocheleau, ThomasSlayter, and Wangarai, 1996, p. 4). From this stance, gender inequalities, environmental degradation, and disaster vulnerability are closely joined. The work women do is place-based. These landscapes are dynamic social, cultural, historical, and environmental spaces and profoundly gendered. Writing about women and the politics of place, Wendy Harcourt and Arturo Escobar (2005, p. 10) observe that landscapes are best understood as “gendered terrains that are always under construction through ecological and social relational webs, not as inert backgrounds for human action.” As primary users and managers of the essential energy, water, and fuel resources that support their families, and as primary household food producers and caregivers, women are especially sensitive to the hazards of place that put people at risk of mudslides, toxic spills, forest fires, gas explosions, and other environmental and technological hazards (Cutter, Tiefenbacher, and Soleci, 1992; Cutter, 1995). Joni Seager (1996, p. 280) observes that women are “often the first to notice when the water smells peculiar, when the laundry gets dingier

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with each wash, when children develop mysterious ailments—or they are the first to worry that these assaults on family safety and health are imminent. . . . [E]nvironmental degradation is typically mundane: it occurs in small measures, drop by drop, well by well, tree by tree” (emphasis in original). This connection inspires women’s work to mitigate hazardous conditions, demand corporate accountability, and challenge governmental environmental policy, as evidenced globally and through Native American work against uranium mining in the United States; the food justice movement; and women’s organizing to reduce environmental threats to reproductive health. The political ecology framework advocated by some disaster social scientists resonates with feminist theory (Oliver-Smith, 1998; Peacock, Morrow, and Gladwin, 1997). Both approaches emphasize intersecting power relations in interacting political, economic, and physical environments. Political ecologists insist on close analysis of the social relations and sociocultural systems that mediate between people and their environments: “Human-environmental relations are always structured and expressed through social relations that reflect the arrangements by and through which a population extracts a living from its surroundings” (Oliver-Smith, 1998, p. 189). With risk reduction and disaster mitigation as our focus, theorizing about disasters must incorporate women’s knowledge and resources as well as their vulnerabilities, and address ways of knowing and acting demonstrated by women and by men equally. New concerns will arise, for example about women’s reproductive rights in periods of environmental crisis and the neglected spiritual dimension of environmental justice work that reduces hazards and potential disasters (Smith, 1997). New linkages may be forged on urgent issues such as women’s work for gender justice and climate justice and the ties of each to armed conflict (Brownhill, 2009). With the development of feminist perspectives on environmental and climate change, the building blocks are now at hand to create an integrated feminist geography that is grounded in place, region, and geopolitics as well as gender analysis (see the positive assessment in Reed and Christie, 2009). With significant climatic changes looming, along with unrelenting pressures to address the conditions that produce disasters, these new connections forged in theory and practice are extremely important (for international examples from climate change research, see Masika, 2002, and Sweetman, 2009). Gendered political ecology offers the following guidelines for those charged with emergency planning: (1) partner with women as natural resource users and managers in environmental mitigation initiatives; (2) increase outreach and networking between disaster agencies and women in environmental justice and sustainable development organizations; (3) include women in planning and environmental science professions and caucuses on local mitigation and preparedness initiatives; (4) target women as informal neighborhood leaders around community health and safety issues for partnership with emergency

Table 3.1 Evaluating Feminist Theories Relevant to Disaster Risk Reduction Current Application Global

United States

Core Concerns

Liberal feminism

Low

High

Socialist feminism

Low

Low

Radical feminism

Moderate

Low

Multiracial feminism

High

Moderate

Postmodern feminism

Low

Low

Gender and development

High

Low

Feminist political ecology

High

Low

Equal access, formal rights Patriarchy, capitalism Violence, sexuality, autonomy Intersecting power relations, racism Subjectivity, emergence Division of labor, globalization Gender equality in natural and social systems, cultural survival

Focus on Sustainability

Focus on Social Justice

Ecosystem Analysis

Low

Low

Low

Low

High

Low

Low

High

Low

Low

High

Moderate

Low

Low

Low

High

High

Moderate

High

High

High

39

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Women Confronting Natural Disaster

practitioners; (5) integrate gender analysis into mitigative environmental strategies and assess sex-specific impacts, for example regarding access to land, workload, time, and social power; and (6) understand and follow the lead of grassroots women’s work for social justice and environmental stewardship in all risk reduction programming.

Conclusion Sociology is the mother tongue of disaster research, the invisible scaffolding of our intellectual frameworks of understanding. The subject of our gender study, therefore, is not the biology of sex or faith-based gender norms but how gendered identities, relationships, and institutions shape agency and power through the disaster experience. There is no undisputed gender lens to “sell” here, as thinking about women, gender, and disaster risk continues to grow and change. I hope we can be generous with our ideas, not defending theoretical borders but challenging them, and finding better ways of translating, sharing, and putting to good use all good ideas (see Table 3.1). More intellectual curiosity among students of disaster and emergency managers would help, as would more concern in gender studies about the environmental realities that ground us. More willingness all around to engage in thoughtful, informed, and spirited debate is sorely needed. More critical thinking is needed about what feminist perspectives do and do not bring to disaster risk reduction.

4 Measuring Vulnerability and Capacity

I

turn now to gender as a contributing factor in people’s vulnerability to hazards and disasters, a logical extension of gender theory but with more practical application. The chapter begins with a brief overview of social vulnerability analysis and some of its limitations as currently employed, including gender blinders. Next, the familiar tool of vulnerability mapping is discussed from a gender perspective with attention to the inadequacies of current indicators and suggestions for alternatives. Throughout, I show why gender should be understood as a root cause of social vulnerability as well as a crosscutting factor.

A Social Vulnerability Approach to Disasters Disasters are naturalized in the public imagination as somehow larger than life, unforeseeable, and essentially the burden of one household at a time. But those who experience disasters learn better when their homes are destroyed by a broken levy or wildfire and they lose the “stuff” that constitutes personal history. They come to realize that disasters are not reducible to personal decisions or conditions but are fundamentally collective social processes culminating in a crisis. Inspired first by pioneering geographer Gilbert White, founder of the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center and the nation’s leading voice on flood risk and water management, the US community of disaster practitioners has long recognized the social causation of the hazards and disasters that seem so “natural” now. Long before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita gave currency to this notion, for example, in the reader There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster (Squires and Hartman, 2006), US disaster scholars were writing about disasters “by design.” The second national assessment of scientific knowledge in this field (Mileti, 1999) concluded 41

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that in the United States, as elsewhere, the distribution of hazard and disaster risk reflects social trends, environmental pressures, and social divisions, as well as physical differences and people’s own actions. As noted in a leading text, “It is necessary to move beyond looking at disasters as simply physical events and consider the social and economic factors that make people and their living conditions unsafe or secure to begin with. Fragile livelihoods are as important as fragile buildings in understanding vulnerability to environmental hazards” (Bolin with Stanford, 1998, p. 42). The everyday living conditions of the nation’s poorest, sickest, most dependent, and most isolated residents directly and indirectly increase their exposure to hazards and susceptibility to harm. When our society is designed for the young and able-bodied, living with old age, disabilities, or both is even more of a challenge in the event of a disastrous tornado or earthquake. Substandard housing in risky places, homelessness, proximity to pollutants, and poverty in America’s most marginalized neighborhoods translate into increased susceptibility to the impacts of disasters. Bias against new immigrants, unpopular religious groups, women and men in nontraditional or nonheterosexual living arrangements, HIV/AIDS survivors, and others outside the mainstream undermines community solidarity and hence resilience to disasters. These social divisions are as much a part of life as the positive social connections and affluence that in other places make neighborhood preparedness campaigns so successful. If prevailing economic and social patterns produce disasters, can these be undone? This was the focus of the first International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (in the 1990s) and is still the abiding concern of the succeeding United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR). A global consensus now exists that reducing the risk of disaster, not simply “putting out the fire” time and time again, is essential to sustainable development. Improved preparedness, response, and relief efforts alone cannot fundamentally reduce people’s risk of natural, technological, or human-induced disaster. Disasters are not written in the language of individual “special needs.” As two leading researchers note: “Vulnerabilities precede disasters, contribute to their severity, impede effective disaster response and continue afterwards. Needs, on the other hand, arise out of the crisis itself, and are relatively short-term. Most disaster relief efforts have concentrated on meeting immediate needs, rather than on addressing and lessening vulnerabilities” (Anderson and Woodrow, 1999, p. 10). Instead, social vulnerability analysis takes us “back to the future” to examine the driving forces that produce conditions putting people in harm’s way. In just the same way that geopolitical power structures predictably produce “regions at risk,” some population groups more than others are placed in conditions that endanger them, despite the notion of disasters as “social levelers.” As developed by leading vulnerability theorists Ben Wisner, Terry Cannon, Piers Blaikie, and Ian Davis (2004; and see Blaikie et al., 1994), people’s

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risk of disaster can be assessed as a function of both hazard (people’s relative exposure to hazards and their susceptibility) and social vulnerability, in addition to the physical vulnerabilities of the built environment and infrastructure around them (for the United States, see Phillips et al., 2009). The equation, however, must be modified (and this is the key to risk reduction) by the capacity and will of people and their governments to mitigate or prevent these hazards and reduce or prevent social and physical vulnerabilities. This approach to disaster risk never looks away from the environmental grounding of everyday life—the “hazardousness of place” as leading geographer Susan Cutter described it in 1996—but decouples social life from the triggering events or conditions that are hazardous, whether these are environmental or technological in origin, slow to take effect or sudden in onset, or biological harm stemming from natural processes or deployed with hostility, to name just some of the ways hazards vary. This approach to risk also insists on history, for disasters have a past and a future. It is essential to come to terms with the root causes and related dynamic pressures of disaster risk, which in any era are as much political and economic as environmental (see Bankoff, Frerks, and Hilhorst, 2004, for international case studies, and Wisner, 1999, for a case study from Los Angeles). Understanding Social Vulnerability The resources we value that reduce vulnerability are familiar, and we miss them when they are gone: time, leisure, good health, access to credit, transportation, income, strong support systems, safe and secure housing—the list is long. These forms of human, social, material, and cultural capital can be lifesaving in any social crisis and are unequally distributed. Social vulnerability analysis asks which social groups are least likely to have access to (and control over) the key assets and resources that help all people “anticipate, cope with, resist, and recover from the impact of a natural hazard” (Blaikie et al., 1994, p. 9). Like resilience, vulnerability is manifest in different ways depending on whether our concern is with the individual, household, neighborhood, organization, or community. It follows that conditions promoting vulnerability at one level of analysis, such as the community, do not necessarily translate into the same level of vulnerability within a household, for example. Social vulnerabilities may emerge from a combination of structural inequalities (related to economic status or sexuality, for instance), but may also be situational; they may change with time as, for example, when a person learns to read or recovers from a debilitating injury or gets a good job. Structural and situational vulnerabilities are frequently compounding. For example, Native American children living in substandard housing on isolated reservations are also likely to be exposed to contaminants from toxic waste dumps nearby, but may move to cities and reduce their lifelong exposure.

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Poverty is often mistaken with social vulnerability to the effects of hazards and disasters, but these dynamics are both related and distinct. Affluent tourists may be temporarily exposed to high winds and floodwaters while at an oceanfront resort, but are also more able than the local staff members at that resort to replace damaged possessions and resume employment. To take another example, household size and structure can increase vulnerability, but single-headed or large households are not always the most vulnerable; the married Dominican domestic worker may have a far more difficult time after a destructive earthquake than the professional single mother who employs her. Some social vulnerabilities may be “hidden in plain sight” (Enarson, 2007, 2009f). High-need groups may live below the radar, for example residents who are undocumented or abused women seeking not to be found. Street children, the mentally ill homeless, severely ill AIDS patients cared for at home, and substance-abusing street prostitutes may be less able to protect themselves in the event of a biological attack and more in need of help later; they are also especially difficult to reach due to stigma, transience, privacy needs, and mistrust of authorities. Other social groups such as those with cognitive disabilities or mental illness and lesbian or gay residents fearing exposure are also likely to be “invisible” and in need of special outreach. In addition, the disparate impacts of disaster may not be seen, or may be overlooked. After the 2003 wildfires in San Diego County, for example, the media focused more on damage to houses in high-end suburbs than on the San Pasqual Indian Reservation, where one-third of all residents lost badly needed housing (LeDuff, 2003). Those most likely to be affected in the event of a disastrous accident, attack, or extreme environmental event may even live outside the immediate area. An example is the women and children left without income in Central American villages when their partners and fathers working in the World Trade Towers were killed on September 11. An estimated 500 undocumented workers employed in low-wage service jobs died that day, as they were present in high numbers in Manhattan; in a survey of fifty-nine affected businesses in lower Manhattan, nearly half (46 percent) of all workers who were laid off were working without proper authorization, one survey found (see Wisner, 2003). The losses incurred by women in fishing families, whether affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami or by oil spills on our own shores, cannot be compensated if their own labor is not reflected in predisaster risk maps or postdisaster needs assessments. In short, gender blinders keep some social vulnerabilities (and capacities) out of sight and out of mind. Further, apparent commonalities can mask significant differences, as documented in the “social autopsy” of Chicago’s 1995 heat wave, in which death rates varied considerably within and between communities that appeared very comparable based on standard statistical indicators such as income, ethnicity, housing, and infrastructure (Klinenberg, 2002). Similarly, one neighborhood in which many Asian Americans reside may be very lightly affected by a gas ex-

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plosion, blackout, or volcanic eruption due to household mitigation, good insurance coverage, and secure income; in another area, with the same proportion of Asian Americans in a community dominated by recent immigrants from lowincome nations, people may lack money to improve their homes or buy insurance, be divided by language, or may have reason to fear violence. Indeed, within a single neighborhood, some households will include two earners and others only one; inside different households, women may care for children single-handedly, share caregiving responsibilities with their partners or paid assistants, or rely heavily on schools and child care homes or centers that may or may not be retrofitted or have emergency plans in place. Physical appearances, too, can be misleading. One heavily pregnant woman may move slowly but her family may own a car and be ready and able to help prepare the household, pack belongings, evacuate, clean up, and return home; across town, another woman in late pregnancy may live in a home for runaway teens, have no access to a car or contact with her family, and be entirely dependent on the facility manager or other residents for help. A person projecting a highly feminine or masculine persona may, in fact, be transgendering and hence highly susceptible to harassment or violence when disrupted conditions make privacy impossible. The complex and diverse life experiences of elders and persons living with disabilities make predicting their relative vulnerability equally complex. Certainly, residents of the same or nearby municipalities can have very different levels of exposure to hazards and social vulnerability, depending on the lens we bring to vulnerability analysis. A poor tax base, reliance on a single industry or crop, absence of strong institutions (schools, churches, social organizations), poor cooperation and coordination across institutions, ineffective government and leadership, inadequate land-use planning and enforcement, minority segregation and discrimination, a transient or unstable population—these and other factors differentiate vulnerable communities from more resilient ones. Within these different communities, neighborhoods and households will vary in exposure to hazardous material spills or the flooding of low-lying lands and to the social and economic conditions that make it difficult to cope. Wrong Turns in Vulnerability Analysis Regrettably, vulnerability analysis often picks the low-hanging fruit—simple indicators of the most obvious and socially accepted “special needs” groups are developed, generally around income, age, and ethnicity, sometimes including housing conditions or tenancy, health or disability, and family structure (single parents). This then leads to a population-based or “silo” approach in which population groups, not the conditions in which people live, are the center of analysis. When highly vulnerable groups are identified one “functional need” at a time, what they lack at any given moment becomes the focus of planners (for

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example, communication or transportation). It is hard to see what assets people with severe limitations can bring. The “special populations” approach is also unwieldy: the aged, the young, the poor, the disabled, racial minorities, the nonEnglish-speaking, and the undocumented, taken together, are not a minority but a majority population. From this perspective, it also matters very little whether an individual is immobilized due to a lifelong disabling condition, late-term pregnancy, substance abuse, or simple lack of a car, as was evident during the Katrina catastrophe. As critics have noted (Lindsay, 2007), if we do not ask “why” as well as “how,” appropriate interventions cannot be identified to work meaningfully toward reducing vulnerabilities where they begin. What is it about the way we have organized our society and communities that results in death and devastation in one home or neighborhood when hit by a fiery blaze, but not in another? How do power relations converge and interact to protect or to endanger life? We cannot answer these questions one population group at a time. In the case of race, for example, we cannot assume that all Americans of Latin heritage are situated identically in physical space, in political space, or in the everyday living spaces of work and family life, nor that “minority ethnic” identity translates necessarily into vulnerability. What exactly jeopardizes safety in neighborhoods with high proportions of “minority” groups? Are not multilingual residents, strong family ties and cultural traditions, a vibrant ethnic media, and the business and social services of an ethnic enclave relevant to the key survival resources people need to cope with hazards and disasters? This is where vulnerability and resilience begin to converge. With the United States moving from response mode to prevention, an intersectional approach that examines the root causes of vulnerability is needed instead of the passive voice of “functional needs” or generalizations about “special populations.” But intersectional analysis of social vulnerability must include gender, which currently is rarely part of the discourse of vulnerability in the United States, despite some recent work on vulnerability and resilience from a social justice perspective (Morrow, 2008). In part, this is as it should be, for “gender” is no more an indicator of vulnerability than “race” or “age” until or unless the specific living conditions produced by these social relations are identified and tied back to vulnerability. Maureen Fordham (2004, p. 181) emphasizes this in her call for a more nuanced approach: “While a gendered perspective is necessary in analyzing vulnerability, in any particular context it may not be either sufficient or the most appropriate primary lens. Furthermore, vulnerability analysis is incomplete without an equal focus on capacity” (emphasis added). Gender Blinders At least five reservations seem to limit gendered disaster vulnerability analysis in the United States. First, the category “women” is thought to be too large for

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a population with identifiable “special” needs, and second, despite cultural stereotypes of the “hysterical” woman to the contrary, the notion that women are emotionally stronger than men is embedded culturally. Third, women and men in the United States are seen to be equal in the ways that matter here, from which it follows that, fourth, women’s vulnerabilities, such as they are, derive instead from old age, poverty, single parenthood, and other factors. Fifth, perhaps most important, gender is seen to play but a small part, and one that is largely positive, in the lives of men—and it is largely still men who write the vulnerability literature and act upon it. But these concerns rest on false assumptions. On the first point, it is important to know that vulnerability analysis informed by gender does not examine women uncritically. Instead, gender and disaster researchers adopt an intersectional approach that deconstructs the social category “woman,” examining context-specific and culturally variable meanings of womanhood. Asserting universal vulnerability based on gender is as nonsensical as asserting universal vulnerability on the basis of the content-less concept of “age.” Significant gender patterns do exist that heighten women’s risk (see Table 1.1). Women do live at increased risk of personal violence and have lower rates of employment in jobs that provide some income security in a crisis; they do take on substantially more care work for dependents who look to them in a crisis, become pregnant, and give birth, even in disasters. Women do live with economic insecurity or below the poverty line at greater rates than men in the United States. These and other factors increase exposure to hazards and undermine capacity for mitigation or self-protection, let alone sustainable recovery. Second, with respect to stereotypes about emotionally resilient women, contradictory gender myths abound. Typecast as weak and passive, awaiting rescue by strong-armed men, women are seen as the prototypic disaster victim. The findings from social psychology about women and postdisaster stress highlight this, but paradoxically the resilience framework now emerging proves more powerful. Case studies of women in actual disasters often demonstrate that they are active responders, not passive onlookers; as resourceful and committed caretakers for infants, frail elders, and others, they hardly seem “vulnerable.” These same case studies, reviewed in subsequent chapters, show what is learned when we consider both vulnerability and agency. Concerning the third point, on women’s presumed equality in the United States, gender inequalities do fundamentally persist in the United States despite the cultural trope of “positive thinking” in contemporary American life (see Ehrenreich, 2009) and in much “postfeminist” thought (see Faludi, 1991). The 2010 Global Gender Gap Report, compiled by the World Economic Forum, places the United States, for the first time in the five-year history of the report, in the top 20 of the 134 nations surveyed, reflecting more leading women in the Barack Obama administration and modest wage improvements for women (World Economic Forum, 2010). This status is determined by rank-ordering

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four equality indicators—economic opportunity and participation, educational attainment, political empowerment, and health and survival—and represents a marked increase for the United States compared to previous years, when it ranked in the top 30 nations and substantially lower than neighboring Canada. The low percentage of elected women officials in the United States depresses its equality ranking, a gap that persists in engineering, architecture, law enforcement, firefighting, and a host of other occupations closely associated with emergency management. Again, these are not generalizations that apply equally to women across social classes, age groups, or ethnic groups, but few women are unaffected. With stark images readily available of rural women in developing nations walking miles each day to gather water, women beaten or worse for choosing their own sexual partners, girls deprived of even the most basic education, and women’s lives generally unfolding behind closed doors, many Americans (emergency managers and disaster researchers among them) find it difficult to think of “gender” as something that jeopardizes American women. The fourth idea, that gender is derivative and not a root cause of social vulnerability, merits more attention. Gender does indeed cut across other social divisions of inequality and difference. This was evident long before the levees of New Orleans failed during Hurricane Katrina and women, men, and children scrambled desperately into attics as waters rose around them. One in four women residing in New Orleans lived below the poverty line; more than half (56 percent) of families with children were headed by women and two-fifths of these lived in poverty; over a third (35 percent) of African American women in Louisiana were officially poor, the worst record in the region and nation; and over half (61 percent) of the poor people older than sixty-five in New Orleans were women (Gault et al., 2005; see also Willinger, 2008a). This essential “gendered terrain” was knowable, if not known, and set the stage for gender as well as race and class disparities in Katrina recovery (Willinger and Knight, 2011). Health professionals and social service administrators certainly foresaw the difficulties soon faced by pregnant women and new mothers, especially among low-income single mothers, as did community activists working with high-risk populations. That gender was out of sight and out of mind in the analysis and reports following Katrina is all the more remarkable. What makes so many turn away from the obvious? Finally, the fifth reservation about men and gendered vulnerability analysis parallels the preceding point: As a society, we expend considerable political energy trying to regulate sex, sexuality, and gender relations, especially around heterosexuality, and reward (or tolerate) highly gendered and sexualized popular media; yet gender is trumped by virtually any other social category in disaster analysis, even more so for men than for women. Americans who naturalize gender dichotomy and seek out gender difference (Venus and Mars, salads and steak, yin and yang) are surprisingly indifferent to how gender may disadvantage men. It may be that the cultural norm of male invulnerability forces un-

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derground the gender concerns that arise for men and boys in disasters, or that power accruing to men in disaster contexts is so self-evident as to be invisible when research agendas or policy frameworks are formulated.

Gendered Disaster Vulnerability Gender relations matter through the life course of a disaster, from prevention and mitigation to emergency response and short- and long-term recovery. Sex and gender are thus an integral part of good vulnerability analysis (Laska, Willinger, Morrow, and Mock, 2008; Enarson, 2009a). Sex or gender may not be the single most important explanatory factor in any woman’s or man’s life at a particular point, but these factors are never irrelevant, any more than age or ethnicity. Understanding gendered vulnerability means seeing sex, sexuality, and gender in three frames: as a crosscutting factor, a root cause, or both. Gender clearly cuts across, and is informed by, income, disability, violence, age, homelessness, single parenting, social isolation, literacy, racial/ethnic status, citizenship status, and widowhood, among the many factors shaping vulnerabilities and capacities in crisis. In some instances, these groups are disproportionately female (or the reverse), so “statistical discrimination” is evident. Women’s and men’s experiences may simply diverge, for example in the causes of homelessness and how people cope with it, and gender differences clearly change over time. But gender also is a root cause of social vulnerability based on differences and inequality (Bolin, Jackson, and Crist, 1998). For example, women have specific needs in late pregnancy, their domestic work is generally discounted, and they are at increased risk of abuse following disaster; men, too, are at risk due to the gender-based division of labor that places them in risky and male-dominated response roles, and due to gender norms that make so many decline counseling as “unmanly” and struggle alone in the aftermath. At its best, social vulnerability analysis directs attention to the resources people have as well as what they lack, and to the past and future as well as the present. How will changes in American life affect the people we love in an increasingly hazardous future? Climate change is a powerful force bringing more extreme and uncertain weather events in its wake, and women and men are not exposed in the same ways or with the same effects. The same can be said of terrorism and such technological hazards as toxic contamination of water supplies. Household and family lives are also changing. The percentage of female-headed households continues to increase, and these households live in poverty at twice the rate of those headed by men; these women are also disproportionately from marginalized racial and ethnic groups. Owing to maternal poverty and related factors, their children often live in substandard housing with caregivers who may lack jobs with secure benefits, not to mention reliable transportation in a

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disaster. High rates of child poverty in the nation also mean that growing numbers of children lack health insurance and therefore are without regular health care, so they are often facing the uncertainties of hazards and disasters while in poor health. The national shift away from state-supported social services especially affects families dependent on the social safety net in the best of times. What will transpire in the worst of times is easy to foresee. In addition to these macroeconomic and political trends, the gender-based division of labor helps predict differential impact, for example on small businesses owned or managed by men or by women, on the crops or animals upon which their respective livelihoods depend, on threats to women’s land rights and inheritance, and women’s or men’s ability to recoup losses. These factors situate women and men differently in recovery. One case study (Paolisso, Ritchie, and Ramirez, 2002) revealed that women coffee farmers in Honduras registered different kinds of loss compared to men after a major hurricane due to their different position in the production process and had different recovery needs as a result. The “plight of women” and “flight of men” (Wiest, 1998, in the case of land-poor widows in Bangladesh) was noted early on as a function of the gender division of labor, specifically regarding who gained or retained access to land for shelter and for crops, and who could earn income at home or must migrate for economic reasons. Writing from Africa, Richard Shroeder (1987) carefully analyzed gender relations during an extended period of drought, highlighting the interaction of gender group with caste group, social class, and age and pointing out differing capacities and shortcomings based on these interactions. What else might be learned from adopting a gendered lens on livelihood, for instance in designing Gulf Coast recovery programs or prioritizing workplace preparedness awareness campaigns in the United States? How useful would it be to know in advance how women and men in different income, culture, and age groups are positioned to cope with the effects of lost income and assets, whether they work in underground sweatshops or in well-resourced corporate parks, and whether or not the workplaces they travel to each day are prepared for the unexpected? Preparedness campaigns could be framed to reach and assist low-income women if planners were aware of women’s high levels of poverty in specific hazardous locales; for example, in a study of Alabama communities exposed to a dangerous chemical weapons storage depot, women comprise 56 percent of the sample but 73 percent of the lowest income quintile (Phillips, Metz, and Nieves, 2005, p. 126). Good social vulnerability analysis also recognizes gender as a pivotal power structure in and of itself, most evidently at the household level. Women’s entitlements (and children’s) are constrained by male privilege in many cultures, where life-saving information, shelter, or social protection may be withheld. Power over key decisions and assets is held tightly by men in most parts of the world—the United States is no exception. Gender relations that empower

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men (some more than others) are also evident at the institutional level in the United States, where women rarely have equal voice in corporate, governing, professional, and cultural institutions in which critical decisions are made that increase hazards and exacerbate social vulnerability. That women have this in common with nonelite men does not make gender less important, but more so. However difficult to quantify, these are the kinds of gender issues we must “count” in the work we do to reduce or forestall the effects of disaster, because they surely count when buildings collapse or rivers dry up. Mapping Gender Vulnerability Determining how sex and gender come into play is a foundation stone of effective disaster risk assessment. In my view, it should be among the core competencies of disaster risk managers, and tools are readily at hand. Numerous templates exist for integrating gender into social vulnerability analysis. Among others, the Capacity and Vulnerability Analysis (CVA) approach originally developed by Mary Anderson and Peter Woodrow (1999) for international development work in disasters, distinguishes between physical/material vulnerabilities (productive resources, skills, and hazards), social and organizational considerations (relations and organization among people), and attitudinal or motivational vulnerabilities and capacities (how the community views its ability to create change). CVA analysis can be used to highlight changes along different dimensions over time, and patterns within different gender, age, income, or ethnic groups. It is a reminder that the call for gender data is not new. The approach to risk assessment offered in At Risk (Blaikie et al., 1994, p. 341) builds on this, inviting analysis of shifts over time with respect to gender and other vulnerability factors. A highly gender-sensitive approach to risk-mapping was developed at the University of Natal in South Africa by researchers working on gender, development, and disaster risk reduction in collaboration with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (Von Kotze and Holloway, 1996). The guidebook clearly discusses the difference between sex and gender, and uses sex as one of many factors when comparing the capabilities and vulnerabilities of women and men in different kinds of households or age groups. Role-playing helps local groups bring to light significant differences that bear on disaster risk, such as women’s lack of land rights or credit. I too was involved in constructing a template for women-directed local risk assessments, one that trained women as community researchers in four developing nations in the Caribbean so that women’s groups could decide what information was essential to know about people’s lives in risky environments and then collect and analyze it locally (Enarson et al., 2003). But in the United States, the approach is different. The National Mitigation Act of 2000 made vulnerability assessment a major component of effective

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emergency management. Planners in this field seek mapping tools, especially computer-assisted geographic information systems (GIS) that show the interplay of such critical infrastructures as utilities, transportation routes, and hospitals with place (coastal zone, flood plain, or a “tornado alley,” for instance) and also with populations (factoring in poverty rates, age distribution, minority population, housing tenure, family size, and other patterns and trends). The Social Vulnerability Index, developed by Susan Cutter, Bryan Boruff, and W. Lynn Shirley (2003), like other indexes used by federal agencies, guides users to a wide range of census data available at the county level. Indicators include such vulnerability factors as urban density, housing stock and tenancy, population growth, population diversity, household size and structure, health and disability status, and poverty rates. Knowing their communities “inside out and from the bottom up” helps practitioners make the most of their time, energy, and resources. Computeraided mapping helps “ensure congruence between the maps of risk and the maps of preparedness” (Monmonier, 2002, p. 236). In an area of high immigration, for example, emergency managers can assume the need for multilingual risk communications and plan accordingly. In an area of high population density, emergency transport systems can be fine-tuned and mass shelters strategically placed. New computer-dependent models (and their increasing affordability) have created strong demand for more quantitative indicators of vulnerability. This more high-tech, or perhaps technocratic, approach generally revolves around GIS risk mapping, conducted with varying degrees of sophistication and interest in social patterns. The Limitations of Gender Data Quantitative data help answer important questions. The Millennium Development Goals and the Gender Equality Index are examples of tools utilizing sexdisaggregated data such as maternal mortality rates or ratios of female to male office-holders. Psychosocial research questions and public health research on disaster-related mortality and morbidity also involve quantitative data. Quantitative indicators of economic trends (male and female unemployment rates) or demographic shifts (female and male longevity rates) can suggest gender differences that matter in disasters. Planners need this. For example, it is possible to know if a community has large numbers of women of child-bearing age and from this to make inferences about hospital preparedness for pandemics. We might infer something about risk communication in extreme heat by knowing that large numbers of men reside in an area, given men’s generally higher exposure to some key risk factors in extreme heat. But we cannot use the sex variable to understand how transgendered teens on the mean streets of our megacities will survive in the next earthquake or hurricane, or the part played by intimacy in the emotional recovery of partners.

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At least three problems arise when quantifying gendered vulnerability: (1) the complexities of “gender” are reduced to, and mistaken for, the bivariate male/female variable of “sex”; (2) “gender” is measured only or mainly through female-specific indicators; and (3) gender data are used in isolation, not cross-tabulated with crosscutting variables. Not surprisingly, gender may drop out as an explanatory variable when the indicator used is simply “percentage female” in a given census tract or county. What does it mean to learn that about as many women as men live in a certain place? And when might a vulnerability measure actually reflect more on capability or resilience? For instance, when drought-stressed farm families find it impossible to make ends meet without women having to take on yet another job (off-farm employment is a common coping strategy), is women’s higher employment rate an indicator of disaster vulnerability (added stress, less time for activities, less time with children, long and costly commutes) or of capacity (increased income, expanded social networks, perhaps new skills)? A census tract with large numbers of single-headed households (a commonly used indicator in vulnerability analysis) may mean many things: single mothers are not always poor, and single parents are not always female. Is this a neighborhood of affluent older widows living in insured homes they own, or one with large numbers of poor mothers living in public housing or substandard rental units? Similarly, gender does not confer the same advantage automatically to all men (the male executive and his male gardener). How can statistics get at this? Examples of critical thinking about commonly used “gender” indicators are offered in Figure 4.1. State, county, tract, and block census data often include sex-specific data on the percentage of single-headed households, proportion of elderly people living alone, roles of grandparents, income, education, and often much more. Special reports produced using census data are invaluable, as scholars have sought out sex-specific data that may be “hidden in plain view” in complex tables, for example regarding seniors and their living conditions. As Figure 4.2 illustrates, many useful data-sets are available to inform planners about women’s everyday lives at the local level. Other sources of statistical community data are local, state, and regional planning offices, research institutes in nearby universities or colleges, law enforcement agencies, and social service agencies. Emergency managers working in government or the private sector must also take structural changes and trends in the nation at large into account in their work at the local level (Enarson, 2007). Where are our farming communities, big cities, and suburbs headed, and how might this affect women and men respectively? Which women are gaining or losing access to resources that can help to protect them or help them to cope and recover? How well organized are women’s groups (or men’s groups), and how well networked are emergency managers with them?

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Figure 4.1 Cautionary Notes on Selected Vulnerability Indicators

• What factors affect sex ratios over time and how do these relate to disaster vulnerability?

• Is vulnerability increased due to competing demands on time, lengthy commutes, or absence from the household?

• At the census tract or country level, can anything be learned about genderbased vulnerability? • How do sex ratios predict relevant place-based differences?

• Is vulnerability decreased due to increased household income, expanded social networks, or job-related skills and training?

% female

% women employed ▼ ▲

• Is vulnerability increased due to sole responsibility? In what income levels?

% single-mother households

• Is vulnerability decreased due to increased personal autonomy in the household and in networks with extended kin?

• Is vulnerability increased due to economic fragility of most women-owned businesses?

% women-owned businesses

• Is vulnerability reduced due to increased autonomy, work-based networks, multiple income streams, or professional skills?

Community Knowledge and Other Information Sources Laments about those who “fell through the cracks” follow with depressing regularity after every disaster. Local “unmet needs” committees form regularly after disasters, with women playing lead roles. Nongovernmental or community-based groups may conduct regular needs assessments and user surveys; for instance, a local coalition coordinating a crisis line might publish annual reports about suicide, domestic abuse, sexual assault, substance abuse, homelessness, or interpersonal violence. Relevant information may be collected through needs assessments conducted by United Way or its member agencies. Emergency management agencies and professionals are well positioned to connect through outreach programs to senior centers, heath care facilities, and schools, many of which may be led by women (and men) with an interest in the gender dimen-

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Figure 4.2 Illustrative Sex-Specific Census Data by Census Tract Although gender-based analysis using relevant sex-specific data is rare, many federal government data-sets do suggest important patterns are revealed at the census-tract level: • Female, 65 years and over • Female, 90 years and over • Female householder, living alone • Nonfamily female householder living alone • Female householder • Female householder, no husband present • Female householder, no husband present with own children under 18 years • Female householder, no husband present with related children under 18 years • Family female householder, no husband present, in renter-occupied housing unit • Nonfamily female householder living alone, 65 years and over, in renteroccupied housing unit • Full-time, year-round female workers with earnings in the past year • Percentage female below poverty level • Percentage female employed/unemployed (civilian labor force 16 years and over) Sources: US Census Bureau, Quick Tables, American Fact Finder; 2005–2009 American Community Survey.

sions of disasters, and perhaps can initiate data collection or make secondary gender analysis possible. Collaboration with local university research institutes, advanced students seeking internships, and researchers in the private sector is another way for practitioners to learn from experience—and to add their own hard-won knowledge to that of disaster social scientists. Working with gender and women’s studies programs is a useful starting point, though programs on rural development, urban studies, health, ethnic studies, and gerontology are also useful. Working directly with highly vulnerable groups to assess risk helps build information exchange and social networks with these important constituencies (see Figure 4.3). When emergency managers strive to reach non-Englishspeaking and recent immigrants, their best allies may be immigrant women whose cultural and gender-based networks help hold these communities together. They, more than their fathers or husbands, may be seen as trustworthy, informal opinion leaders in their neighborhoods, and also as people whose daily engagement with social services has earned them useful knowledge in navigating government bureaucracies. Finally, emergency managers can learn about gendered vulnerability by being as actively involved at the grassroots level as possible, taking part in women’s and community events, or seeking out particular groups such as women

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Figure 4.3 From Numbers to Relationships: Anticipating Needs and Capacities Map hazards and demography

Identify action barriers across groups

Document capacities

Poverty Income Age Marital status Household size/ structure Employment Education/training Race/ethnicity Disability/health Language/literacy

Limited decisionmaking power Low social authority Low social protection/safety Multiple dependents/care work Stigma/cultural norms Social/geographic isolation Low levels of social protection/safety Limited household power Lack of material resources Low hazard awareness

Participatory action Research Risk-profiling Capacity and vulnerability assessments Organizational preparedness plans/ activities

Begin with census data Seek sex-specific statistics Overlay on hazards maps Use smallest scale

Consult with women’s and community groups Oral histories, academic papers Local service-agency reports

Networking Collaborate on local planning initiatives Exchange information

who reside in town only during the migrant labor cycle or clubs for low-income girls. Grassroots women’s groups are often knowledgeable about high-risk populations and actively involved in emergency relief and long-term recovery efforts at the community level. Documentation projects undertaken by local women’s groups, for example following Hurricane Katrina, are valuable sources of information, as are oral history collections that include women. The vast repository of women’s voices on the Internet should not be overlooked. This includes community newsletters, blogs, and online news reporting, as well as information about women and men in crisis that may appear on organizational websites. Emergency relief programs conducted by the Soroptimists and the Black Women’s Health Network, or the efforts of community health nurses to prepare for disasters, are just a few examples of the rich veins of local knowledge that emergency managers should consider when looking for more than one-dimensional “sex” data to understand the everyday lives of women and men.

Conclusion The changing face of the United States, expanding gaps in life chances, and growing social inequalities will make vulnerability reduction an essential com-

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ponent of the skill set of tomorrow’s emergency managers. It is also certain to change the face of emergency management, drawing in a more diverse pool of experienced practitioners, women and men alike, who bring with them nontraditional life experiences and educational and employment histories. Emergency managers must be knowledgeable about the complexity of their communities, resisting easy stereotypes about different cultures, different kinds of abilities, different ways of organizing family life, and different relationships between women and men. They must be skilled in communicating with high-risk groups, not just through translation into all community languages, but also by understanding communication barriers of all kinds, including those based on gender. Efforts by local emergency managers to identify “hidden” vulnerabilities, meet critical needs, build on the capacities of even the most vulnerable, and partner creatively with high-risk groups will be well-rewarded when the next disaster unfolds. It is challenging to do justice to gender and other power relations in social vulnerability analysis, but not impossible. In a national climate of uncertainty about risk and security, and the social contract between a people and their government, the resources and wisdom of all Americans must be brought to bear.

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his chapter begins with some of the most pressing questions about women caught in disasters: How is women’s reproductive health affected and how serious are the impacts on maternal and fetal health? What kinds of mental health effects have been found and how do women cope with these? But first, who dies more often in US disasters—men or women? Though perhaps less compelling due to the comparatively low rates of disaster-related mortality in the United States, this often-asked question is a good place to begin our discussion of women’s health and well-being in disasters.

Gender Patterns in Disaster Survival Amanda Ripley’s book The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—And Why (2008) was received with acclaim in the popular press. First asserting that “[s]ex matters too. It is far better to be a man in certain disasters, and a woman in others” (p. 88), she moves quickly to men’s life-threatening heroic rescues and the “embarrassingly banal” issue of women slowed down by their high-heeled shoes in the race for survival at the World Trade Center on September 11 (p. 89). Though gender analysis in disaster mortality and morbidity research is indeed scarce, we know more than this about women, men, and survival. Hospitals, coroners, and morgues provide sex-specific data on mortality and morbidity, but the difficulty lies in establishing causality. Where do hazard events such as ice storms or tornadoes or catastrophes such as oil spills begin and end, and how can their effects be distinguished from intervening or concurrent conditions? Walls that collapse and kill can be observed, but what about a widow’s death six months after an earthquake displaced her to a distant and 59

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strange new care facility? How can mortality be determined when even the geographic locations of potential victims cannot be determined, as for instance after Hurricane Katrina? Moving from a population-based data-set to comparative analysis of social development and disasters events, geographers Eric Neumayer and Thomas Plümper (2007) found strong associations between gender equality, life-span, and disaster. In countries like the United States, women and men die in percentages roughly comparable to national sex-specific life-spans; but in poor countries with low levels of gender equality, women’s deaths rise above men’s. “The feminists got it right,” these researchers observed in a follow-up piece, for “[n]atural disasters are a tragedy in their own right, but in countries with existing gender discrimination women are the worst hit” (Women’s United Nations Report Network, 2007). This conclusion is in line with findings from developing countries (Ikeda, 1995), but case studies also powerfully demonstrate the significance of the gender-based division of labor. When the destructive waves from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami reached shore, fishermen still in their boats survived more often than did the women waiting on shore to receive, prepare, and market the day’s catch (Oxfam International, 2005). Conversely, during Hurricane Mitch in 1998 in Central America, some researchers have suggested (Gomáriz, 1999) that men’s dominance in hazardous occupations and risk-tolerant gender norms raised male fatality rates above those for females. Here in the United States, conflicting gender patterns exist, for instance in sudden-impact events such as tornadoes (e.g., Schmidlin and King, 1997; Ono, 2002). It seems likely that women’s mortality in these events arises from residence in unsecured mobile homes or substandard housing. The gender division of labor clearly put more men on the site of the World Trade Center when it was attacked on September 11, with high fatality rates among elite men employed in the financial industry; and during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, more boys than girls lost their lives (Zahran, Peek, and Brody, 2008), echoing other findings that elderly, poor, African American men suffered disproportionately high fatalities in this catastrophe (Sharkey, 2007; see also Bourque et al., 2006). Men found outdoors during thunderstorms, for work or play, and those who drive through flash floods, account for the majority of storm-related deaths, reported public health specialist Thomas J. Songer at a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conference on safety. American men were found to comprise 70 percent of the 1,442 deaths related to thunderstorms occurring between 1994 and 2000 (UPMC News Bureau, 2003). This familiar pattern is echoed by international research (Jonkman and Kelman, 2005, p. 87) reporting a larger gender gap in flood deaths among European men (76 percent of all excess deaths) than among US men (48 percent).

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Close Up: American Men at Risk in Extreme Heat The relationship between sex and physiological heat tolerance is not clear (Kenney, 1985; Kaciuba-Uscilko and Grucza, 2001). Some researchers report that women are “curiously protected” from heat stroke due to storing less heat during a given workload (Grogan and Hopkins, 2002); however, George Havenith (2005) suggests that women’s tolerance for heat is lower than men’s at the population level, explained by women’s higher core body and skin temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate, as well as their different set point for sweating. Other social determinants of health, highly related to gender but also to age, income, and general health, may be more powerful explanations for men’s higher mortality in heat waves. Men live at elevated risk when they are treated for certain mental health conditions that lead to dehydrating drug therapies; men overall are more likely to experience drug abuse, alcoholism, and obesity, all of which threaten health in extreme heat. Occupational heat stress is another risk factor for men especially; for example, in California, past experience has led to campaigns to warn migrant farm-workers, still a predominantly male group, about the dangers of extreme heat (California Department of Industrial Relations, 2008). Deaths of male youths in strenuous sports such as football and wrestling are reported by the CDC (Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, 1998). Extreme heat events are an excellent illustration of the need for gender analysis; we cannot fully understand heat wave death without it, nor is gender analysis alone sufficient. In the period 1979–1998, men in Los Angeles County died at twice the rate of women due to excessive heat (Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, 2001). Male fatalities were also higher during Chicago’s 1995 heat event (Semenza et al., 1996). From 1999 to 2003, data from the CDC show men composed 66 percent of all US heat-related deaths (Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, 2006). These data suggest a curvilinear relationship between sex and age, with risk of heat-related deaths substantially higher for younger men compared to younger women (ages fifteen to fifty-four), then declining in late middle age (fifty-five to sixty-four), and then rising dramatically in old age (sixty-five and older), when death rates for women and men very nearly converge. The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (n.d.) is noteworthy for tracking heat deaths by sex and ethnicity, finding small sex differences between African American women and men (11 percent versus 13 percent of heat deaths) but larger differences between white women and men (25 versus 49 percent). Data from the period 1979–1988 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2001) show fatalities to be higher for African American men than women until age seventy-four, when women begin to fare worse; fatality rates for white women were the lowest of all. Eric Klinenberg’s (2002) “social autopsy” of Chicago’s 1995 heat wave determined that 80 percent of the bodies that went unclaimed were those of old,

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poor African American men residing in a highly vulnerable neighborhood. Men died at more than twice the rate of women even when controlling for age, a finding that Klinenberg related to “the gender of isolation” arising from masculinity norms of detachment and independence that stretched family ties beyond the breaking point. Klinenberg speculated that the men who died were also loners who were fearful of male-on-male violence, which then cut them off from warning systems and possible social networks of support (see also CanouïPoitrine, Cadot, and Spira, 2005, on nonmarried men’s higher death rates during the 2003 heat wave in France). Conversely, Christopher Browning and colleagues (2006) found that Chicago women in neighboring South Lawndale, a community dominated by Latin immigrants, did not experience a relative advantage in heat risk compared to men. More gender-focused work is needed on this climate-related health hazard. A clear pattern of disparate impact is also seen in European heat wave studies—but in the opposite direction: “If the Chicago victim of 1995 can be characterized as elderly, disabled, black, socially isolated, urban, lower social class and male, in contrast the French victim is elderly, disabled, lower social class and female” (Ogg, 2005, p. 19). Eric Jougla and Denis Hémon (2005), in their work for the French national health authority on the 2003 heat wave, found that excess mortality was 80 percent higher for women than men, due both to large numbers of women in old-age groups and to persistent sex gaps within age groups (see also Borrell et al., 2006, and Michelozzi et al., 2005, for other European cities). Reduced income is logically related to homelessness, poor health, lack of transportation to cooling centers, substance abuse, low literacy, and other life chances that come into play in periods of extreme heat. In fact, Parisian women most affected by the heat reportedly lived in small rooms at the tops of heat-stressed buildings lacking air conditioning, fans, cooling vegetation, and other potentially life-saving amenities (Ogg, 2005). A suggestive study from Arizona in the 1980s indicated that female fatality rates were more affected than male rates by the presence of air conditioning (Rogot, Sorlie, and Backlund, 1992). Will more American men die in the next extensive heat wave, as in Chicago, or will more women, as in Paris or Barcelona? With more gendersensitive research, our risk communicators and emergency managers might be able to answer a question not yet asked, thus allowing them to craft genderaware messaging with the potential to save lives.

Sexuality and Reproduction Television ads notwithstanding, women’s menstrual cycles are a private matter in the United States, so managing menstruation in a crisis is a real challenge to millions of women. Further, women’s bodies are intrinsically more exposed to waterborne contaminants, especially when tampons or pads are in place, increasing

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the risk of infection or even toxic shock (Richter and Flowers, 2010). More difficult yet is the lack of a functional health care system equipped to provide reproductive care, a lifeline for women of child-bearing age in disasters anywhere. In the six months after Katrina, among fifty-five young women (ages sixteen to twenty-four) who were using the services of a family-planning clinic in New Orleans, one-third found it difficult to practice their usual birth control method, and four out of five had not used birth control (Kissinger et al., 2007). When the rate of unintended pregnancies in the sample was extrapolated to the entire population of 2,500 clinic users, it emerged that as many as 100 unintended pregnancies might have occurred, to say nothing of the larger pool of sexually active women in areas hit by the Gulf Coast storms who simply could not be counted. Low-income Katrina survivors who depended upon diabetes clinics, maternal and infant care programs, and community clinics serving those living with HIV/AIDS or other chronic diseases lost whatever tenuous access to health care they had before the storm (Jones-DeWeever, 2008). Three years after the 2005 hurricane, just one of nineteen public health clinics were providing reproductive health care services (Monk, 2008, p. 56). Family-planning clinics operated by Planned Parenthood remained closed for months, some never to reopen. Especially in regions traditionally hostile to women’s abortion rights, clinics across the South struggled to meet women’s immediate needs for reproductive services, including abortion. Even before the storm, the counties in which 85 percent of Mississippi women reside offered no abortion services, and access became even more difficult after the storm (Bennett, 2005). Writing a striking editorial on the effects of hurricanes on pregnancy, physicians Pierre Buekens, Xu Xiong, and Emily Harville (2006, p. 91), began and ended with this plea: “Women gave birth in the squalor of the Superdome or in alleys while waiting for rescuers. . . . Among the displaced were at least 10,000 pregnant women. What will be the effects of the hurricane on their health and that of their babies? When it comes to pregnant women, the first priority of disaster relief agencies is to provide obstetrical and neonatal care.” Instead, few alternatives existed for poor and pregnant women in the region when the public hospital system in New Orleans was closed down. One new mother had to leave the state for the public care she needed: “When I felt the pains I just went to the women’s and children’s hospital,” said Noemi, an illegal immigrant from Oaxaca, Mexico, who had arrived in New Orleans right after the storm as part of a cleaning crew. “If they hadn’t received me, my girl would have been born in the hall” (Porter, 2006, p. 1).

Maternal and Fetal Health Global research indicates that women who are unable to eat well lack important vitamins, with demonstrable effects on fetal development, for example among

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newborns in Jamaica following Hurricane Gilbert of 1988 (Duff and Cooper, 1994). Despite concerns about unhealthy breast milk due to exposure to chemicals in floodwaters, the positive effects of breast milk are well known, especially in contrast to formula feeding when water and cleaning materials are scarce (Callaghan et al., 2007, p. 310; see also Richter and Flowers, 2010). This supports advocates who call for private breastfeeding spaces in shelters and temporary accommodations. It can only help: “Even under the worst conditions, breastfeeding mothers have the ability to safely nurture their infants. This ability is empowering and healing for women. Breastfeeding may be their only source of hope, even in the darkest days” (Heinig, 2005, p. 396). Spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) rates were elevated in the wake of a major New York flood in 1972 (Cordero, 1993) and babies born to New York mothers who were pregnant at the time of the 9/11 attacks came into the world smaller than others of their gestational age (Landrigan et al., 2008). Following Katrina, the rate of low-weight births was significantly higher than the US norm (Callaghan et al., 2007). The ratio of female to male live births also increased after 9/11, as it did following the massive 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, leading to speculation about how disasters and other stressors affect male fetal viability especially (Catalanol et al., 2005). The reproductive health of both men and women is clearly jeopardized by exposure to toxics, which is the concern that prompted multiple public health advisories directed toward pregnant women about avoiding areas in which chemical dispersants were used to clean the waters of the Gulf Coast following the 2010 BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Disaster-related stress also comes into play. Mothers’ stress levels increased after a prolonged ice storm in Canada, and seemed to negatively affect the cognitive and language development of the children carried to term (King and Leplant, 2005). Rates of premature labor may relate positively to heat stress (Lajinian et al., 1997), but contrary data from a larger Chicago sample call for caution (Porter, Thomas, and Whitman, 1999). A remarkable retrospective study conducted following Hurricane Andrew, which hit the US Southeast in 1992, found that exposed women gave birth at higher rates to infants with fetal distress, after controlling for such other factors as smoking, alcohol, diabetes, and hypertension (Zahran et al., 2010). Not surprisingly, the infants of black women more than white women carry this legacy of Hurricane Andrew. Because distressed infants demand more costly care (and may reduce maternal employment), the researchers call for prevention to reduce these hidden costs of disasters over the long term.

Understanding Women’s Physical and Mental Health in Disasters Like no other past disaster, the Gulf Coast storms of 2005 demonstrated the fiction behind the myth of US exceptionalism. In fact, we fare worse than other na-

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tions on many public health indicators—and low-income women and their children pay the price. The unhealthy living conditions of millions of US women in “normal” times were well known long before Hurricane Katrina. Lowincome women and women of color, already living with high rates of chronic disease and higher mortality rates than women elsewhere, grew sicker yet in the aftermath (Bennet, 2005; Monk, 2008). With a public health care system that was “decimated” (Monk, 2008, p. 55), the access of low-income mothers to public health care declined precipitously. Not just the hurricane, but also the contours of their everyday lives, hurt Gulf Coast women in predictable ways. Unhealthy residences compounded the problem. Asbestos and formaldehyde were found to have contaminated many of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailers women had waited months for, just as mold had produced the “sick house syndrome” along the Red River in North Dakota in 1997 (Fothergill, 2004, p. 117). Staying well is difficult when women have few options and so much falls to them. Uncertainties about birth control, unsafe housing, lack of health care, concern for their children, and the acute worries of women who are pregnant in a disaster all take a physical and emotional toll. Disaster researchers have long “agreed to disagree” on some topics, including disaster mental health (see Tierney, 2000). But anyone spending time with those who have lost their homes or jobs or family members cannot miss the strain in people’s voices. More stress symptoms were reported by women than by men following the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington (Shore, Tatum, and Vollmer, 1986), and following the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska (Palinkas et al., 1993). Women also reported stress symptoms more often than men after deliberately induced disasters such as the 9/11 attacks (Pulcino et al., 2003; see also Stuber, Resnick, and Galea, 2006, on contextual factors). A holistic approach to women’s mental health in catastrophic conditions is needed, one that reflects the silent catastrophes endured by women whose lives are distinctly shaped by the stigma and demoralization of gender violence, armed conflict, terrorism, internal displacement, and forced migration (Raphael, Taylor, and McAndrew, 2008). But sheer exposure to traumatic events does not explain why women are reportedly at increased risk of posttraumatic stress, for stress varies among women and men as a function of relative exposure (and susceptibility) as well as of the nature of the event. Are women simply more exposed to triggering events than men? Evidence to the contrary was compiled by David Tolin and Edna Foa (2006) in their metaanalysis of 200 studies. Except in the area of sexual assault and child sexual assault, these data indicated that women were not more exposed to the trauma related to armed conflict, disasters, accidents, fires, nonsexual assaults, and other triggers. The largest statistically significant sex difference was found in the subset of data related to disasters and fires, where women’s stress levels were nearly twice as high as men’s (p. 975). Considering the trauma of gender

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violence, Tolin and Foa found that women survivors were far more likely than men to meet posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) criteria and to report more severe PTSD symptoms (p. 977). Explaining Difference Why, if they are less exposed to trauma triggers, do women report more stress than men? Is this a generalizable or context-specific pattern? Many interrelated factors must be considered. Displacement, for instance, is obviously difficult for single mothers responsible for rebuilding homes and a stable family and work life; older women often speak of losing a sense of themselves when waters or fires strip away what they had built, made, or bought over the years. A major review of the literature based on case studies from US and global disasters (Norris et al., 2002) determined, counterintuitively, that being married is a risk factor for women, while somewhat more protective for men. This echoes Klinenberg’s observations about men during Chicago’s 1995 heat wave. Fearing the unknown effects of toxic contaminants on an unborn generation, women speak of feeling despoiled (see Tec, 2003, for the case of Hiroshima survivors). Arguably, but reflecting on very little data, the loss of children hits women especially hard, for instance the mothers of young adult children who were killed in the Bali bombings of 2002 (see Raphael, Taylor, and McAndrew, 2008, p. 17). Jane Ollenburger and Graham Tobin (1998, p. 106) concluded in their study of the psychosocial effects of stress after three US floods that “[o]lder women are also more likely to suffer from health and mobility limitations, increasing their disaster vulnerability. In addition divorced women are more likely to be heading households with two or more residents and women usually have custody of the children following a divorce.” Unlike many stress researchers, Mary Melick and James Logue (1985) used a control group to examine connections between age, gender, and postdisaster stress, comparing directly affected survivors and others (women older than sixty-five) following a Pennsylvania flood in an economically depressed region of the state. They found that stress levels were higher among senior women than senior men five years later, in both the control and the study sample; that is, even older women not themselves directly affected, but residing in the flooded region, found the event more stressful than their male peers. The responsibilities of parenthood are stressful in the best of times. Caregiving seems to increase disaster-related stress, as anyone who has not been able to feed a child or reach a grandfather in a crisis can attest. Female caregivers reported more symptoms of psychological disorders than did men in these roles (47 percent versus 38 percent) in a survey of 576 Mississippi residents a year after Katrina; women more than men (14 percent versus 11 percent) also reported having significant difficulty meeting everyday demands as parents (p. 31). These survey results flesh out the observations made by Lori

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Peek and Alice Fothergill (2008) after speaking with parents and guardians caring for children displaced by Katrina into shelters, trailers, the homes of friends and family, and other makeshift quarters (but see Hutton, 2004, on the lack of difference in stress levels between flood-affected Canadian mothers with and without young dependent children). One mother from a flooded-out rural community in Canada speaks for many: “He has an escape from this— his work. . . . It’s our poor daughter who gets the worst of it. . . . My temper with her now is worse. I didn’t expect for things to be lasting so long. . . . I even yelled at the baby the other day—now that’s real stress” (Enarson and Scanlon, 1999, p. 117). Other women are occupational emotional shock absorbers, such as a female firefighter who recalled, referring to the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks: “Guys will come into my office and cry to me who aren’t going in to the office and crying to my lieutenants. As women, I think we’ve got a big burden. The burden has always been on the women, because we’re in a fishbowl” (Hagen and Carouba 2002, p. 179). Similarly, significant gender differences were reported in a sample of 200 health care workers deployed to help earthquake survivors in San Francisco and Marin Counties after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake (Kaltreider, Gracie, and LeBreck, 1992). Compared with such other variables as age, location during the quake, work role, county of residence, and physical intensity of the quake experience, gender was found to be the most powerful predictor of how these health workers came to terms with the quake emotionally. The authors of the California study note that women health care professionals seemed surprised by the strength of their own negative feelings and the conflicts that arose between obligations to work and family. Comparing posttraumatic stress reported in Acapulco, Mexico, after Hurricane Pauline of 1997 with stress reported among African Americans in Miami after Hurricane Andrew of 1992, Fran Norris and her colleagues (2001) confirmed the significance of place, era, and culture. Cultural norms of dominant masculinity were found to be stronger in Mexico than in the United States (Miami), and hence stronger differences were evident between Mexican women’s and men’s feelings after the hurricane. Black women in Miami hit by Hurricane Andrew seemed to benefit from a culture that minimized sex difference and fostered more egalitarian relationships, relative to Mexico. In the oilsoiled Native communities of Alaska, in turn, Native Alaskan women’s historically high status was eroded when the Exxon Valdez oil spill degraded the environment that supported them and diminished the traditional interdependence of women and men (Palinkas et al., 1993). When the people had no time for gathering traditional foods or fishing, strongly knit social bonds between women and men began to fray. For some, the experience of disaster is simply too much to bear. In a random survey of over 360 Katrina survivors who were displaced into travel trailer parks in Louisiana and Mississippi (Larrance, Anastario, and Lawry, 2007),

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suicide attempt rates were higher than those reported at the national or state levels, in other internally displaced populations abroad, or among conflictaffected populations. “Women in general and in this surveyed population shared a disproportionate burden of depression, suicide attempts and suicidal ideation” (p. 598). Coping Strategies—Hers and His Because of their different experiences of disaster, men and women may need different kinds of mental health interventions. “Doing for others” is a survival strategy adopted by legions of US women to cope with these raw emotions. In a study of senior women in a Pennsylvania flood, women were found to be “no more anxious or depressed than non-flood respondents. In fact, flood respondents seem[ed] better off in some cases” (Melick and Logue, 1985, p. 34). In my own research, I often heard from older women that pitching in to help others helped them through difficult times (see also Spence, Lachlan, and Burke, 2007, on women’s greater use of prayer as a coping strategy in the Gulf Coast storms). A qualitative study of seventy-four older women interviewed six months after Katrina (Roberto et al., 2010, p. 995) also confirmed that “the ability to do emotional work allowed older women to maintain their sense of an independent self by caring for others.” Is women’s emotional engagement a pathway to resilience? In a rare study of women’s psychological resilience and the possible effects of pregnancy and recent childbirth, it is suggested that women are “less likely to be resilient than men, but more likely to experience posttraumatic growth” (Harville et al., 2010, p. 25). The great majority (75–90 percent) of the women surveyed reported positive post-Katrina experiences, such as making new friends or feeling more prepared for future disasters, which can help mitigate psychosocial effects that might lead to increased depression and PTSD. For men, socially rewarded coping strategies tied to masculinity can be highly damaging. Men seem more likely to turn to alcohol or drugs and may express strong feelings physically, as was found in communities hit hard by the Exxon Valdez oil spill (Palinkas et al., 1993). In a study of over 500 Native and non-Native Alaskan families in thirteen villages, researchers speculated that “loss of traditional male status” was a factor in men’s high suicide rates, which were highest in those aged fifteen to twenty-four (Palinkas et al., 1993, p. 3). In a very different context, after a 1976 canyon flood in Colorado that killed 140 tourists and residents trapped on a mountain road, it was found that reported alcohol consumption one year later was far higher among men than among women (46 percent versus 18 percent, in the case of hard liquor) (Miller, Turner, and Kimball, 1981, p. 113). Event-specific factors may further shape women’s and men’s emotional responses, as David Hutton (2004) found in a survey fol-

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lowing the Red River flood; the more confrontational or problem-solving approach preferred by men may have worked against them, given a relief system they found overly complex and inadequate. As the Red River flooded their home in Manitoba in 1997, a worried wife described her partner this way: “He lost weight, he wasn’t shaving. I at least could take some down time and take the kids out in the wagon. He would gobble down some food at noon and then go back to [flood] work. He started crying [when he saw the flooded house]. You wouldn’t know unless you’re from a small town” (Enarson and Scanlon, 1999, p. 116). A retired Canadian man in the same area recalled “raging like a bull” with anger because conflicts with neighbors during the flood recovery period were “destroying” his life (Enarson and Scanlon, 1999, p. 117). Few men speak so openly to researchers and few have been asked to. Silence is more typical, as in this account from a collegeeducated Native American woman in Grand Forks, North Dakota, regarding her husband (Enarson and Fordham, 2001, p. 49): “The first three or four months he stayed away. He was real distant and kind of did his own thing. . . . He said the most difficult thing for him was the fact that he is supposed to take care of his family and he had nowhere to bring that family.” A woman on the Grand Forks disaster outreach team, recalling her contacts in an affluent neighborhood, told me about an older wife and her husband after the Red River flooded their home: “We go down there and the guy got out of the car and he stopped at the end of the driveway and he sobbed and he sobbed. And she goes, ‘This is what he does every time. We can’t even talk. He’s a wreck and I have to hold everything together’” (Enarson, 1999b, p. 22). The same observations were also made by a North Dakota pastor I interviewed who reflected on women’s seemingly stronger support systems and hence their enhanced capacity to handle the high levels of emotional stress they were experiencing. Or is it that, by comparison, men’s traditional coping strategies served them poorly? Mental health services that serve women and men equally well are clearly needed.

Conclusion Disaster health planning is a women’s issue. As insurance companies understand very well, women need and strive to obtain health care services at rates higher than men, and seek help for their dependents and loved ones. They live long enough to become disabled and chronically ill, need natal care and reproductive health services to control fertility and protect sexual health, and are forced into urgent medical care through intimate partner abuse and sexual assault in much larger numbers than are men. But women also provide invaluable (nonmarket) emotional support and hands-on care to the ill and traumatized, in-

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fants and the frail elderly, those incapacitated by disability, and others in their circles of kin, friends, and neighbors. They know firsthand how hazardous living conditions and disasters hurt their own health and that of their families; they compose the majority of formal and informal health care providers, serving more women than men. What valuable partners they could be in emergency health care planning.

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former Catholic priest from Canada, disaster sociologist Samuel Henry Prince laid the foundation stone for a “gender neutral” approach. Describing a horrific wartime explosion that rocked the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917, taking 2,000 lives and the eyesight of thousands more, he wrote: “At first it was a very general consciousness which seemed to draw all together into a fellowship of suffering as victims of a common calamity. There was neither male nor female, just nor unjust, bound nor free” (Solnit, 2009, p. 80). In fact, the burden of proof in this book and chapter demonstrates how little in human life can be divorced from our bodies and cultures. Antisocial behavior is minimized in most disaster analysis, reflecting the pushback of experts against persistent myths about human behavior in crisis, our nonstop media regime that toggles between horror (“like a war zone”) and affirmation (“everyone pulling together”), and an almost perverse American will to walk on the sunny side. The selflessness, creativity, and imagination of women, men, and children in disasters are real. But disasters do not offer us a moment of earthly paradise (Solnit, 2009), and what they reveal is not always seen. Male-on-male violence in those incredible days of flooding and suffering during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans was replayed in endless looping media clips, seemingly driving decisions about how the National Guard and other relief resources would be deployed, while the murders of black men by armed white men were first denied and then very slowly opened to investigation (among others, see Solnit, 2009, pp. 240–266). Nor were many ready to hear what happened to women in the bathrooms of the Superdome, in the cars of strangers, and on the side streets of the city. But this violence was real (see Griffin and Woods, 2009, on resurgent poststorm structural violence targeting black women). When asked, women tell us more than we want to know about rape in disasters and the physical, mental, and 71

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emotional violence they endure at the hands of their intimate partners (for personal accounts, see Thornton and Voigt, 2007). As the simple facts are not well known, I summarize the evidence from recent US disasters, following a short discussion of the limitations of these data. The chapter concludes with observations about the implications of gender violence for women’s resilience to hazards and disasters in the United States.

Case Study Data: Patterns and Gaps In disaster research and theory, it is rarely possible to build causal chains linking events to specific social effects or changes over time, and the subfield of disasterrelated gender violence is no exception. Still, while crime reports tend to decline after disasters, domestic violence does not (Tucker, 2001). But data are inadequate for a full exploration. Documentation procedures are rarely in place in women’s antiviolence organizations, law enforcement agencies, or relief organizations to capture reports either in the immediate aftermath or during the months following. Most of the indicators used are indirect and suggestive, and of course only tap into the larger universe of unreported sexual violence. Confounding events also complicate analysis, such as the opening of a new domestic violence court in Miami just before Hurricane Andrew (Morrow, 1997, p. 158). It is difficult to ascertain whether the new court or the hurricane mattered more. In New Zealand, increased reporting of abuse in the major local shelter/ refuge following a major snow storm was closely examined by researchers (Houghton et al., 2010) in order to distinguish between increased reporting and increased violence following the storm. Among other important findings, they found that over half (57.2 percent) of women victims were reporting abuse for the first time, although two-thirds of them had endured abuse for between two and ten years prior. This helps distinguish between increased reports of violence triggered by a disaster from increased violence directly related to the disaster, a line of inquiry too little explored to date. Further, longitudinal data are rare, though in my survey of US and Canadian domestic violence programs impacted by and responding to natural and technological disasters (Enarson, 1999a), I learned that demand for services rose for as long as six or twelve months following a disaster in the thirteen most severely impacted agencies. Not surprisingly, even fewer data are available about gender-based violence experienced in disasters by boys and men, or by lesbians, gays, and queer and transgendered people. We also lack data on possible shifts in the kinds of sexual assaults experienced: for example, a possible increase in marital rape or in the severity of violence. Abuse of “increased lethality” was noted in Homer, Alaska, after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, while some reports from New Orleans suggested that rapes that occurred closer to the time of Hurricane Katrina were “more bru-

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tal, often involving multiple offenders” (Thornton and Voigt, 2007, p. 30). In Grand Forks, North Dakota, more direct referrals to the domestic violence shelter came from emergency rooms after the Red River flood, also suggesting a rise in severity of physical assaults (Enarson, 1999a). Although other factors were also in play, Frederick Buttell and Michelle Carney (2009) reported from New Orleans that interpersonal violence became more severe after the hurricane. Sexual assault and domestic abuse, as well as forced marriage and the threat of human trafficking, grabbed headlines after the Indian Ocean tsunami, Pakistan’s devastating slow-motion floods, and the earthquake that destroyed much of Haiti’s capital city. Faced with these facts on the ground, gender violence is increasingly taken up by international relief agencies and women’s groups. Although gender violence is frequently found to increase following disasters under conditions of poverty (see Buvini´c , 1999, on Hurricane Mitch in Central America), it is far from a function of poverty or underdevelopment. Writing of a major Australian flood in 1990, one responder wrote: “Human relations were laid bare and the strengths and weaknesses in relationships came more sharply into focus. Thus, socially isolated women became more isolated, domestic violence increased, and the core of relationships with family, friends and spouses were exposed” (Dobson, 1994, p. 11). In Canada, a Montreal urban police chief reported that 25 percent of the calls he received during the week of the severe ice storm in 1998 related to abuse (Picard, 1998). After the powerful explosions of Mount St. Helens in the American Northwest, researchers learned that domestic violence reports to law enforcement jumped by 46 percent (Adams and Adams, 1984; and for disaster abuse in New Zealand, see Houghton, 2009). Tracking violence against women was not a priority until recently, but when we ask and listen, much can be learned from past disasters that might protect women in future. The following sections introduce some of the cumulative lessons (to be) learned from these events. Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (1989) In addition to generalized reports of increased community and family conflict following the Exxon Valdez oil spill, sociologist Sharon Araji (1992) examined gender violence by surveying community leaders about their perceptions. Onequarter cited “increase in domestic violence,” higher than the number mentioning increased child neglect (4 percent) or elder abuse (4 percent). Asked directly whether spouse abuse increased after the spill, 64 percent agreed; they also reported increased child physical abuse (39 percent), child sexual abuse (31 percent), elder abuse (11 percent), and rape (21 percent). Absorbing these statistics in a largely indigenous community may reaffirm convenient stereotypes about Native Alaskans. Indeed, cultural norms of gender that are specific to this place and people would have shaped this response. But it is important to

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note that high rates of violence against women are not rooted in traditional society, in which indigenous women historically held high status, but rather in the postcolonial present. Loma Prieta Earthquake (1989) A report following this California earthquake was produced by the Commission for the Prevention of Violence Against Women (1989), noting that many antiviolence services were closed, disrupted, or damaged. A coordinator for a domestic violence and sexual assault education project recalled that her agency shifted to providing shelter and food, limiting its ability to reach out or respond to rape and battery survivors. A sexual assault team in Santa Cruz reported that such assaults rose after the quake by 300 percent (though thankfully the numbers were small), and an emergency operations center in the same city reported a 600 percent rise in domestic violence calls during the first four months after the quake. The local battered women’s shelter coped with a 50 percent increase in requests for temporary restraining orders, while the district attorney’s office reported a “very heavy” workload the first week after the quake and filed its first reported gang rape case (United Way of Santa Cruz County, 1990, p. 201). Regarding the gang rape, the pretrial-services program manager reported being pressured for the early release of the perpetrators by family members who claimed that their help was desperately needed in the aftermath of the quake. Advocates suggested that abusers used the event to pressure women to return to violent relationships. Hurricane Andrew (1992) The domestic violence shelter in Miami was damaged but functional after the hurricane, but clients, assuming the worst, stayed away at first. When Betty Morrow and I visited women in the shelter nearly a year later, we met young mothers with children in tow, women who had been beaten while living in tents during the postdisaster construction boom, professional women who had simply run out of alternatives—no one woman’s story of violence after the hurricane was the same. Spousal abuse calls to the local community helpline increased by 50 percent following Hurricane Andrew in Miami (Laudisio, 1993). In a countywide survey, more than one-third of a mixed-sex sample of 1,400 residents reported that someone in their home lost verbal or physical control in the two months following the hurricane, though no gender-based analysis was conducted (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1992). In a survey of domestic violence programs five years after the storm, shelter staff reported that demand for services remained high and that in-house emergency preparedness had increased as a result of the hurricane (Morrow and Enarson, 1996).

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Missouri River Flood (1993) As the flooded Missouri raced to join the Mississippi River, the average state turn-away rate at domestic violence shelters along the floodway in Missouri was 111 percent higher than in 1992; 400 percent more women and children than anticipated sought and found shelter from the antiviolence coalition (Constance and Coble, 1995). Working closely with the governor’s flood committee, the state coalition successfully tapped into existing federal grant monies designed to assist affected substance abuse programs in flooded areas. To make its case, the coalition worked with local programs to revise in-take forms and collect data from women on what connections, if any, they saw between the flood and the violence that had brought them to the antiviolence program later. The additional funds secured through the substance abuse stream helped meet the urgent housing needs of women and children hit first by violence and then by floodwaters. To my knowledge, this partnership was the first in the United States to proactively address domestic abuse and substance abuse as public health issues in a disaster. Unfortunately, funds for follow-up research were not included. Teasing apart the triggers of gender violence in disasters (substance abuse, psychosocial stress, economic strain) would be a major step toward violence prevention and disaster recovery. Red River Valley Floods in the Upper Midwest (1997) An unexpectedly high river crest forced the emergency evacuation of East Grand Forks, Minnesota, and its sister city Grand Forks, housing one-fifth of North Dakota’s population. The area experienced widespread flood losses as well as fire damage to downtown businesses, agencies, and low-income housing units. No provisions were in place for emergency evacuation of women and children housed in nearby motels because the existing shelter (later destroyed in the flood) was full, and staff lost contact with these families during the midnight evacuation crisis. The women’s crisis center was seriously damaged, and many staff and volunteers lost their homes. The center relocated to a series of temporary locations over the next eighteen months as the city made decisions about redevelopment and future diking, making it difficult for women at risk of violence to locate counselors and access safe spaces. Six months later, the crisis center was still struggling and staff faced a long drive to an out-of-area courthouse to process protection orders. Upriver in Fargo and in other rural communities along the river, other crisis programs reported similar problems working with newly displaced families moving into their area, out-of-town relief workers, and new referrals from disaster hotlines. Some programs lost funds when private fundraising events were canceled or curtailed due to sandbagging, evacuation, relocation, or recovery efforts, and when donors redirected funds.

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Again, service statistics tell the story (Enarson, 1999a; Fothergill, 1999a, 2004). Hit by floodwaters in late April 1997, the Grand Forks community violence intervention center reported that crisis calls rose by 21 percent; between July 1996 and July 1997, counseling of ongoing clients increased by 59 percent; in August 1997, 18 percent more protection orders were processed than during the same period a year earlier; during the period January–March 1998, following the flood, thirty-three protection orders were issued, compared to twenty protection orders issued prior to the flood during the same period in 1997. September 11, 2001, New York Though no public database exists, informal reports indicated that domestic violence services in lower Manhattan were severely disrupted after the 9/11 attacks, and service requests grew, prompting donations from Soroptimist International of the Americas (n.d.). In the immediate aftermath, however, domestic violence shelters emptied entirely. “Women just stopped calling our hot lines after the attacks,” explained director Kelly Otte, who added that the tug of family is always strong even when family is complicated and dangerous. “They’re already very vulnerable, and they may feel they need to be with somebody, no matter what, so maybe the violence of the relationships is not such a big deal compared with a huge national crisis” (Lewin, 2001). Abusers strive to control the physical mobility and social interactions of their partners and may manipulate the meaning of a disaster to reinforce their power. “The batterers will say this is a time when we need to be together as a family, you need to be here where I can protect you,” Kristina Matkins from SafeHouse Denver explained. “We had at least two women whose perps used the terror attacks as an excuse to coerce them back into the relationships” (Lewin, 2001). Gulf Coast Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (2005) Overall, both rape and abuse rose after Katrina. In Mississippi, these crime reports increased, from 4.6 per day to 16.3 per day one year later, before declining again to a still remarkable 10.1 per day in 2007 (Anastario, Shehab and Lawry, 2009). These population data complement more readily available service-based statistics on which most research on violence is based. Not surprisingly, Pam Jenkins and Brenda Phillips (2008a, 2008b) learned that crisis calls declined 72 percent (compared to the previous year) after floodwaters in Gentilly, Lakeview, and Eastern New Orleans washed away police buildings as well as homes, communication lines, and roadways. The resourcefulness of local shelters and advocates was sorely tested during this period as they sought to regroup and meet the needs of women in danger (Brown, Jenkins, and Wachtendorf, 2010; Brown, 2011). Positively, the New Orleans Police Department reported that “domestic violence did not get relegated to secondary status as a consequence of rising

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demand”; as well, researchers found that a higher proportion of calls led to arrests, after tracking four years of records (Buttell and Carney, 2009, p. 8). Lack of knowledge about the whereabouts of many thousands of registered sex offenders was also a concern on the Gulf Coast, although they constitute a very small part of the universe of perpetrators. With so many women displaced across state lines, a further barrier was lack of a national reporting system and unusual resistance to accept the “courtesy reports” of violence that are customary across state lines, enabling crossborder exchange of information about violent crime when victims and perpetrators are on the move. For the first time after a disaster, advocates did their own documentation of disaster-related sexual assault. In just six weeks, the computer registry implemented by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center and the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault took reports of fortytwo incidents of Katrina-related sexual assault in and outside New Orleans, forwarded electronically by mental health and crisis counselors, medical professionals, advocates, and sexual assault victims. The great majority (95 percent) involved rapes of persons directly affected by the hurricane; all were female, both young and old (20 percent were older than forty-five, 13 percent younger than fourteen); most were Anglo (44 percent), but a high proportion were African American (33 percent). The rapes had occurred in many places, including at evacuation sites (30 percent) or in hotels (23 percent), and most assailants were strangers (38.6 percent) or acquaintances (25 percent) rather than family members or partners (National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 2006). Contacted in their new “temporary” trailer park residences in Louisiana and Mississippi 274 days after the huge storms, women told researchers that rape and abuse had followed them. Ryan Larrance, Michael Anastario, and Lynn Lawry (2007) examined national Bureau of Justice statistics to estimate likely rates of reported assault and abuse. They were surprised to learn that these women had reported rape, since their displacement, at a rate three times what might be predicted on a population basis. Among the population of low-income women and women of color housed here, lifetime rates of interpersonal violence before the storms were high, as much as sixteen times higher than the national average, and the social events surrounding the hurricanes brought more of the same. In a related study of displaced women in trailer parks (Anastario, Larrance, and Lawry, 2008), it was found that nearly one in five (17.5 percent) had been subject to “sexual violence, such as molestation, being forced to undress or stripped of clothing, forced intercourse or other sexual acts, sexual experiences that were not desired, being pressured or paid with money or material goods in exchange for sex, forced sex by a spouse, or . . . violence, such as beatings, by a spouse” after the hurricane (p. 1439). Those most subject to postdisaster abuse were women of color, married women, and comparatively younger women (pp. 1439–1440). This is a remarkable finding, given that crowded camps and thinwalled trailers pierce the veil of violence “behind closed doors.”

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Further complicating a full understanding of gender violence in disasters is the long history of structural violence to which black men especially have been subjected, including economic exploitation, discriminatory policing, high arrest and imprisonment rates, and physical violence at the hands of law enforcement (among others, see Incite!, 2005; Ransby, 2006; Ross, 2005; Bergin, 2008). Familiar racial and class-based myths quickly surfaced when young white volunteers from outside the region came to work with the social action group Common Ground, activist scholar Rachel Luft observed (2008). When white women volunteers began to report sexual harassment and assault, the perpetrators were assumed to be local and black; in fact, seven of the eight assault reports identified the assailants as white men from outside the region. In this and other ways, the “disaster masculinity” Luft describes is a highly raced category. Critical white studies theorist and law professor Kathleen Bergin (2008, p. 4) argues that neither black nor white women are free to speak of violence: We will be blamed for mythologizing Black male carnality when we protest the rape of Black women. We will be accused of conspiring a divide and conquer strategy that pits Black men against Black women in the service of a white racist patriarchy. Most ferocious in assailing us will likely be the very same reporters, politicians, media analysts, and law enforcement officials who themselves shamelessly disparaged Black men through sensationalized violence after the storm.

Technological disasters have a different life history than those triggered by more benign (knowable) events seen as “natural” or environmental, but the theme of violence against women endures. With oil still gushing uncontrolled following the 2010 BP/Deepwater Horizon spill, the mayor of the small Alabama town of Bayou La Batre took the extraordinary step of uploading a YouTube video in which he cited a 320 percent increase in reported domestic violence. Other figures suggest a 110 percent increase (Stephenson, 2010; and see National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 2011, for rich narrative accounts). Fourteen of twenty antiviolence programs in Louisiana were found to be impacted by the BP/Deepwater Horizon spill, with reports indicating increased crisis calls following the spill; calls to the antiviolence program in the oil town of Lafayette increased 116 percent from March to May after the spill, and an overall increase in crisis calls of 81 percent was recorded in these first months (Meeks, 2010, for the Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence). Alarmingly, the Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence noted anecdotal evidence of increased severity in the abuse reported, coupled, paradoxically, with cutbacks in funding: “Most of these programs are heavily reliant on United Way funding. In one southern coastal area the local United Way reports that as much as 80 percent of its funding is reliant on the oil industry and they expect to lose half of that. Cuts have already been issued;

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one agency has already lost 13 percent of its funding in these cuts alone” (Meeks, 2010). Compounded by the lingering effects of the hurricanes, this new environmental and social assault on the community put women’s safety at increased risk once again.

But Why? Real and Imagined Explanations What is behind these numbers? The question cannot be answered in the abstract, without first listening to very different women who experience violence very differently. Consider “Karen,” “Liz,” and “Carol.” In an affluent neighborhood heavily damaged by flooding, Karen’s husband grew increasingly frustrated and angry as they struggled to rebuild the family home, and she experienced the first physical violence in their relationship of twenty years, an assault severe enough to necessitate a protection order. She explained: “He likes things ordered and when things are out of order he doesn’t like it. So the flood was a nightmare for him” (Fothergill, 2004, p. 160). In contrast, Liz was a lowincome mother and wife living with severe physical disabilities whose abuse in an already violent relationship escalated after the flood. Her physical disability, low income, and other factors kept her in the town where her abuser lived, making crisis intervention essential: “When he got back to town, I’d call [my crisis counselor] all the time. Boy, did I need them then. . . . Had the Center not been there, or my daughter, you know, I wouldn’t have made it” (p. 165). For Carol, who had moved to Miami from Chicago with her husband, a retired police officer, just before Hurricane Andrew hit, it was all about powerlessness (Enarson, 1999a, pp. 747, 749): He couldn’t take the pressure—being used to everything, and then coming down to no eating, because we could not find food. . . . And my husband, of course he wasn’t working because his business got destroyed. . . . And then he was beating me up, taking my money—there was just so much going on that I just couldn’t—he was really going berserk! I was getting beat up pretty bad. . . . I came [to the shelter] with one shoe, ended up going to the hospital, the emergency room. . . . He really went crazy. . . . [A]fter the hurricane it all got worse. . . . It was really rough for a female. I ran across a lot of women suffering too with their children—husbands beating them up and leaving them. It was pretty bad.

Disaster responders and planners are not called upon to address the root causes of gender violence, but it is important to refute wrong-headed ideas based on stereotyping or misinformation. The most significant of these is the notion that stress causes violence, and that both simply increase in disasters. A study of the potential effects of the Red River flood on 140 Grand Forks residents sought to untangle the relationship between disaster mental health symptoms and domestic violence, expecting to confirm the notion that anxiety,

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depression, and hostility lead men to domestic violence. But the researchers found this notion to be false: “Self-reported domestic violence by men increased after the flood, but a direct positive relationship between the emotional symptoms and domestic violence could not be established” (Clemens et al., 1999, p. 203). They noted that older men held values that supported both the use of physical force and control over their partners, and researchers identified older married men in marriages averaging twelve years as the subset of men most likely to abuse their partners. Income and degree of exposure were less powerful factors differentiating abusive from nonabusive men. As the researchers suggested, the study should be expanded to examine same-sex couples and such factors as education and substance abuse. For now, this stands as one of the very few studies of domestic violence in disasters that focuses on established relationships. Psychological distress and substance abuse may well correlate with domestic violence, but the causal link is far from established; this is also the case in disasters, where lack of research has limited our ability to learn about the root causes of gender violence in this context. Antiviolence advocates and subject experts point to deeply embedded gender ideologies countenancing male control over women and children as a root cause. Loss of control is a common concern, reported by women as well as men; feelings of inadequacy rooted in the male provider role are also common and potentially dangerous to women. Abusers may be threatened by new opportunities for women in relief and recovery initiatives, such as women’s collective organizing around disaster recovery, programs offering women funds for small businesses or skills training, or perhaps even relief funds sufficient for some to relocate to safer locations and situations. Ironically, when targeted services are felt to benefit women, international relief agencies report that some men respond with increased violence. When abuse or rape is understood as a preexisting condition (hence neither new nor significant in disasters), the significance of gender violence as a social problem is devalued and the scope of harm minimized. As noted earlier, women already living with violence are indeed subject to further violence after a disaster, though with what frequency we cannot yet say. Pamela Frasier and colleagues (2004) found that two in five women who recalled domestic abuse in the six months before Hurricane Floyd struck land in 1999 also reported abuse after the storm, indicating that violence is constant before and after disaster for a significant minority. Antiviolence advocates on the Gulf Coast saw more “professional, working ladies” calling or coming into shelters, and more women with children. “They’re new. After Katrina, they’re new. We don’t have the same people, we have people who had never heard of our program . . . people aren’t working, can’t pay rent. The population now is totally different. Most, they are so broken” (Jenkins and Phillips, 2008a, p. 61). The destruction left behind by earthquakes or explosions—more accurately, by the social worlds they occur in and our responses to them—disadvantage

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women as a social group more than men, especially women who are already isolated or disenfranchised. Disaster homelessness and overcrowding in damaged homes, reduced income, health problems, lack of transportation, disrupted social services, and other disaster effects impact women disproportionately, exacerbating preexisting power imbalances between women and men. The dense social networks of friendship and kinship sustaining women through crisis— and perhaps protecting vulnerable girls and their mothers—are frequently disrupted by emergency evacuation and subsequent relocation. This may also contribute to the increased stress reported by women after disasters, especially among those who have a history of suffering domestic violence (Frasier et al., 2004; see also Lewis et al., 2008, on domestic violence and cumulative stress in a sample of pregnant women after the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks). Women’s disempowerment and distress when disaster is coupled with abuse is further heightened by increased exposure to potentially dangerous living conditions: “We have families doubling and tripling up in substandard housing, families living with extended family members they wouldn’t normally choose to live with” (specialist Alisa Klein, quoted in Batchelor, 2006, n.p.). As Betty Morrow and I heard in the wake of Hurricane Andrew (Morrow and Enarson, 1996), overcrowding can put children as well as women at increased risk of sexual assault. Social support systems that formerly provided some degree of oversight and protection may unravel in the immediate aftermath of a flood, destructive earthquake, oil spill, or gas explosion as people relocate and connections to family, coworkers, and friends become difficult to maintain. New conditions and problems confronted by women may also undermine their capacity for self-protection, for instance when only their abuser’s father’s home still stands. As much as a woman might wish to keep her distance, she and her children need help. A Katrina survivor explains: “I had no roof over my head, no place to live, so I put up with it for nine months. I left for a few days because of physical and verbal abuse, would go to friend’s house or to ex-husband’s house where my children live, saw it was upsetting the children. I made a choice that I was going to leave for good after too many times going back” (Jenkins and Phillips, 2008a, p. 56). It is vital that our social support systems for women who are pulling out of violent relationships be “hardened” against the known effects of natural, technological, or deliberate disasters. The physical effects of disasters to infrastructure certainly limit reporting, while leaving women more vulnerable to gender-based violence. When Hurricane Iniki hit Kauai in 1992, for example, local authorities responded to domestic violence by issuing offenders citations only, as the jail was not functional (Enarson, 1999a). At what risk to women? A mudslide, blizzard, or other extreme weather event can isolate women at home in unsafe environments without working telephones or accessible roads, increasing their exposure to violence. These events can coerce women back into a violent relationship because either they or their abuser need emergency living space, help making

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home repairs or responding to children’s needs, or assistance securing disaster relief services. Male-dominated relief systems may increase abusers’ leverage over women, as men more often control the resources needed to find or repair housing, restore livelihoods and jobs, replace goods, or relocate if necessary. An additional factor is sheer proximity; disasters can force individuals into closer quarters, which can endanger the safety of girls and boys, or force estranged partners to return home. Finally, out-of-town disaster volunteers may be less able to protect themselves from assault or abuse in an unfamiliar environment.

The Amplification of Vulnerability Living with the “daily disaster” of domestic violence puts women at special risk before, during, and after disaster. In the vicious dynamic of power and control, theirs is a world of increasingly narrow social networks, isolation, and financial dependence. Like their physical and emotional health, women’s sense of self-worth and efficacy diminishes in the face of continued violence. The trauma of the event and the struggle to survive, lack of information, the loss of home and possessions, evacuation, displacement into temporary accommodations, relocation into new or repaired housing, unemployment, the closure of schools, loss of child care, and disrupted social networks—this “new normal” enormously complicates the lives of women already in crisis or under great stress due to violence and the threat of violence. Many get through it alone but a flood or earthquake can also coerce women back into a violent relationship. Lack of child care, employment, and affordable housing—or simply a woman’s need for help in making residences habitable again for children—may force a return to the abusive home they had just managed to leave. After Katrina, one woman’s attorney advised her that the divorce she sought could not go through because she and her abusive husband were living in the same apartment; he had managed to learn where she had evacuated to and moved into the apartment, claiming that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) voucher she had filed included himself (Jenkins and Phillips, 2008a, p. 57). Despite having two open court cases against him in New Orleans, he was able to control their living conditions, as before the hurricane, leaving her in an untenable situation. Child custody can be a further barrier to women’s recovery. If noncustodial parents (male or female) flee across state lines with children to ride out the (metaphorical) storm, they can be extremely difficult to locate. Jenkins and Phillips (2008a, p. 56) cite this issue as a lingering effect of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita: “If it was the noncustodial parent’s weekend, the children often evacuated with them. Because of the length of the evacuation, some custodians, primarily mothers, are still fighting (more than two years later) to retrieve children

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back from the noncustodial parent.” Certainly, lack of access to courts, police, shelters and transition homes, counselors, crisis lines, and other services (where these exist) makes abuse more difficult to report and hence redress, counseling and protection more difficult to obtain. Evacuation is more difficult for anyone without the freedom to act or access transportation; for battered women, evacuation may be impossible. And, as I was reminded by an advocate, the designated emergency shelters serving the general public may not protect them in any event: “[The abusers] are just going to put two and two together and say okay, well where is she going to go?” (Enarson, 1999a, p. 20). Another advocate described a woman previously in a shelter in New Orleans who was able to leave in her own car and drive until she ran out of gas: There she was taken in by a local domestic violence shelter, but every day she would go to the town center and hide behind a tree to see who was getting off buses bringing evacuees to the town. She and others like her feared their abusers might end up in the same place. To keep abusers from finding them, victims of domestic violence often go to elaborate lengths to keep even the most basic contact information out of databases associated with voting records, supermarket club cards and change of address forms. Those fleeing Katrina, however, faced a more pressing conundrum due to mandatory forms at the FEMA and Red Cross centers. Domestic violence victims had to choose: “Do I receive FEMA and Red Cross assistance and get the cash I desperately need, or do I make sure I stay hidden in a shelter and keep my family safe?” (Cindy Southwork, quoted in Singel 2006)

Gender-based violence also becomes part of the disaster experience for women by increasing the likelihood of poor mental health outcomes. A successful journalist and editor of Women’s E-News recalled how forcefully her experience years earlier, as a young battered wife, came back to her when the World Trade Center was attacked (Jensen, 2002). First the terror of September 11, and then the anthrax threats and a horrific airplane crash over her beleaguered city—it all took a toll. For months she handled it, until she could not. Falling into the same “emotional ditch” of past years, she fell into deep depression and contemplated suicide. As one shelter worker noted, support systems are greatly needed, however fragile they may be in disasters: “So many victims of battery have been isolated from the normal networks of support— family, job, things like that. . . . Now here’s this person that’s holding on, just barely holding on—the disaster hits. It’s not just them, but everybody around them, they scatter. The little bit of support that’s been helping that victim hold it together is gone. . . . I mean, it just mushrooms, the stress level of that victim” (Enarson, 1999a, p. 75). Lack of housing, transportation, money, family support, self-confidence—all of these may have kept many women at home when their safety lay elsewhere. These same factors make self-help and full recovery all the more difficult and undermine any semblance of resilience to fu-

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ture hazards and disasters. But researchers also hear from women who see the door wide open and walk right out. They take the relief money they receive and buy a bus ticket out of town, or simply determine: “That was my old life leaving. All the abuse left with the water” (Fothergill, 1999a, p. 94). How women use these precious “windows of opportunity” to protect themselves and their children is unknown, but few are likely to let them pass altogether. Women who wake up each day in fear, yet carry on, are creative crisis managers with a strong will to survive that stands them in good stead, along with the “go bags” they may have pre-packed for the day they can leave a violent home. Their lives and safety are, or should be, life and safety concerns for emergency management, too, and proactive emergency health planning should reflect this. Speaking with Katrina survivors in mind, feminist sociologists Pam Jenkins and Brenda Phillips (2008a, p. 50) urge attention: “Theoretically and in praxis the experiences of battered women in this catastrophe seem to us much like canaries in a mine—predicting future conditions for other women in the next disaster.” Communities that underinvest (or disinvest) in safety systems indirectly afford new opportunity for abuse and assault; gender violence is more likely than ever to go unreported, uninvestigated, and unprosecuted after a disaster. On this point, a comparative analysis of disaster-affected communities is instructive. A qualitative study (Wilson, Phillips, and Neal, 1998) compared three communities in California, Florida, and Texas, each affected by a natural disaster, in terms of their relative awareness of, and response to, gender violence. The researchers found that when community, antiviolence, and disaster organizations are aware of the existence and extent of violence before a disaster, they tend to be more sensitive to its presence following that disaster. From this perspective, violence against women in disasters can be reduced by planning ahead to anticipate the possibility of gender violence, help advocates strengthen their capacity to cope with it, and put systems in place to provide continued law enforcement—in effect, by building communities that convey a powerful message to potential assailants that they will not “get a pass” in the wake of a disaster. The US antiviolence women’s movement has a growing interest in disaster (Klein, 2008; West, 2006), including service continuity, practical protection, custody, and women’s rights. Understanding the need for mitigating gender violence in crises, antiviolence networks have sought training on disaster-related abuse and developed practical materials for grassroots organizations working in this area (see resources on the website of the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence, www.ncdsv.org/publications_hurricankatrina.html). In Canada, women’s organizing around personal safety in disasters is well advanced, inspired by a report about gender violence and service impacts in the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in northern California (Porteous, 1998). However, while the provincial government of British Columbia learned from US ex-

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perience and supported both the conference and the preparedness guidelines, the US government did not step up to the challenge of building disaster-resilient shelters or programs that might keep American women and girls safer after future disasters (Enarson, 2009f).

Conclusion Violence against women in disasters is a neglected risk warranting far more attention from public health officials planning for emergencies and from disaster managers. Students of disaster and emergency managers have been slow to take violence against women seriously, but new partnerships are emerging that bring the government’s justice system, antiviolence and women’s health specialists, and emergency management experts together. Women’s hard-won experiences must be documented and used, both to raise public awareness to put into place systems, structures, and values demonstrating that US disaster policy protects people’s fundamental rights, including women’s right to live without domestic abuse or sexual assault.

7 Intimacy and Family Life

T

he United States still has a rich family tradition, though “family” is a social production never fully realized. We are first and foremost fathers and sons, daughters and mothers, lovers and ex-lovers, all sharing the social spaces in which we learn what it is to be “manly” or “womanly” in a crisis. These relationships are the locus for key disaster decisions and actions. Students of disaster have also long recognized kinship relations as a strong predictor of evacuation and emergency help for stricken families (Drabek and Boggs, 1968; Bolin, 1982). Family heads make critical decisions that affect how the events and feelings surrounding an explosion or drought or eruption are experienced by the young and old, within the household and in the web of family connections that stretch across the nation and beyond. People’s capacity to cope is understandably lessened when families are forcibly separated or their reunification is delayed, a lesson well learned by the Red Cross in global and national disasters. There is a lot to lose when women’s (or men’s) networks of good friends are disrupted. Following the 1991 fires in Berkeley and Oakland, California, anthropologist Susanna Hoffman (1998, p. 59) observed that “the disintegration of friendships more severely crushed women,” because women, “as part of our domesticity, act as the social connectors. We are, to a large extent, the ‘linesmen’ of our ties and the ‘bondsmen’ of our everyday social circles. We form and maintain the family’s intimate network.” Friends and family matter in crises, and knowing about them matters in disaster management. Understanding the characteristics of family life in the community at hand, or at least the size and structure of households, is essential for emergency planners who want to know where high numbers of seniors living alone can be found, or persons with disabilities, low-income single parents, or children in specialized care facilities acting in the place of the parent in an emergency. Further, emergency assistance is distributed to individuals through the household, and information about pre87

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vention and assistance also targets people in the context of their homes, with family members sharing information and coming to collective judgments about its reliability and significance before electing to act (or not) as a family unit. The “his” and “hers” of family life in US disasters is not yet elaborated in disaster research, but exemplary models exist. When Kai Erikson (1976) set out to trace the personal and collective meanings of a horrific dam collapse in West Virginia, he began with an account of the people and what family and kin meant to them. His gendered portrait of the “men of the mountains,” and the contrasting values and labor of Appalachian women, put the gendered family at the center of this study of loss. He did much the same (Erikson, 1994) when examining community and trauma with respect to the “new species of trouble” arising from technological and other hazards, again identifying the gender of those who speak and telling the story in an embodied way. Happily, gender is gaining more attention from contemporary researchers, though the field as a whole still best reflects the normative family of the US middle class. Far too little is known by disaster scholars about same-sex, transnational, child-headed, or even blended families in crisis. Despite the ideology of family solidarity in crisis, learning about disasters through a gender lens brings conflict as well as cooperation to the forefront. I focus in this chapter on parameters of difference that divide and alienate women and men in relationships—heterosexual couples, given the bias in our database. The discussion then moves to how women’s domestic labor changes through a disaster. Finally, I offer some guarded comments about disaster fathering and other gaps in thinking and research in disaster family studies.

Divisions and Strains A study of ten Grand Forks couples during the Red River flood (Davis and Ender, 1999) found that flooding strengthened bonds between women and men who had enjoyed stronger, more egalitarian relationships before the event, and further weakened less strong marriages. My colleague Joe Scanlon and I investigated couples in Canada affected by this same flood event. These were stable marriages of long duration that had brought wives and husbands through miscarriage, major illness, unemployment, bereavement, and other difficult times. The couples shared a general flood history and local flood subculture, incurred economic losses as an economic unit, and undertook substantial cooperative disaster work. Overall, we found that new marriages were tested and strengthened; new bridges were built between children and parents; and common ground was found with relatives and neighbors. For some, it was a pivotal moment of selfknowledge: “I have a lot more strength than I thought I did. . . . I come from a family with strong women bonds. The women in my family have been through

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a lot—my mom’s divorce, my sister was in an abusive relationship. They came out of them—I know it’s in me, too” (Enarson and Scanlon, 1999, p. 116). The cross-currents of mutuality and conflict found in disaster research reflect the contradictions and complexities of intimate life as well as power relationships shaped by gender and age (Bolin, Jackson, and Crist, 1998; Kabeer, 1994). Alice Fothergill (2004, pp. 138–143) found in her research on Grand Forks that flood-affected couples stayed together more often than not, but had to work their way through new conflicts and other, long-simmering divisions that only became more evident (see also Morris-Oswald and Simonovic, 1997, for the case of Canadian couples across the border). Many factors explain the new levels of division and strain women so often express to outside interviewers. The sheer enormity of what is at stake and the many decisions to be made provoke conflict behind closed doors. Women change and so do men: “There is something different about each of us individually. He is a new kind of mad. He has this anger in him that I have never seen before” (Davis and Ender, 1999, p. 186). Her husband agreed: “She is not near as mad as I am. . . . I can now be one mean son-of-a-bitch. I was never like this before.” Women’s priorities may diverge from those of their partners. A young francophone wife in Manitoba considered her husband’s unilateral decision to relocate the family to an area closer to his own workplace to be “still under discussion.” Without a driver’s license, the move left her more isolated from her parents and friends and unable to access the French-language resources she had enjoyed in the local library. Drawing on his economic power in the family (“I work, I hunt, she’s a homemaker—that’s it”), the husband explained: “You can’t live on handouts. There wasn’t much choice. She didn’t want to leave, but I pay the bills. There was no choice.” Making flood decisions together was also an “eye-opener” for this young wife as the couple faced the Red River flood: “It wasn’t a big deal before the flood. If conflicts never got fixed they would just go away. It’s his way and that’s it. It wasn’t a big deal before the flood. Now it is” (Enarson and Scanlon, 1999, p. 115). Emotional distance between partners grows in more subtle ways due to different aptitudes, skills, or tolerance for risk. Sociologist Glinda Crawford (1997, p. 15) wrote movingly of this in her striking personal journal “Moving to Higher Ground: Seeking Wisdom from Earth, River, and Critters in the Wake of the 1997 Flood,” in which she described the disconnect with her husband of many years: “When the women showed this concern (to buy flood insurance, to move things upstairs), their significant others (or men, significant in their lives) in many cases discounted their turbulence, little was done, and much was lost. . . . I didn’t force him to help me, but I missed his companionship when I felt our home was at stake.” As Erikson (1976) observed (asking a question rarely asked), sexual estrangement can pull couples further apart. Wives in Appalachia speaking of how

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the dam-break and flood changed their lives described feeling “unable to be a whole woman and wife to my husband for the longest time” (p. 221). Some spoke of infidelity, while for others just the light of love went out. “My marriage?” one woman asked, “It’s just like a job” (p. 219). Conflict may arise more often (or more visibly, an important distinction awaiting more research) in fishing, mining, or ranching towns, given the bright light that shines there on men’s loss of employment. The “creeping” disaster following a livestock epidemic—the social impacts of “mad cow” disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy—is a case in point. Researcher Simone Reinsch (2009), interviewing hard-hit farming towns in rural Manitoba, provided women with prepaid cameras and asked them to capture images of their new reality after the bottom fell out of the US cattle market. The women sent Reinsch photos of cases of beer piled high, men sitting idle at midday, plastic sheeting covering gaping holes in a barely functional bathroom, and (capturing a compelling image of competing priorities) the image of a well-groomed and well-fed prized heifer. Cultural and gendered expectations of “the farmer’s wife” made life that much more difficult, Reinsch learned: “Ideologically, a ‘good farm woman’ should ‘be extremely supportive of her husband, never say a bad word about him, like, you know he’s just a wonderful guy and we’re gonna do what he wants to do’” (p. 156). The disproportionate economic power of most men in most relationships leaves the art of compromise more to women than to men. In a far-distant coastal town reeling from the untold effects of the massive 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, women and men were forced to leave beloved land and ways of life, but for very different reasons, researcher Liesel Ritchie (2004) found. One resident in Cordova, Alaska, explained: “The area itself is very peaceful for the soul. But, because it is so painful for their men to have to try and live here, the men want to leave. They feel like they’ve failed” (p. 434). Conflict can readily spiral when women must earn income to support the family. As one husband confided: “You probably drink a little bit more, become a little more bitter, become a little more pissed off, become a little more prone to be violent” (p. 347). Men’s working identities can be so closely tied to self-worth that alternatives become difficult to imagine, as a fisherman’s wife explained: “[I]f you are a fisherman, you are a fisherman. . . . You are not a carpenter. You are not a cashier. You are a fisherman” (p. 344). Ritchie’s interviews in economically stressed households also reveal tension around the renegotiation of gendered roles concerning family work and income-producing work, as articulated by this husband and fisherman: “[Maybe] your wife [is] at work so therefore she can’t help as much with your fishing industry job as you need her to. Then there’s a conflict of, ‘I need you to help me to put this net on the boat.’ She’d say, ‘No, I can’t. I’m at work.’ [He’d say], ‘Who’s gonna pick up the kids?’ [She’d say], ‘I’m at work. You have to go.’ [Then he’d say], ‘No, I’m fishing, I can’t do it’” (p. 339).

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Alice Fothergill (2004) develops a gender analysis of the “stigma of charity” felt particularly by women, given the disparagement of those dependent upon government support. When they must seek help from their government or private relief agencies, equal benefits for women and for men are not ensured. While Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) policy no longer overtly privileges a presumptive “household head,” the first person to seek help on behalf of a particular address becomes the one and only recipient, and men are generally more mobile than women. Some estranged fathers and partners also seek out assistance first. Describing a dynamic common to many partners in an intimate relationship, Felice Batlan (2008) writes of an older male acquaintance, with whom she lived and shared so much in the days and months after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Like many, he had resisted asking the government for help on its terms—experiencing the supplication and endless waiting as feminizing, if not emasculating. This made pitching in at home all the more difficult for him, which resulted in the two friends bickering more and more about domestic chores. As she is white and he black, in their case she felt that differing race and class trajectories of recovery exacerbated their conflict: “[He] had lost his own identity and perhaps feared emasculation and impoverishment. In contrast, I had regained a professional identity and had somewhere to go and something to do during the day that made me feel empowered, if only to a certain degree. As I was regaining a modicum of control over my life, he had little control over his own. Perhaps one of his only ways of enacting masculinity was to ask me to perform the traditional role of a woman” (Batlan, 2008, p. 176). Notwithstanding the much-needed material aid offered by family and kin, family ties in disasters can also be burdensome, creating new and unwishedfor dependencies. Hoffman (1998, p. 59) wrote on this dependency dynamic as it played out in the aftermath of the massive fires in Berkeley and Oakland, which brought in-laws and distant relatives with unbidden gifts and goods presented woman-to-woman: Not all kinship relations went smoothly. . . . Onus often tags along with aid, and troublesome aspects of kinship ties that many survivors, both men and women, had disengaged from, like the ubiquitous Cat in the Hat, came back. . . . The paraphernalia that arrived was sometimes battered, sometimes not, yet women could neither refuse items nor throw away what they had received, since kindred brought them. In consequence, women could not control the accoutrements or the aesthetics of their living environment.

The dynamics of adult mother-daughter relationships can also intensify, as Megan Reid (2011) found in her conversations with low-income African American single mothers displaced to Houston after the Gulf Coast storms of 2005. In part, this was simply because of undesired dependencies, including grown

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women’s dependencies on their grown daughters for help with the basics— securing housing, accessing legal and social services, even finding sufficient food. Disasters may tip nonfunctional relationships toward divorce, as they did in Miami following Hurricane Andrew of 1992. Morrow (1997, p. 157) found that divorce increased by 30 percent within two months after the storm. But as Morrow also notes, divorce rates commonly fluctuate following disasters and are difficult to tie empirically to just one event (p. 144). Male desertion is another disaster reality, as partners leave the area in search of work and fail to return, or claim disaster relief funds intended for households and use these to relocate. International humanitarian relief organizations elect to distribute assistance to women first for just this reason, most recently the World Food Programme in the wake of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. It was much the same in Miami after Hurricane Andrew, according to a social worker whom Betty Morrow and I interviewed: “There is conflict, more conflict. The woman gets the money. It’s to replace her furniture, but he says ‘No, it’s our money. Give it to me.’ And he takes it any way he can” (Enarson and Morrow, 1997, p. 131). Disasters rarely make or break the bonds we build, but with them come travails that profoundly strain or stretch these bonds. In the United States, with a divorce rate far exceeding that of many nations, many couples are well outside the warm glow of the supportive family network that is the imagined center of gravity in our national disaster relief system.

Women’s Domestic Labor and Care Work Inasmuch as domesticity has historically defined “true womanhood,” a strong centrifugal force pulls women toward care work and the home, whether they resist or embrace it. Housework and child care remain substantially the work of women in the United States, along with personal care for other family dependents; women also compose the majority of those employed in caregiving professions and jobs, and the mainstay of the volunteer labor force as well. Often cast in the negative (obligations, work, tasks, chores), freely chosen care work and domestic labor can bring fulfillment even (or especially) in times of crisis. Some women take pleasure in care work following disasters—sandbagging rivers and other outdoor labor, cooking for their appreciative adult children again, or simply using their bodies in different ways. But the “labor of love” is not always freely chosen. There is a powerful observation about disaster and gender from South Asia that may apply to the United States as well: “Their men may have lost the fishing equipment necessary to earn a living, their children may have died, and their homes and belongings were washed away but at the end of each day it was the wife/mother who had to cook for whoever survived in her family” (Bari, 1992, p. 58). Feed-

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ing, hugging, clothing, healing, loving—these are not at the margins but at the heart of disaster survival and recovery, falling more to women just as physical labor outside the home falls more to men. Never Done: Why Women’s Family Work Expands Disaster movies or documentaries cannot begin to convey “life after.” It is hard to exaggerate the smell, the sense of contamination, the sheer exhaustion, and the unrelenting work of it all; even as I write, memories of my own home after Hurricane Andrew come sweeping back as I knew it through months of repair work after the water and wind hit, trees fell, and Miami mold set in. Family work continues but is more difficult and time-consuming with fewer prepared foods, limited or no access to shops and necessary goods, and poorly functioning or nonexistent kitchen and laundry spaces or appliances—all compounded by the presence of more and more people with new needs and feelings. Among the poor in the United States, as in developing countries, families double or triple up when accommodation, food, and money are scarce. Some households increase in size even though they may still be under repair or barely habitable. “In a way it’s nice, but it’s a lot of work,” one mother conceded. With serious physical limitations of her own, this mother felt the burden heavily, adding: “I’ve got an added two adults. Big hungry adults with dirty clothes and messy. . . . I’ve got so much to worry about now that I really don’t need them to worry about too” (Enarson and Scanlon, 1999, p. 114). In addition to paid jobs, the everyday chores that sustain family life are more complex and demanding during disaster: mothers boil and sterilize water for infants; children lack safe play space and need careful supervision in construction areas; laundry is hung outdoors to dry as repairs to the family home or apartment drag on and on. The movement of families in and out of trailers, rental units, friends’ homes, and partially rebuilt houses calls for constant coordination and supervision. Kin work such as marriage celebrations, home visits to older relatives, and care for the ill continues during cleanup and rebuilding, more difficult surely but all the more important. While some affluent couples may employ other women to help out, in most of the cases in the literature to date it is wives and daughters who are primarily responsible. Like the long hours of cleaning, time required of women (and men as well) in visiting store after store to replace missing or damaged clothing, furniture, and household goods pushes other activities aside. Resentment of disaster-affected families who receive monies for replacement goods is common. The consumption work this entails falls mainly to women, and especially to those who care for the very young and very old. Women’s domestic labor also expands when couples are separated. The postdisaster increase in households maintained entirely by women is well documented internationally (e.g., see Buvini´c , 1999, on Hurricane Mitch; and

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Wiest, 1998, on Bangladesh). In the United States, too, women do more domestic work than men, with less support. Children generally evacuate with their mothers and remain with them until the family residence (new or repaired) is ready for them, and women maintain domestic order while their partners serve as disaster volunteers or pick up reconstruction work in distant cities. Women’s family care certainly expands when the commercial services they may have utilized are destroyed or under repair, including the long-term care facilities, home health programs, adult and family day care homes, child care centers, and after-school programs that constitute the fragile US support system for dependents. Girls, too, are drawn into more domestic labor during and following disasters, just as they are in poor countries, where girls’ work at home is more essential than their education and disaster expenses consume any money that may be set aside for school fees. Observers noted this in a shelter following Hurricane Katrina, especially among poor mothers, whose daughters were “acting like mothers, making sure baby has the appropriate clothes on so they’re not too hot or not too cold, feeding the baby for Mom, stuff like that” (Peek and Fothergill, 2008, p. 80). As researchers note, we still know too little about the resilience and vulnerabilities of girls and boys in disasters. Middle-aged women in the “sandwich generation” are pushed from all sides, caring for young and old while striving to maintain their own emotional equilibrium and health, get back to their paid jobs, and perhaps maintain some kind of long-distance relationship with a partner who has temporarily relocated. I found in North Dakota (Enarson, 2001) that when relatives were lodged many miles away, daughters and daughters-in-law drove long distances to visit them; when needy elderly parents moved in, they used wood-burning heat and camp stoves to meet basic needs; when toddlers needed toilets, they guided them across debris piles to portable toilets placed along deserted streets. Certainly, not all the women were as resilient as the following middle-aged woman, who amazed the disaster outreach worker who met her: “One lady . . . her mother was dying of cancer, her sister was dying of cancer, and she had kids, she had a house, they had a flooded basement. Her husband wasn’t living there because he had to work someplace else. . . . And she was just strong, and going here at two, going there at four, got to be here at six, got to be home at this time because the kids are going to be home, gotta cook dinner. . . . I mean, she had everything going” (Enarson, 2001, p. 7). Women’s Emotion Work in Crisis Like their wives, employed men take on an exhausting “double day” during disasters, particularly if both their homes and their workplaces have been affected, such as by flood; relocation means long hours removing debris, tending to livestock, making repairs, and negotiating with contractors. But managing the emotions of loss falls more to women. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1983) and

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others have analyzed the “emotion work” embedded in many female- or maletyped occupations, calling on employees to manage or suppress their own feelings while projecting the emotional state expected by employers and clients, patients, and customers. The emotion work of women in disasters is similar, perhaps more so among senior women than others due to their dense social networks and greater dependence upon social support as widows (see Roberto et al., 2010, for the case of senior women’s emotion work with family members after Katrina). The need for emotional control is a common refrain in first-person accounts by women who hold traditionally male occupations, for example the women firefighters, police officers, and others on the scene at the Twin Towers on 9/11 (Hagen and Carouba, 2002). Even as they struggle to set their own houses in order and regain their own emotional equilibrium, a great many women spend their days responding emotionally to the disaster-stricken through the “people professions” of social work, counseling, education, health, and recreation, or become informal “over the counter” disaster counselors through other professions. Thinking of the African American family profiled in her film Still Waiting: Life After Katrina, Kate Browne (2008, p. 198) describes women as “the center beams that hold up a home.” This powerful metaphor signifies the centrality of women, their strength and dependability, and perhaps their emotional self-control in the service of others. It falls on women to suppress negativity (fear, uncertainty, foreboding, anger, helplessness) and convey the positive and enabling spirit that they are so strongly identified with. This means women in disasters keep a lot inside: “I wish I had more family or friends here. . . . Every day I begin knowing that it’s going to be a struggle and I just feel as though I’m wrecked, like I can’t go on, can’t keep doing this all by myself. . . . ’Course, the future is just as scary as the past. . . . I’ll do everything I can to keep my family afloat, but I can’t make anyone any promises. . . . I can’t put the sadness that makes me feel into words” (Terzieff, 2006a). The material labor of emergency preparedness, response, and recovery is more acclaimed and transparent, but the emotion work enabling it is vital. Women manage tense interpersonal relationships with children, partners, and parents while also helping to cover windows or move possessions or pets to safety, and yet again when settling in to new and overcrowded lodgings in hotels, trailers, or the homes of strangers or kin. This emotional work is an important dimension of the evacuation experience, a subject explored further in Chapter 8. The “kin keeping” labor that women contribute every day in families in the United States stands them in good stead in disasters and serves their families well. The fun may go out of care work—baking a birthday cake in a home still undone by wind and water becomes a chore—but the bonds of family that women knit bring people through the crisis and into the future. This emotional substructure of family life is largely of women’s making, a proposition sup-

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ported by survivor research on Japanese prison camps (Clason, 1983). In an account reminiscent of emergency shelters in the United States, where small spaces are converted to private family zones (Yelvington, 1997), Christine Clason describes how women in prisoner-of-war camps during World War II converted whatever was at hand into furniture and decoration, celebrated birthdays and festivals, used scraps of materials to create toys and small gifts, and generally adopted practical strategies for maintaining life. They seemed “able to get emotionally aroused by the plight of their neighbors or newcomers and to take action about it” (p. 61). These emotional impulses and life-giving interactional skills were, Clason suggests, less available to men due to their upbringing. As a result, in men’s prison camps, boys suffered under their care. Clason found no evidence of “large-scale ‘parental’ activity on men’s part that could have provided [the boys] with more resilience as a defence against camp life” (p. 59). Overall, men’s death rates were as much as twice those of women (Clason, 1983, p. 54), although men received more food and had fewer children with whom to share food. Women seemed less resigned to their fate than men did: “When the elderly couples were separated, for example, the condition of the men deteriorated rapidly but that of the women continued unchanged. The women were determined to make a home for themselves and their children” (p. 59). Ultimately, what matters most is caring for others and being cared for: “It is not living in a family as such that gives an individual a better chance of survival in a disaster, but participating in a caring relationship” (p. 55). Disaster researchers will want to pursue this notion. Women’s Care Work: Mothering in Disasters Relationships of care and reciprocity are a critical part of women’s disaster experiences, and children’s. The enormous and long-lasting displacement of Gulf Coast residents hit by the storms of 2005 provides an opening for what we must understand as “disaster mothering.” The unbounded nature of maternal care is on full display—if only because meeting the basic needs of infants, children, and youth cannot be readily delegated in crisis periods, nor can substitute services be purchased. As the needs of children expand, so do women’s worries: How to clothe and feed them tonight? How to keep them healthy and safe? And what about school? The routine chores of mothering are more complicated in households without running water, heat, bedding, or transport, in neighborhoods unsafe for children in which family, friends, and neighbors are all engaged in their own domestic travails—or are simply gone and unaccounted for. The conditions for women and families after Hurricane Andrew were a major motivator for Women Will Rebuild Miami, the emergent women’s coalition that sought recognition of gender in the city’s recovery from the storm, as one founding member recalled: “[Children] were living in those ghastly trailers. There was no

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playground, there wasn’t a swing, there wasn’t anything. The kids’ main toys were razor-sharp pieces of metal from the blown-away trailers. . . . And it was hell down there. Grandmothers were taking care of a trailer full of kids. Mothers were out working. There was one huge park with no phones because the owner wouldn’t let them in” (Enarson and Morrow, 1998b, p. 175). The groundbreaking work of sociologists Lori Peek and Alice Fothergill (2008) on parenting in the Katrina diaspora, indicates how differently fathers and mothers engaged with children during disasters. Social fathering, based more on intimacy and social recognition than on material support or legal rights, was a valuable resource for the low-income African American mothers, whom Peek and Fothergill met, and sorely missed during their displacement: “I think he called three times in one week to talk to [our son]. Then it went like two weeks and I called him. I was like, ‘I thought you might want to talk to him.’ He was like, ‘Yeah.’ The only time he talks to [our son] is when I call him” (p. 92). Peek and Fothergill’s conversations with displaced parents included seven fathers, within and outside legal or formal arrangements with ex-partners. Too readily dismissed as “absent,” some of the seven fathers they interviewed did, indeed, strive to remain in physical and emotional touch with their children after relationships with their partners came to an end, an effort they continued in the wake of Katrina but that was difficult or impossible when mothers and children went or were sent to different cities or states. Child custody, so often contentious in the best of times, comes into play too. Women with no-contact orders in place at the time of an evacuation across state lines may well delay moving or seeking help to avoid making their presence known, as in the following situation described by a domestic violence advocate: “She grew very worried about the storm and evacuation, was afraid to leave her child with her ex-husband, and literally sneaked her child out of the house” (Jenkins and Phillips, 2008a, p. 56). Because of the length of the Katrina evacuation, some custodians, primarily mothers, are still fighting many years later to retrieve children from noncustodial parents. In every disaster, women strive to maintain desired family bonds. When fathers stay behind while the rest of the family evacuates, or when fathers are absent due to trips to a damaged home to check on possessions and begin clearing debris, mothers have no respite. Along the Red River in the Upper Midwest, women spoke of their struggles to “stay in touch emotionally” with men and to maintain father-child bonds: “He would cry every time his daddy would leave [after a weekend visit]. . . . [He] had to get readjusted to seeing his father every day. It took him a good two months to get readjusted. He didn’t really see him as his father” (Enarson and Scanlon, 1999, p. 113). Many flood-affected mothers confided to me how they lost patience with children who were suddenly very “clingy,” especially when confined to the interior of a FEMA trailer for hours and days on end (author interviews, 1997–1998). In one home, a pro-

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fessional woman deeply involved in North Dakota flood relief work visited a doctor when her young son was suddenly unable to walk. The doctor’s prescription for “more time with mother” took her aback: Did she have more time to give? Another flooded-out mother shared with me her last-ditch effort to soothe a youngster in crisis by finding bits and pieces of Lego toys in the wreckage, and washing each piece by hand with a toothbrush in frigid water. This is disaster recovery work, too. Children’s health and safety loom large in disasters, including protection from violence wherever life is lived. Communities in the United States increasingly face the insidious contamination of unacknowledged hazards that pose new and old threats to the safety of children, further complicating mothers’ decisions about where and how to live in the aftermath. In the wake of gas spills and events such as the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in Pennsylvania, women’s concern for children takes precedence. “I do not want my grandchildren romping in my backyard,” said one grandmother following the meltdown. “I just don’t know what’s out there. I can’t see what’s there” (Erikson, 1994, p. 156). Another woman nearby said, “I don’t even hang wash out anymore, and usually I’m a fanatic on hanging wash out. I don’t want to bring in what maybe is out there” (p. 157). The loss of place undermines community and the trustworthiness of everyday family life—the food women cook, the clothing they provide for their children, the play times they create. Living in “the dead space,” such informants speak volumes about why technological disasters are so difficult to overcome, especially for those charged with protecting the health and safety of children. This same corrosive fear or dread appears often in the aftermath of technological disasters, as it did when the full effects of Hurricane Katrina became known. A displaced mother wondered aloud if she could ever take her children back to New Orleans after Katrina: “The park is a disaster. City Park is gone. The carousel is a disaster. Everything’s a disaster over there. How is that going to survive? Is the aquarium going to survive? Is the children’s museum going to be there? . . . And then in our own house, I’m so afraid to even touch the soil. I don’t know what’s been seeping into it” (Peek and Fothergill, 2008, p. 94). Latina and black mothers living for months after Hurricane Andrew in a large “tent city” shared their worries. The environment was physically difficult, and having to live so closely with people whose cultures and histories were so different from their own magnified these mothers’ fears. Fights were common. Anthropologist Kevin Yelvington recalls one African American mother in a Miami tent camp: “She couldn’t leave the child alone and she refused to take it into the dirty portable toilets. . . . She was afraid a [social worker] might come by and accuse her of abandoning her child” (1997, p. 105). Additionally, children in new locales may have new allergies or need different kinds of medical care, including costly new school vaccinations. Like the mothers caught up in

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Hurricane Andrew, women found mothering children with special needs after Hurricane Katrina challenging. A day care director who observed what happened at the Cajundome shelter in Lafayette, Louisiana, said: This one woman had been in the Superdome with her autistic son, who was 18. . . . She said she had to change his diaper, and the women wouldn’t let her in the women’s room, ’cause he was older, and she couldn’t go in the men’s room. And to get a plate of food, you had to stay in line. And you couldn’t get two plates. But she couldn’t [get him to stay in line]. By this time she was just about crazy. They had put her out of the special needs unit at one place. Then they put ’em in a hospital. Then they sent them to this special needs unit. Then they pulled them again. I don’t know where they went. I lost track of them. (Peek and Fothergill, 2008, p. 82)

Speaking with Katrina-displaced families in the Denver, Colorado, region, in interviews conducted separately with single mothers and children, sociologists Jennifer Tobin-Gurley, Lori Peek, and Jennifer Loomis (2010) learned of the many service gaps and other barriers facing women as they negotiated the new social, geographic, and political landscape in which they found themselves, most urgently barriers to child care and paid work. Schooling concerns weigh on mothers. Megan Reid’s (2011) conversations with single mothers displaced to Texas, still residing in Houston some two years after the Gulf Coast storms of 2005, are revealing. It falls to single mothers generally to meet with teachers and other officials to protect their children in unfriendly school and neighborhood environments, especially those that are racially segregated, where children may be met with harassment or even violence. In addition, as Reid relates, children experience strong emotional reactions to disasters. As a result, some go truant from school, while others break school rules that are new to them. Single displaced mothers were at the heart of the ensuing emotional, institutional, and legal storms following the twin hurricanes of 2005. In my research after the Red River flood in Grand Forks, North Dakota, three single mothers (and a fourth woman whose husband worked extensive overtime) reported that their young sons had been physically aggressive toward them for the first time (author interviews, 1997–1998). But under what conditions and how often do children suffer at the hands of their mothers in disasters? This, too, is an important and underexamined topic. “Feeding the family” keeps children going physically and emotionally, recreating what is meant by “family” itself, for example through ceremonial or culturally specific meal-making (DeVault, 1991). Women’s inability to provide this kind of sustenance, whether symbolic or material, is painful. Mothers fed children first, of course, but worried about the quality of food they could provide: “They be eating a lot of cereals and Hot Pockets and all that. That’s not food, you know, but I can only buy what I can afford” (Reid, 2011, p. 111). Reid’s work with mothers displaced to Houston following Hurricane Katrina

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highlights the problem of food insecurity, about which much more must be learned: In a new city, with scant knowledge of transportation and social services, and little, if any, personal financial resources, mothers in this study were especially concerned about having a stable supply of food for their children. Though most of these women had been impoverished in New Orleans, they found food insecurity to be a new experience. Most mentioned that they did not have much money pre-Katrina, that they had always been able to provide for their children. Not being able to do this anymore caused significant stress for these mothers. (2011, p. 111)

Disaster fathering—men stepping into traditional mothering roles in disasters—is also underexamined. Few if any structural supports are available for men who are able and willing to step into the shoes of absent mothers, though they do so from necessity of course, before as well as during disasters. Young boys and men in South Asia stepped up when their mothers, sisters, and wives were swept to their deaths in the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, which left many thousands of infants and youth in dire need of food, shelter, medical attention, schooling, and affection. The challenges to households headed by widows and by young orphaned boys were extreme, leading to rapid remarriages and, in some cases, to early marriages of young girls, which became known as “tsunami marriages.” In the United States, too, following the attacks of September 11, men stepped into the “mother” role. Peter Griffith, whose wife, Joan, was killed on the ninety-seventh floor of Tower 2, reflected on caring for his two daughters: “Mommy was the buffer between us. You had your boundaries set up and now those boundaries are gone. I’m basically winging it and hoping it turns out right. I’m making a lot of mistakes. I’m not cut out to be a mother” (Lite, 2002). Many women readers will be nodding their heads, for motherhood is far from an inherited or innate talent. Betty Morrow (1997, p. 166) recalls the pain in an elder woman’s voice as she described life with her disabled husband in a severely damaged home shared with twelve children and grandchildren: “I just can’t get it together,” she kept repeating. Women, who are suddenly unable to provide personal care for their aged parents and must turn to institutional care, or who see their families or marriages torn apart by disaster-related conflicts, or who feel they are failing as mothers when their children need them most, pay a high cost as disaster caregivers. Their emotional turmoil may be “hidden in plain view,” unlike the toll disasters take on men as wage earners, but it is real and carries a high social cost for the community at large. Women’s Care Work and the Disaster State Women caught up in disasters like those reviewed here must also test the limits of state support. I vividly recall, after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the African

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American mother in Miami who asked me for a mattress (I was her Red Cross volunteer at the moment). Forced to refuse, I tried to explain the rule that no mattress could be provided if she could not guarantee it would be kept off the floor; having been unable find new beds, she and her children slept on the sodden floor. Women and men alike can apply for unemployment benefits and emergency food assistance, Small Business Administration loans, or housing vouchers, but structural gaps between what women need and what is offered are glaringly obvious. State support for the poor in the United States has always been as much about gender and race relations as about poverty alleviation—witness the debates about “welfare queens” (reborn in the debate about immigrant women and their so-called anchor babies), the gender order implicit in the so-called family wage, and regulation of women’s reproductive lives, especially among poor women of color (Gordon, 1994; Sidel, 1996). The nation’s underdeveloped family policy provides only limited support for families in crisis. Patricia Hill Collins (1990), a feminist theorist of black women’s experience, drew attention early on to the expansive networks of care provided by “other mothers” or fictive kin, perhaps a longtime friend, relative, or formally designated guardian but just as likely a trusted woman down the block. Another set of watchful eyes or pair of helping hands are welcomed by single mothers in low-income homes in underserved and perhaps dangerous neighborhoods, but this support is jeopardized through disaster-related illness or death, relocation, competing claims on time and energy, and other conflicts. In some cases, survival strategies adapted to life in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward transferred poorly, and no safety net kept them safe. The low-income mothers Reid (2011) spoke with in Houston about food and hunger made this point, explaining that they could no longer access food stamps in their new locale or could no longer share food stamps with adult children or friends. In Jacqueline Litt’s (2008) extraordinary analysis of poor women’s social networks following Hurricane Katrina, both dense and shallow support systems were evident, some serving African American women in New Orleans very well (see also Stack, 1974). Litt writes that “helping out” was “central to their sense of self, about their life before the flood and displacement. Sharing resources, exchanging child care—for the short or long term—loaning money, sharing food, were quotidian. Households were porous, not constructed as barriers which others had to cross” (p. 38). But in other cases, truncated or disrupted or essentially shallow networks prolonged or even increased women’s vulnerability after Katrina (Litt, Skinner, and Robinson, 2011). Applying a policy framework to women’s care work in disasters, political scientist Susan Sterrett (2011) explored and contrasted the survival strategies of women from New Orleans residing in Denver two years after the Gulf Coast storms of 2005. Her close analysis of displaced women’s circumstances highlighted the state’s dependency on women’s backstage support systems. She found that women who were unable to work for wages or otherwise live independently

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were also unable to garner sufficient support from any combination of government services. To manage their own disaster recovery, such as it was, they sought to replicate the creative (underground) support systems they had developed in New Orleans, combining state benefits, paid work, and unpaid family care. But this care “system,” like women’s patchwork of child care exchange after disasters, was now more tenuous than ever: “Disaster that requires people to relocate can make it more difficult to accomplish the hidden work that stretches state benefits. Relatives who share housing or helped with disabled relatives are no longer around. Low wage work is no longer available. Under the table work that requires referrals in a neighborhood are gone” (p. 127). Women’s extreme need for and dependence upon state benefits and the generosity of others magnified their dependence, yet these benefits and this generosity did not meet their specific needs. Housing policies, for instance, preclude sharing of resources; two persons eligible for assistance who apply separately cannot then share a residence, regardless of their preference or the advantages of doing so. Using Section 8 vouchers or FEMA monies in ways not intended by the state, including helping others in a far-flung family network of reciprocity, subjects them to legal action. But what options exist? Isolated in unfamiliar surroundings and unable to organize or lobby from afar, the position of these displaced women evacuated to Denver from New Orleans was precarious. Women have traditionally been the bridge between family life and the state, connecting children and men to schools, health services, housing agencies, and other governmental agencies. In the urgency of need following a catastrophic explosion or earthquake, new questions arise: Where can housing affordable to the poor or to single mothers or for those with large families be found? What child care is available for infants, or what counseling for a troubled teen? How can financial assistance be found to search for work or relocate? What about enforcement of antiviolence restraining orders or custody orders, and what about the availability of sexual assault kits or birth control? These are not questions exclusive to women, but women’s relationship to a governing state historically and currently dominated by men and patriarchal values is highly charged, and their needs are acute. Some women’s organizations organize as collective shock absorbers, as described in Chapter 10. By stepping in to provide direct assistance to affected women and their families, women may mobilize to ease the way, but political questions arise about the long-term implications of this strategy for relationships between women and their government.

Conclusion Carving out “family” from other core concerns in the study of disaster (and other core concerns of disaster survivors) illuminates how strongly gender

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comes to matter in disasters. This may be a fool’s errand, though, because love and affection, conflict and estrangement, trust and betrayal are realized in the soft underbelly of disaster impact and response, as well as in family life. Still, a critical new lens can be brought to our understanding of family life in disasters by learning more about how, or whether, women (and husbands, fathers, and sons) manage to “dance through the minefield,” negotiating conflicts in the family, the demands of disaster parenting, and people’s contested relationships with their government. Examining women’s family work and intimate relationships is also an essential precondition for developing emergency plans and operations that reflect women’s and men’s capacities and needs equally. This, in the end, can best protect those most at risk and promote effective and equitable recovery.

8 Houses and Homes

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mergency planners and housing experts are challenged to anticipate damage to residences and to the lifelines of water, heat, and communication critical to residents. They promote the mitigation of hazardous living conditions and help people find safe space during and after disasters. These interests converge with those of women. If not the “haven in a heartless world” that some romanticize, the house gives women space for constructing and expressing an identity, building family life, and earning a living. It was the loss of her house, pure and simple, that evoked the following wrenching statement from anthropologist Susanna Hoffman (1998, p. 56): I had no salt. By this I mean I had no salt to put upon my food, and also that I had no salt left for tears. I had no thread. By this I mean I had no thread to stitch my daughters’ hem and also I lost the thread of my life. The pattern of my days, my plans, my routines were irrevocably ruptured. The warp of my past was torn from the weave of my future. . . . I had no numbers. I lost all the addresses and phone numbers of everyone I knew or had ever known. I further lost all my accounts, my journals, records, calendars, the numbers of my days. I lost my vita, and while some might find this refreshing, without it and the rest of my numbers I lost both my connections and the equations that lead to opportunity. . . . I had no paper, no sheets, no warm, wooly sweater, no lights. By this I mean no light bulbs, no work lamp, no flash light, candles, matches, but also no lightness. No joy crept into my days for a lengthy while.

Studies from the United States have identified lack of affordable housing as a factor in the slow recovery of low-income neighborhoods hit by earthquake (Bolin, 1993). Earlier research documented conflict over culturally appropriate temporary shelter and reconstruction (Phillips, 1993; Bolin with Stanford, 1998) and addressed the postdisaster housing needs of the homeless and elderly (Phillips, 1996, 1998). Racial and class disparities in people’s capacity to pre105

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pare or leave risky residences and return to much-loved neighborhoods are also highlighted in post-Katrina reports (e.g., Brunsma, Overfelt, and Picou, 2007). Despite the lack of gender analysis in this area, disaster housing is also a women’s issue (Enarson, 1999b). In developing nations, women may confront barriers to inheritance and legal tenancy in the postdisaster period and see their fragile land rights and housing conditions even further degraded; in the United States, the root causes of insecurity are different but no less significant. This chapter examines women’s housing tenure in the United States, how women act to protect their residences, and what evacuation is like for them. The gender dimensions of the places in which they seek refuge are then discussed, followed by consideration of some barriers to women’s successful resettlement.

Women’s Housing Vulnerability Nearly three times as many women as men single-handedly hold together households with children; this group of female-headed households also comprises half of families living below the poverty line in the United States, with racial/ethnicminority families even more likely to lack safe “shelter from the storm” (Spraggins, 2003, 2005). These are the mothers who build families and neighborhoods in and around the deteriorating public housing units that will shelter them in an era of increasing disasters. Low-income women and their children are also likely to reside where land is cheap and exposed to contaminants of all kinds. Although the government does not provide sex-specific data on ownership of mobile homes, women who are older, poor, and African American are at increased risk due to the flimsy protection offered by mobile housing. Renters are typically younger and earn less compared to homeowners, and large percentages are women. Just 6 percent of men without spouses now rent their homes, compared with 19 percent of women (US Census Bureau, 2009). The corollary is that 56.9 percent of men (versus 48.6 percent of women) living without their spouses are homeowners (US Census Bureau, 2010). Female homeownership is increasing among some groups, such as single women, but the extraordinary foreclosure rates of the Great Recession hit women hard. Researchers found that women were 32 percent more likely than men to hold subprime mortgages; more African American women whose incomes were below the median for their region received subprime loans with above-average rates, compared with white men or Latinas in the same situation (Fishbein and Woodall, 2006). African American women are likely to dominate among the new homeless of our era. While self-protection is a major theme in US disaster preparation campaigns, women have substantially higher poverty rates than men; further, over half of those over age sixty-five are widowed or divorced, resulting in older women living alone at twice the rate for men (Spraggins, 2003, 2005). In this

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low-income population, there are meager resources for preparing or repairing homes or hiring the new “handyman” service down the block. Many senior women do own homes in the United States, having outlived their partners, but extended care and retirement facilities also house large numbers of senior women likely to require help regardless of income level. Women and children are the fastest-growing group of Americans who lack secure housing, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless (2009). Along with divorce, foreclosure, and other trends, domestic violence is a major contributing factor to women’s homelessness. Their daily rounds in and out of shelters, hotels, or borrowed spaces render them socially invisible, difficult to locate and assist, and well outside the normative household that disaster planners target for information and resources. Dependent on friends, family, and acquaintances, but less able to tap into social services for the homeless, mothers and other women move regularly (“couch surfing”). They become secondary victims in a disaster when they lose these spaces in the interstices of other people’s lives, or the spots they stay in are muddied or contaminated or simply tumble down. The universe of poorly housed Americans also encompasses the voluminous migrant labor force, one-fifth of which the US Department of Labor (2010) estimates is women; they join men and children in the many high-risk environments sheltering migrant workers, including the wind-swept canyons of California. Finally, most hazard-related building codes concentrate on highly engineered, high-value structures. Shelters for battered women, homeless shelters housing families, child care and adult day care centers, and group homes housing vulnerable populations of the infirm, persons with disabilities, juveniles, and others are likely to put women more at risk; on the day of an earthquake or massive explosion or fire, they are likely to numerically dominate as residents, clients, administrators, staff, volunteers, visiting family, or specialized caregivers. These are sites of critical social infrastructure that warrant protection. Arguably, however, gender norms now covertly embedded in building codes rank these sites as lower-priority for disaster-resistant construction or retrofitting (Corotis and Enarson, 2007). This is not an argument for redirecting scarce retrofitting dollars from utility plants to child care centers, but a call to determine—with women’s input—which structures in a community are most worth preserving and to act accordingly. These are the social facts on the ground that make disaster housing such a pressing issue for women, and gender analysis so necessary for effective emergency disaster housing policy and practice.

Women in the Lead: Risk Communication and Preparedness Emergency managers fervently hope that someone is listening to the warnings and forecasts they issue or actually reading the advice in the flier from the

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county fair regarding making household emergency plans, preparing window coverings, securing heavy items, or marking gas lines. While disaster risk communications rarely target women or men in the way that language groups are targeted, emergency preparedness messaging is implicitly gendered female, as evidenced in the tone and content of information posted to emergency management websites. Who better than mothers, aunts, and grandmothers to know what medicines members of the household take, the location of doctors’ offices, or the phone numbers of dear friends and close relatives? Who most needs information about the probable effects on pregnancy of our increasingly extreme weather? Currently, gender-sensitive risk communication is as useful as it is rare, despite growing evidence of gender-specific risk and gender differences in willingness to plan for emergencies. In their study of Californians responding to earthquake aftershocks, Paul O’Brien and Patricia Atchison (1998) found that women more than men responded positively to earthquake aftershock warnings on virtually every indicator, from seeking out more information to securing household items and developing family emergency plans. Survey data comparing risk perception and willingness to take protective action yielded similar results in a study of earthquake warnings along the New Madrid fault in 1990 (Major, 1999; see also Blanchard-Boehm, 1997, for the case of California). Students of risk perception and tolerance make the same point, emphasizing differing risk contexts (e.g., Cutter, Tiefenbacher, and Soleci, 1992, on technological hazards). They also caution against overgeneralizing about gender difference without accounting for lived experience, for example of Latino or African American men whose daily realities may support risk perception patterns more like women’s than like Anglo men’s. Researchers examining interactive effects of gender and race/ethnicity write of the “white male effect” in risk perception (Finucane et al., 2000), referring to elevated awareness among elite men. This masks differences among men and exaggerates differences between women and men, so a more nuanced understanding of how women and men interpret threats and warnings differently is necessary (see also Greenberg and Schneider, 1995, on the disappearing gender gap in highly stressed environments). Arguably, women are the emergency manager’s natural allies. Generally seen as “easier to convince” (Drabek, 2010, p. 54), and demonstrably more engaged as volunteers in training exercises or neighborhood preparedness projects (e.g., Turner, Nigg, and Young, 1981), women are also—paradoxically— believed to be overly emotional in crises compared to “the rational man” norm. But is this “panic” or preparedness? Case studies find that what women and men actually do to prepare is highly gendered, mirroring the familiar indooroutdoor or public-private divide (e.g., Fothergill, 2004; Morrow and Enarson, 1996; Alway, Belgrave, and Smith, 1998). As Red River floodwaters moved north into Manitoba in 1997, for instance, the Canadian couples whom Joe

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Scanlon and I contacted (Enarson and Scanlon, 1999) recalled that men moved heavy furniture and appliances, built earthen dikes, moved their own tools and hobby materials to safer places, protected outdoor equipment and livestock, packed up household possessions, and often helped relatives and neighbors pack and move. Women concentrated on home interiors and family needs. They “supervised” the removal of heavy furniture, packed up smaller items, identified and protected irreplaceable family possessions, found temporary pet care, helped children prepare emotionally and materially, and provided meals and voluntary child care to neighbors and kin. Women also made radio appeals for assistance, helped secure sandbags, organized and supervised volunteers, and watched over children in the sandbagging area and at home. Because outsiders were also hungry, cooking for large numbers of volunteer sandbaggers was an added chore for many women. They cooked individually at home and organized collective cooking at the community hall, deliberately drawing preschoolers and elderly widows into the effort. Far from passive observers, women often also helped sandbag their homes and build neighborhood dikes. Pregnant and breastfeeding women participated, as did most women in good health, women without children, and women who had child care help at home. One woman, pregnant and with a toddler in tow, minimized her own backstage help and felt excluded: “My husband went sandbagging. He did a lot of helping with people that needed help in their house. I couldn’t do a lot. I went down [where he was] for moral support, I guess. I helped watch other people’s kids . . . any little errands that people needed. But I felt kind of useless because there’s lots of stuff I wanted to do but couldn’t. I kind of felt like I didn’t help at all” (Enarson and Scanlon, 1999, p. 110). Other studies examining the case of women’s labor in floods (Fordham, 1999) and fires (Poiner, 1990) also reveal women’s backstage preparedness efforts. Men’s greater public preparedness in flood work also left women alone, like this older Manitoban woman during the 1997 floods: “I did the cleaning while the others sandbagged. I kind of thought to myself ‘Who’s gonna help me while you help the neighbors?’” (Enarson and Scanlon, 1999, p. 109). Women may simply lack the resources needed to prepare the structures that house them (in public housing, in rental units, in migrant labor camps) against known hazards, or may have seen their best efforts at self-protection undone by events. A groundbreaking study of women with disabilities during the Gulf Coast hurricane season of 2005 revealed their high level of preparedness, based on their knowing that the challenges they face everyday would be magnified in a disaster (Davis and Rouba, 2011). Foreknowledge is not always sufficient. The go-kit prepared for a woman in a wheelchair was inaccessible to her because her caregiver (her daughter) happened to be out of town. The daughter recalled: “We had a pair of very good quality walkie-talkies. I had given one to my momma and daddy, and one to us. We knew we were going to lose electricity. We knew all that. We stuffed the freezer. We were boxed up with water and canned goods. I

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know how to do for a hurricane, but I didn’t know how to do for a 45-foot tidal wave. I was not ready for that at all” (p. 86). Denial is not the special preserve of either men or women. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (1992) research team examined decisionmaking in a sample of low-income, pregnant, predominantly African American, single women in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Among those who spoke out at one of the focus groups the research team conducted was a heavily pregnant woman who recalled how she and a friend had firmly believed that the hurricane would “just blow over,” even with the television tuned in to weather news. (This was my thinking in Miami, too, as I watched the cloudswirl called Hurricane Andrew loom larger on the television screen.) Inside some homes, it was not denial but men’s active resistance that limited women’s choices. For example, reflecting on the 1997 flooding of the Canadian prairies along the Red River, one man said: “My wife is always a bit more scared than I am. She gets worried. Right away, she wanted to move stuff from our basement, get the furniture out. I said, ‘Let’s take it easy, don’t panic. . . . The river doesn’t mean get worried. They can sandbag it. I never thought the water would get here’” (Enarson and Scanlon, 1999, p. 109). Reflecting on the same flood, one young mother explained her husband’s amazement (“he thought I was nuts”) that she packed up possessions from the past to sustain them through an uncertain future: “I wanted the bedding to smell like home and make things as homey as I could. . . . I packed up my rocking chair. It’s my chair and my time with the kids when I rock them to sleep” (Enarson and Scanlon, 1999, p. 112).

Gender Relations in Evacuation Who decides where to go and when—or how? Evacuation is generally not gender-specific, but can be (see Milne, 1977, for the case of Cyclone Tracy of 1974 in Australia). Evacuation orders were implicitly gendered in a rural Manitoba community as Red River floodwaters approached from the United States: “If the children evacuated, the mother had to go with them as the mother is considered the caregiver. If the father wanted to stay, that was his choice” (Enarson and Scanlon, 1999, p. 111). Male emergency management officials and municipal leaders then drew up an overtly gendered list of individuals exempted from mandatory evacuation. Only six of the seventy-five residents who were permitted (or asked) to stay longer were women. They were the cooks, nurses, waitresses, and “executive assistants” whose labor supported the male emergency team that stayed behind as the town was evacuated. This small group eventually became exclusively male. Paradoxically, while many men are more socially free to take the kinds of actions recommended by emergency managers in the face of a looming eruption, quake, or fire, resistance to evacuation (and subversion of mandatory evac-

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uation orders) is higher among men. Gender is indeed a good predictor of evacuation behavior, as are pregnancy and the presence of children (Gladwin and Peacock, 1997). Cautionary advisories are commonly directed toward pregnant women (e.g., see Stallings, 1984, for the case of Three Mile Island) or families with young children, and women take these to heart. But no single line of causality is present. In a sample of low-income pregnant women in New Orleans, evacuation timing during Hurricane Katrina varied considerably, with some not evacuating until after the event (Zotti et al., 2011). Gendered evacuation patterns were closely examined in a multivariate analysis by Julie Bateman and Bob Edwards (2002), who studied evacuation behavior in homes threatened by Hurricane Bonnie as it neared the North Carolina coast in 1998. They found that women were more likely to evacuate due to “underlying gender difference in caregiving roles, evacuation preparation, their greater exposure to certain objective risks [such as living in a mobile home], and their more acute perception of subjective risk” (p. 116). Clearly, responsibility for others is a major determinant when household heads must make difficult choices: Who will stay and who will go when our newborns, teenagers with disabilities, mothers in hospice care, and ex-partners across town all need help? Examining people’s decisions about evacuation from New Orleans as Katrina neared, sociologists Timothy Haney, James Elliott, and Elizabeth Fussell (2007, p. 83) found that “gender exerted the strongest and most consistent influence on individual evacuation response,” more powerfully even than parenthood. Men with families were twice as likely as women to remain in the city and men without children were also more likely than women to remain. The pattern is often reported, including in a sample of older men with health problems who were living on their own when Hurricane Katrina struck (Rosenkoetter et al., 2007). In telephone surveys of women and men along the Rhode Island coast (West and Orr, 2007), women were found to be more likely to take government advisories seriously. But, more than sex, what mattered most was “the differing role of financial resources, home ownership, owning a car, being married, and of having children” (p. 581). The women interviewed were objectively more at risk than men, based on statistically significant differences in income (hers was lower), tenancy (she more often rented), and the presence of children in the home (she more often cared for youngsters). On three of four questions comparing evacuation messages from weather services, media reports, government spokespersons, and friends or relatives, women declared themselves more likely to evacuate; women of color were most likely to feel this way and Anglo men the least (p. 576). These patterns parallel the “mother hen effect” deduced from a preparedness study in Israel, where the proactive efforts of mothers were demonstrated after a careful effort to distinguish the effects of gender and parenthood (Kirschenbaum, 2004). In the author’s view, mothers are the “master designers

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of their families’ survival” (p. 203), though culture and generation shape the meanings of motherhood and hence of preparedness. Intentions aside, the sheer capacity to leave cannot be overestimated. In Grand Forks, savings accounts and credit cards helped some women evacuate their families to hotel rooms instead of to crowded emergency shelters during the Red River flood. Affluent married women often described evacuating to the relative comfort of nearby lakeside cabins. On the Gulf Coast, among the lowerincome population of women displaced by Katrina, the fact that the storm came at the end of the month, when funds were exhausted and assistance checks were not yet in hand, hampered women’s ability to buy a tank of gas or pay the price demanded by taxi drivers. “In 2005, 26 percent of all New Orleans household units and nearly 15 percent of women workers reported they had no vehicle available, compared to 12.4 percent of New Orleans working men and just 4.3 percent of working women nationally” (Willinger and Knight, 2011, p. 58). Health conditions also come into play. A pregnant woman who later miscarried explained that she remained in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward because of her mother’s obesity. More accurately, the lack of any accessible shelter meant that the only option would have been to flee to the hotel where her sister was employed, in which case her mother would have had to somehow walk up eight floors and down again to reach a functioning toilet (Davis and Rouba, 2011). Critical decisions about how or when to leave hinge on material assets and the facts on the ground, but also on gendered disaster decisions and social relationships that bind women and men to a place and people (see Pardee, 2009, for a rich discussion of these relationships and motivational narratives). The normative power of men over women is a neglected topic in evacuation research as Bateman and Edwards (2002) remind us. Significantly, their study of gender and other factors in evacuation concludes with the observation that when men (like women) cared for others with special medical needs, resided in mobile homes, or lived in storm surge zones, they were not equally likely as women to want to evacuate. Women in these conditions wanted to evacuate but could not always do so; when men did elect to do so, they seemed to be “more able to follow through on their intention to evacuate” (p. 117). Resources matter, including household power based on gender. Conversely, men seem freer to simply not comply when others (even government workers) deem evacuation necessary—though they may come to rue the day. After finally agreeing to evacuate from a pending flood, one husband commented that his wife “went prepared” with clothes and supplies when she evacuated but that he had stayed behind and eventually left home with only his toothbrush: “Don’t think you know it all—move your stuff up” was his advice to others later (Enarson and Scanlon, 1999, p. 109). While I suggest that core disaster decisions are made more often by men than women within the household, in the sample of mothers displaced by Katrina, Lori Peek and Alice Fothergill (2008) learned that it was mothers, instead, who determined when to

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evacuate and where. They attributed this mainly to men’s paid work, for instance when men’s employers moved their place of work and fathers had to travel farther to keep their job. Women’s domestic labor brings “family” to life. Wives and girlfriends, grandmothers and sisters step up to organize family communication, giftgiving, and visiting, with women more often than men preparing the special meals and events that mark significant life passages. This “kinwork” (di Leonardo, 1987) creates and tests the critical social bonds that come into play in emergencies. Kinship, of course, is built on age as much as gender. In interviews with pregnant women who elected to leave before Katrina hit, researchers found ample evidence of the power of mothers and mothers-in-law (Zotti et al., 2011). These “maternal authority figures” understood what was at stake, perhaps better than the younger mothers-to-be. Looking back, this young woman credits her mother-in-law (“that lady”) for getting them out in time (Zotti et al., 2011): “I wasn’t going to go anywhere because again I was pregnant, didn’t have any money, and didn’t have a decent running car. That lady sat in our driveway and would not move until we got in that car. So thank the Lord we did because we lost everything” (Zotti et al., 2011, p. 95). The tenacity of the “ties that bind” in women’s social networks, including but transcending those of marriage and family, was illuminated in Still Waiting: Life After Katrina, filmed during the course of eighteen months from the viewpoints of different women in the subject family. Anthropologist and documentarian Kate Browne (2008, p. 197) writes: “[Connie] was the one who had welcomed all her bayou relatives to her home in Texas. The 155 people who showed up the weekend before Katrina made landfall certainly had no intention of staying. Evacuating ahead of the storm was a ritual precautionary exercise that had never required them to stay away more than a day or two. But when Katrina changed all that, Connie never blinked.” Women’s well-resourced social networks can make the difference between wanting to leave, being able to leave, and actually leaving in a timely way. As Jacqueline Litt (2008, p. 43) remarks, women “were able to do what the government could not—that is, move people into safety,” keeping legions of young and old out of the Superdome. But bonds of obligation and entitlement can also break down or restrict the options of women or complicate the steps leading to successful evacuation (Pardee, 2009; Barnshaw and Trainor, 2007). In a very different scenario, also in New Orleans, a pregnant woman explained that it was difficult to know where to go to escape Hurricane Katrina when traveling with two parents, an older and a younger sibling, a pregnant sister-in-law, an infant, and a husband (Zotti et al., 2011, p. 100). In a similar vein, Katrina researchers Jacqueline Litt, Althea Skinner, and Kelley Robinson distinguished between well-resourced and “flat” networks. The meager resources that “Rona” had before the storm were soon eroded by her generosity and the needs of others: “Like I was telling my husband, ‘When I came down here, I gave cars away

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and all that. Now I don’t have a car.’ I can’t get nobody to bring me here or there. Me and my children, we do want to go somewhere, we walking” (Litt, Skinner, and Robinson, 2011, p. 135). Evacuation and resettlement are hard work, especially when more than one move is needed, as is very likely, and “temporary” seems to last forever. Writing of their conversations with Canadian women just over the US border who watched the Red River floodwaters coming their way, Karen Grant and Nancy Higgitt (2001, p. 13) write: There were meals to stockpile and household effects to move up or out. There were sand-baggers and dike-builders to feed and sometimes house. There were arrangements to be made for children’s schooling and billeting with friends or relatives. There were animals needing food and shelter. . . . When women and their families could return to their homes, there were accommodations to be made (including renting mobile homes and port-a-potties), school and transportation arrangements, and childcare to be secured.

Pleasure can also be found in evacuation. Being displaced to an area nearby their primary residence, with minimal impact, may bring people closer physically to their place of employment, and unite them in positive ways across generations. For many of the grandmothers I met in the prairie towns of Grand Forks, North Dakota, and East Grand Forks, Minnesota, evacuation meant hosting beloved children and grandchildren, and cooking the kind of meals they had prepared years earlier. They felt needed once again.

Shelter in the Storm? Emergency Shelters, Tent Cities, and Trailer Camps Physically secure shelters that are properly organized and operated are a lifeline in disasters, as evidenced by high fatality rates where shelters are unavailable, especially where shelters are culturally unavailable to girls and women. Few Americans desire to evacuate to a public shelter and the affluent rarely do. Emergency shelters are still the place of last resort: “Do you think I would be here if I had a family?” a Miami woman asked a researcher inquiring about her shelter decision during Hurricane Andrew (Morrow, 1997, p. 141). No matter how badly they are needed, shelters can be especially unsafe and unhealthy for women. Shelters, trailer parks, and other temporary accommodation sites are unique and complex social spaces with an emergent culture and social structure. The worlds we know are soon re-created. Songs offensive to Mexican migrant families, for example, were played loudly by some families displaced by Hurricane Andrew (Yelvington, 1997). In another shelter, following Katrina, a preoperative transgendering resident was jailed for taking a shower (with the permis-

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sion of the shelter director) in the women’s bathroom (D’Ooge, 2008, p. 22). Women’s accounts from New Orleans’s Superdome and Convention Center can be harrowing to read (Pardee, 2009). The conditions prevailing in the sweltering days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall were broadcast to the nation and do not need retelling here (but see Mary Gehman’s account, 2011; and MontanaLeblanc, 2008). Volunteer Annette Marquis (2011) writes in her diary that nothing affected her more, after many years of crisis response work, than the first hour she spent as a shelter volunteer. Among the many women of Katrina she brings to life is seventy-six-year-old “Gilda,” a New Orleans resident. Gilda had first sought to drive a sixty-year-old friend, a woman with cognitive disabilities, back to her Mississippi home. Then the car broke down. Eventually, both older women were helped into an emergency shelter where, for three weeks, Gilda tried to get in touch with someone in her own family who could help her out. She eventually did, but when Marquis met her the outcome was not good: “Her health deteriorated and she spent time in the hospital before returning to the shelter to wait for some information about her family. One day last week . . . she found that her friend had left the shelter without her. Now utterly alone, she tried hard not to despair but despair was clearly setting in. She was angry, hurt, terrified of never finding her family” (p. 30). The simple needs of everyday life for seniors or persons with disabilities are unevenly met in emergency shelters, as multiple personal accounts from women and their caregivers attest (Davis and Rouba, 2011). Ethnographer Denny Taylor (2011), one voice among many writing from inside these shelters, described the plight of three older sisters she met. Each needed help in the bathroom, and food they could digest. She also recorded the desperate efforts of one young mother-to-be to hold back her labor contractions. Where feasible, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailer parks house many women and children. No matter how welcome, trailer life complicates women’s daily efforts to care for their families. There is generally not a reliable source of acceptable child care, elder care, or family respite care to consistently help stricken women venture out and begin necessary home repairs, search for new housing, or get back to paid employment. In Grand Forks, a community center I visited during the 1997 Red River flooding offered trailer residents much-needed recreational services, computer facilities, and afterschool care, among other services, but here, too, mothers spoke often about overcrowding and the lack of safe, outdoor play space for children. Outreach workers identified limited public bus transportation as an issue for women in FEMA trailers who lacked cars but were still responsible for searching for permanent housing, getting to jobs, and transporting children. Nearly a decade later, in the Katrina diaspora, women in apartments or trailers provided by their government struggled to adapt but found it difficult without family and friends who understood and could help them access the

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emergency assistance resources on offer (Tobin-Gurley, Peek, and Loomis, 2010; Pardee, 2009; Reid, 2011). It soon became clear to residents (and then to lawyers) that thousands of government-issued trailers were unhealthy places of refuge imposing a steep and potentially lifelong health “tax” on those already bereft. The lingering mold and mildew of water-damaged homes would jeopardize the health of all residents as weeks became months or even years; children, women of child-bearing age, and the housebound were most affected. Despite the failings of FEMA trailers, eviction from these shelters, like the retraction of other forms of rehousing support, hit women hard. Velma Johnson, a fifty-seven-year-old former St. Bernard, Louisiana, resident displaced by Katrina into a FEMA trailer parked on a large leased lot, was understandably angry at being made to relocate twice prior, work a night shift, and cope with eviction notices on her trailer door. Searching for alternatives, she rejected one as a “dump,” another as a “crack house.” “Oh, so that’s how you feel about me,” Johnson thought to herself every time she saw another run-down or treacherous address recommended by FEMA (Tisserand, 2008, p. 29).

The Road Home? Roadblocks for Women There is nothing new about the problem of limited housing in a disaster-affected community, town, or region. But the effects on girls and women bear closely on overall family and community recovery. Women’s ability to get to work and move to safer housing is a critical indicator of individual, household, and community recovery from disasters. Low-income women rearing families on their own are uniquely disadvantaged in the postflood housing market, as the Red River flood in the Upper Midwest demonstrated and the women of Katrina testify today. In Grand Forks, many of the older and affordable houses needed by single mothers with large families were destroyed by floodwaters. Low income as well as family size restricted their ability to find suitable new rentals, as developers rushed to rebuild more costly single-family dwellings. Predictably, given the marginalized position of migrant worker families, racial barriers also surfaced. After losing her home and its contents, one single mother of three drove nonstop to Texas for emotional and material support from her extended family. Upon her return to Grand Forks, she described an encounter with a potential landlord: I had a hard time getting that apartment but I actually begged him—actually, I kneeled down and I said “Please, me and my kids need a place. . . . I have to go into storage to get clothing for me and my kids. I need a home.” And he’s over here, “Well, let me think about it for two weeks, because Mexicans used to live in my place and destroyed my apartments before the flood.” That’s what I was told by him. So that’s where I thought racial had something to do with it. (Enarson, 2001, p. 12)

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Mothers displaced by the Gulf Coast storms of 2005 still long to re-create the neighborhoods that were indeed “family” to generations of a settled people with deep and treasured ties to land, culture, and place; yet the housing policies that put them on unsafe ground to begin with continue to keep them at bay. Affordable housing (single-family homes or apartments, or mixed-income subsidized units) is rare in most US cities and scarcer yet after an explosion, quake, flood, or storm. To those on the receiving end, the politics of urban renewal and gentrification can feel like ethnic cleansing, not disaster recovery. This, combined with decades of neglect that allowed existing subsidized housing to decline into disrepair without replacement, is one of the many reasons why New Orleans felt like a “city of men” (Batlan, 2008) with an increasingly Anglo population, a pattern reminiscent of what transpired in the wake of Hurricane Andrew in Miami as well (Girard and Peacock, 1997). Race, class, and gender combined to put safe and secure housing out of reach of low-income women of color in New Orleans well before Katrina, though grandmothers and other household heads needed this badly. Their prospects were slim in this “unnatural” and entirely human-made disaster: “The predictable result of forcing poor mothers, predominantly poor mothers of color, to pay inflated post-disaster rental rates is indeed the ‘second storm’ faced most especially by low-income African American women and directly attributable to policy choices determining American’s access to federal housing” (Luft with Griffin, 2008, p. 51). Like evacuation, resettlement is an ongoing process. As Chapter 7 elaborated, the emotion work of re-creating a home in a series of difficult “temporary” spaces falls largely to women in families with dependents. They “moved like water” in the Katrina diaspora, Jessica Pardee found; however, “the motion between housing spaces was not fluid, but rather an alternation between periods of calm stability and unexpected rapid change as a single HUD or FEMA notification could force another move and erase much of the progress toward recovery a woman and her family had made” (2009, p. 150). Pardee also documented high levels of mobility, with respondents who were displaced for less than six months reporting an average of 2.42 new accommodations, a figure that rose to 4.31 among those displaced for longer (p. 138). Earlier researchers had compared mobility rates among those displaced due to disasters and related causes. Not surprisingly, they found those they termed “forced movers” to be predominantly African American, with lower incomes and educational levels than nonmovers; nearly one in three of those who moved unwillingly were women heading households alone (MorrowJones and Morrow Jones, 1991, p. 129). Further, disaster victims move into public housing more often than do other kinds of movers. This is all the more worrisome given that public housing developments are often hard hit (Morrow and Enarson, 1996). In the wake of Katrina, for example, four in ten public housing developments were closed: “Despite the fact that generations of

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New Orleanians had sought shelter in the projects during hurricane warnings because of their low-rise, sturdy brick workmanship, residents were evacuated along with the rest of the city days after surviving the storm. When they returned to New Orleans they were not allowed back into the developments, and within a few months steel plates were placed over doors and windows” (Luft with Griffin, 2008, p. 52). The impacts on poor women when the four largest public housing developments in New Orleans were closed were predictable, given high levels of poverty before the storm among residents of these four units (82 percent, 68 percent, 85 percent, and 75 percent, respectively). As critics complained, “Thousands of poor women of color and their families were forced to leave because the levees failed, but actually lost their homes to city planning” (Henrici, Helmuth, and Carlberg, 2011, p. 145). In the residences to which they were displaced, these mothers and grandmothers, once a tight-knit community who helped one another care for the young, old, and disabled, now lived in limbo in neighborhoods unknown to them. They and their children and parents described long, hard days without friends or cars: “[We] walk, walk, walk, walk, walk. Walk, or the bus” (p. 147). Researchers in Denver, Colorado, learned about misunderstanding and misinformation among Katrina-displaced women who sought subsidized emergency housing vouchers (see also Sterrett, 2011; Tobin-Gurley, Peek, and Loomis, 2010). Recounting her post-Katrina experience, one mother described what happened when her Section 8 voucher was stolen. Though disabled and retired, she was told to check into a homeless shelter at night; during the day, she was urged to enjoy the “beautiful parks” in the area. Her response? “I feel like a bag of snacks at a Super Bowl party, I just get passed round and round” (Henrici, Helmuth, and Carlberg, 2011, p. 147). These are the feelings of women tenants in the new rental world of quickly constructed, high-profit apartments, where some find refuge through rent subsidies. But discretionary rules are applied against poor women (no doubling up with family members, no trash outside, no visitors, no use of the yard), and this seems likely to ultimately force many out (Pardee, 2009). Women are also frequently disadvantaged in the physical rebuilding process. Few hold construction jobs or otherwise benefit from “recovery” dollars targeting only material reconstruction. Women on their own (single, divorced, widowed, and those with disabled or chronically ill husbands) may help coordinate voluntary repair crews and contract labor, working closely with male laborers, suppliers, contractors, and officials. In a rebuilding program operated by Catholic Charities in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, 70 percent were found to be female, and just 13 percent male (Laska et al., p. 16). Still, gaining access to a rebuilt or new residence may be the first of many problems. A New Orleanian woman with disabilities tells this story about the house she had rebuilt three years after Hurricane Katrina hit, with doors wide enough for her

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wheelchair: “I’ve had trouble with my lift ever since I’ve moved into this house. I have gotten stuck in it for anywhere from 15 minutes to 5 hours and nobody could get me out. I’d have to wait for somebody to come rescue me. I’ve been begging for a ramp. . . . I’m number 94 on a list of 457, I think they said, to see if I can qualify for a ramp on the front end of the house so they can make me live up to fire code” (Davis and Rouba, 2011, p. 78). Despite the hurdles, more women have returned to their places of residence before the Gulf Coast storms of 2005 than not, with the exception of women of child-bearing age. Women with children and women heading households alone (especially those over age sixty-five) are least likely to find the housing they need to contemplate actually returning home. By 2008, married couples with children under 18 declined by 49.5 percent, and female-headed households with children under 18 declined even more dramatically, by 65.9 percent (Willinger and Knight, 2011, p. 69). As Peek and Fothergill (2008) learned from the displaced mothers they met, an unreconstructed past and house left women in a permanent state of dislocation. In the words of one mother: “My heart goes out to those who can’t go back. My heart goes out to me because I can go back” (p. 69). When disaster-affected women speak about recovery, we often hear of their efforts to construct a “new normal” for the family by replacing or repairing precious artifacts of family history, and by reestablishing family rituals or inventing new ones. This can bring pleasure, of course, but also takes a toll when so much remains undone. One Grand Forks mother active in community restoration as well as family rebuilding following the Red River flood recalled crying at the stove on her family’s first night back in their own home; one too many meetings that week had left her too exhausted to cook the special meal she knew the occasion demanded (author interviews, 1997–1998). The material and emotional obligations of “feeding the family,” symbolically and materially, are not exclusively female, of course, though this theme rarely emerges in interviews with men after disasters. Still, some men do acknowledge the pleasure of feeling like a family again, as Katharine Donato and colleagues (2007) found when speaking with immigrant workers in post-Katrina New Orleans camped out in warehouses and trailers. As one man said: “First one up, starts the meal, just like the ‘brotherhood’ of home” (p. 232). Among the immigrant population of New Orleans, Latinas have an increasingly larger presence, having accompanied partners who sought temporary construction jobs following the hurricane. Many of them earn money by cooking ethnic foods to sell to other construction workers in the area (p. 233). This cultural work of women in rebuilding family and community cannot be subcontracted. Wherever they are, women are determined homemakers. In shelters, trailers, and the backrooms of the homes of friends and family, they strive to stake out or reclaim space for family life. “Reclaiming domestic culture,” as Alice Fothergill (2004) found in the case of the Red River flood, is a passion and opportunity for women that constitutes a significant step toward disaster recovery.

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The home is also the symbolic and physical ground where women take a stand. They are there, often in leadership roles, when their neighborhoods are threatened with landfills (Nguyen, 2011; see also Brown and Ferguson, 1995; Neal and Phillips, 1990), or when profit-driven development jeopardizes the essence of life as well as local livelihoods (Peterson and Krajeski, 2011). At the heart of their defense of home and hearth is their valued identity as “good mother”— the woman who does what it takes to protect family health and safety (Bell and Braun, 2010).

Conclusion More women than men live through the loss of housing in the wake of disaster, due to women’s demographic longevity; more women cope single-handedly, due to higher rates of female headship; and more women are responsible for children, as mothers disproportionately head households with young children subject to harm. More women than men lack the economic resources needed for resettlement, due to gender disparities in wages and benefits and reduced social protection through the state; more women, too, have no home of their own and may be forced back into violent relationships; and increasing inequalities and economic recovery strategies push women deeper into debt and further in poverty compared to men. But equally, the patterns of everyday life position women positively as vital, if unsung, actors in the intimacy of the home, one of women’s many workplaces, to be sure, but also the starting point for reclaiming a postdisaster future. Home and hearth are vital links in all our lives—a social fact as much the case today as in earlier generations, despite the diversity of household forms today and high rates of divorce and remarriage. Though not theirs alone, or universally treasured by women, the disaster-threatened home is a quintessentially female space. When it is degraded or destroyed or simply priced beyond their means, women pick up the pieces and make new homes for those they love.

9 Work and Workplaces

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orking with the International Labour Organization, I undertook a review of the effects of natural disasters on women’s work and employmentintensive crisis prevention and response (Enarson, 2000a). The primary conclusions I drew about women and work in global disasters also apply to the United States—that women and men have specific short-term needs and longterm interests in disasters that may diverge; that women are key economic actors throughout the disaster cycle; and that women’s economic vulnerability is increased by lack of attention to gender equity in disaster interventions. Even as working conditions in and out of the home deteriorate, women are also drawn into paid and unpaid disaster work of all kinds, resulting in work overload and new conflicts between work and family. The broad outlines of women’s economic status are well known and critical to an accurate understanding of how disasters affect us economically (for US national census data, see Spraggins, 2005; for state-based data, see Caiazza, Shaw, and Werschkul, 2004). More women live in poverty than men in every age group, and the contours of their employment put them at high risk in recessions, contrary to the “man-cession” notion concerning the Great Recession (Hartmann, 2009, p. 8). High levels of gender and racial segregation also persist in the United States, with correspondingly large gaps in income nationally and in the South (e.g., see Willinger, 2008a, p. 39; Williams et al., 2005, p. 16). Women are at risk of economic harm long before tidal waves surge or crops are lost to drought. They are the majority of those who labor in the informal sector, without employment contracts or collective bargaining, and the majority of paid and unpaid care workers whose hands-on physical and economic support protects infants, children, seniors, and persons with disabilities in the best and worst of times. The specific economic status of different groups of women in any community is a vital part of risk assessment, challenging emer121

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gency planners to seek out gender-specific data and get to know the working women in their jurisdictions. Further, as Brenda Phillips notes (2005, p. 1): “If employers want to retain trained, valuable employees, they must understand the relationship between gender and disaster and design disaster-resilient programs for the entire workforce.” In this chapter I again introduce empirical data from published field studies conducted in the United States over the past two decades, searching out those that reveal the multifaceted nature of women’s labor in time of crisis. The chapter begins with observations about the direct and indirect economic impacts on women in differing working contexts, and then moves to work and family conflicts and other barriers to women’s postdisaster economic recovery. Finally, I offer some thoughts about women’s disaster-related occupations as “offstage” responders who labor on a different set of “front lines.”

The Economic Costs of Disasters to Women The discussion here focuses on the negative impacts of disasters on women and their work, but with an important caveat: some women do benefit economically from disasters, both directly through postdisaster employment opportunities (e.g., Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] work and social service relief work, generally reserved for college-educated women) and indirectly through an increase in business or employment opportunities in the aftermath. Economic resources provide some women with time and help. In the 1997 Red River flood, recovery was easier when funds were available for women to relocate their families to out-of-town cabins rather than FEMA trailers, or when they were able to rely on credit to refurnish homes. Affluent women also had funds to hire low-income women to help with home repairs. Waged flood-relief jobs were disproportionately available to middle-class women with formal credentials, job experience, and professional networks. For example, when an athome mother with a counseling degree grew increasingly depressed about the likely buyout and demolition of her home, family members urged her to apply for work. She did and was soon offered a full-time position: “I decided I was working too hard on the house. I also realized you can’t kill yourself by working too hard and you cannot die from sadness. So, I decided, all these people had been really good to me, I needed to do something to help. So I got a job” (Enarson, 2001, p. 12). She and others thrived, among them a woman operating a booming bed-and-breakfast serving out-of-town emergency responders, and a local woman whose flood folk art was very popular. Most women, however, reported declining incomes following the floods. Alice Fothergill (2004) found similar patterns in her Red River research, contrasting the upward mobility of some women to the more common finding of downward mobility.

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Impacts on Earnings and Working Conditions Internationally, women earning their living through home-based production or manufacturing zones dependent upon export are highly vulnerable to tornadoes, fires, or severe earthquakes that damage or destroy transportation and communication systems, international commerce, and markets. Women service workers in tourism-based employment along stormy coasts or in service and retail industries dependent upon high levels of consumption and disposable incomes are all hit by ripple effects that destroy infrastructure, housing, and markets as well as workplaces. Much the same is true in the United States. Sex-disaggregated data were rare in economic research conducted after the 1997 Red River flood in the Upper Midwestern United States. But state employment-agency data suggest obliquely that flood-related employment declined more among women than men, as women were overrepresented in the sectors most affected; flood-related employment declines in retail trade (down 14.7 percent) and service jobs (down 15.9 percent) cost women work (Job Service North Dakota, 1998). The impacts on women’s livelihoods are poorly understood. I heard often in these river towns that child care workers, like counselors, lost income because free or subsidized services were readily available to flood survivors; some older women explained they took early retirement, while others felt forced by lower income and higher expenses to postpone long-planned retirements (author interviews, 1997–1998). Like the men in their lives, women lost income when working schedules were reduced, firms closed, or staffing needs changed due to the floods. To my knowledge, however, no sex-specific statistical economic data for tracking disparate impact and recovery were gathered, an important hiatus in the research canon. Given the very high levels of female poverty along the Gulf Coast, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita are better bellwethers. Researchers have provided essential information about regional women’s education, income, employment, and family status before and after the storms, a first in US disaster studies, and continue to track changes through the long recovery period. Overall, women’s jobs in Louisiana accounted for 103,000 of the 180,000 lost (Vaill, 2006, p. 13); predictably, the research team writes (Willinger and Knight, 2011, p. 58), women of color were most hard-hit: Black/African American women in pre-Katrina New Orleans comprised 50 percent or more of the women employed in nine of the ten lowest paying jobs while White women predominated in five of the ten highest paying jobs. . . . In 2005, more than 26 percent of women in New Orleans had incomes below the poverty level; the vast majority (84.5 percent) [were] Black/African American. . . . Further, approximately 42 percent of all New Orleans female-headed families lived in poverty (compared to 29.4 percent nationally). (emphasis in original)

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Women constituted more than half the labor force of New Orleans in 2006 and 2007; unemployment rates were also high but declined somewhat after three years, especially among black women (Willinger and Knight, 2011, p. 69). Overall, women’s earnings declined by 8.2 percent in the three years after Hurricane Katrina. Higher wages paid to some classes of labor post-Katrina were not enjoyed by women: “In sum, money pouring into New Orleans for rebuilding, regardless of source, benefited White males, particularly those in management and professional occupations and sales” (p. 65). In fact, median annual earnings for white men employed full-time and year-round increased by 46 percent in the year after the storm, dropping back to an overall increase of 8 percent by 2008 (p. 72). Among women able to find full-time, year-round work, white women’s earnings increased over the recovery period, even exceeding men’s average incomes in 2008; Latinas realized an increase of 14.1 percent (p. 64), but black women’s earnings declined by 6.4 percent. Not surprisingly, the income gap persisted and widened between some groups of women. These dynamics force the conclusion that class, race, and gender inequalities are reproduced or magnified after disasters. The conclusion applies to occupations as well: “Just as the storm failed to disrupt the sex segregation of the New Orleans labor force, so too did it fail to disrupt the pre-Katrina occupational pattern between Black/African American and White women” (Willinger and Knight, 2011, p. 63). Some new earning opportunities did arise, notably among Latinas in service and administrative roles, and more work was available to Central American women who provided informal cooking and laundry services to construction workers on the scene (Ensor, 2008), but this is highly contingent labor subject to exploitation. The Immigrant Justice Project’s “Esperanza” initiative, which promotes immigrant women’s legal rights, highlighted rising reports of sexual harassment from women who came to the Gulf Coast (Redwood, 2009). Poor working conditions and underpayment are not uncommon in reconstruction work, or lack of pay altogether as “Antonia” reveals: “Every day we got to work at 7 a.m. and left at 5 p.m. There was still so much water. We began cleaning—pulling out all the filthy things that were completely wet, covered in mold. They smelled awful. . . . When my turn arrived to get my check, I’d already been working two weeks, and I was angry because I hadn’t been paid. I’d been working to make enough money in order to buy food” (Immigrant Justice Project, n.d., p. 7). Working in Mississippi, where the effects of Hurricane Katrina were often overlooked, Ophera Davis (n.d.) interviewed a purposive sample of twenty-five women, mainly African American and all with relatively high levels of education and the jobs to match. Her work was conducted in Harrison County, which hosted more casinos than another part of the Gulf Coast before the storm; virtually half of all employed women worked in either the entertainment or tourism sector. Both were hit hard by the storm, with one in four jobs in these sectors

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lost. Among this group of professional women, 60 percent were unemployed in the first month after the storm; three months later, ten more women had lost their jobs and two had been given notice. The great majority of those left without incomes were between ages thirty-five and fifty-nine—at the peak of their potential earning curve, auguring poorly for the economic recovery of the region. Davis heard from some that the storm spurred long-postponed career changes or forced early retirement. As I had also observed earlier regarding the Grand Forks flood, many of these middle-class women found work with FEMA to tide them over, but such work is only temporary (author interviews, 1997– 1998). New work roles do emerge for women after disasters, though no long-term research has been conducted to my knowledge to track these roles over time, for example in openings for women in construction jobs post-9/11 (Sullivan, 2004). Disasters are unlikely to keep the proverbial window of opportunity propped open for long. Increasing numbers of women in first-response professions and in professional roles related to emergency management are a better barometer, less tied to specific events. I consider these trends in Chapter 11. Impacts on Home-Based and Self-Employed Women Earners Home-based work is increasing across the globe and in US homes, with rising numbers of men as well as women engaged in a wide range of income-earning activities, professional and nonprofessional, in their own homes and in the homes of others (e.g., Boris and Prugel, 1996). Women’s home-based work includes personal services such as beauty and massage; child care, including infant, toddler, and after-school child care; professional services such as physical therapy and transcription typing; independent professional work conducted by writers, journalists, academics, attorneys, health professionals; a host of new “telecommuters” who engage long-distance with colleagues in central hubs; and production of goods such as food for contract or private sale to consumers. From street venders selling homemade foods to home-based service workers and professionals, women regularly lose income when their homes are flooded, toppled, or burned. Damage to home working space can threaten a woman’s livelihood by destroying the one site over which she exercises some control. Residences may be uninhabitable, too uncomfortable, or nonfunctional for work, or simply inaccessible due to damage to transportation systems; disrupted markets, loss of clients or customers, as well as damage to equipment, supplies, or inventory can all be expected. The new and pressing needs of family and kin may also make home-based earnings impossible. Consider domestic work. Throughout the United States, a host of women leave their own residences early every morning for a shift as cleaners, home health aides, and child care providers. Some women also provide live-in do-

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mestic work at a second residence, subjecting the poor to a perverse double jeopardy when a tornado or flood destroys both working places. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild (2003) write on the new global economy of care work that brings women from developing countries to the most affluent US town homes and sprawling suburban ranch homes. In the event of a catastrophic event or lesser emergency, women’s exposure to economic harm is not equal in these homes. Immigrant women home-workers servicing affluent Americans are likely to experience secondary unemployment if housing is destroyed or if family life is reconfigured in the aftermath, and may also endure direct losses to their own homes and property. In these transnational families, a disaster can have far-reaching gender effects when women are unable to return remittances to support children and parents in their countries of origin. Decisions around evacuation certainly complicate women’s ability to earn at home. In North Dakota during the Red River flood, reports of lost workspace, tools, supplies, and equipment were common: “When we heard that Lincoln dike had broke, we all called my sister to say we’d come over and get trucks and we would move everything out of their home. And [my brother-in-law] just refused. He said, ‘It’s not going to flood. We’re all right.’ He just absolutely— and she had a business down in her basement and she wanted to get all that stuff and he just, he refused” (Enarson, 2000a, p. 11). I found in North Dakota that family child care providers estimated that their pre-flood earnings had contributed one-third of their total household income before the flood and virtually nothing after it, due to the location of child care space in easily flooded basements (Enarson 2000a). External funds for emergency child care assistance helped parents but further hurt providers economically. In a similar vein, Katrina volunteer Annette Marquis (Gehman, 2011, p. 30) shared the story of a distraught woman displaced by the hurricane: “[She] worked as a live-in care giver to an elderly woman. The house where she was living was destroyed and the person she was caring for moved in with relatives. Like countless others, suddenly [she] had no place to live, no job, and no hope of getting a FEMA trailer.” More positively, the services of a full-time homemaker in a Midwestern host family enabled one mother I met in North Dakota to move her home business into the basement of her host family following the 1997 flood: “We set up a phone and computer for me at a desk. . . . I asked if we could take turns cooking and cleaning so I could pitch in. It turned out that she cooked and I kept the rooms clean. She doesn’t work, she’s at home all day” (author interviews, 1997– 1998). Home-based or not, most women-owned or -operated businesses function on a small margin with relatively high failure rates, rarely employing other people (see Willinger, 2008a, p. 46, for the case of Louisiana). University of North Dakota researchers found in a survey of short-term flood effects on small businesses in 1997 that those owned by women had disproportionately high failure rates; 22.9 percent of the women who owned or managed small busi-

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ness, compared to 11.2 percent of the men, were not doing business some two months after the Red River flood (Staples and Stubbings, 1998). The characteristics of women-owned businesses, which are generally smaller and less well-capitalized than those owned by men, put them at increased risk of failure in disasters. As a survey of businesses after a series of hurricanes hit North Carolina revealed: “Women and Minority Owned Businesses with 10 or fewer staff are disproportionately likely to experience physical damages, be forced to close as a result of a natural disaster, experience problems with infrastructure like electricity, water and phone, and be forced to lay off employees” (Wilson et al., p. 6). Lack of insurance was identified as a particular area of concern. Years earlier, sociologists Joanne Nigg and Kathleen Tierney (1990) found that women’s businesses were also at a disadvantage in federal disaster relief programs for small businesses. The particular vulnerabilities of women-owned or -managed businesses affected by disasters warrant attention, whether these are small operations, major corporations, or family-run businesses. Impacts on Resource-Based Livelihoods Women’s roles in resource-dependent economies are readily obscured both before and after a disastrous event. In the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, relief agencies struck by graphic images of fishermen unable to fish without their boats moved quickly to meet this need, though the markets through which women sold the fish and earned their living were also severely disrupted (Oxfam International, 2005). Still reeling from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, many thousands of fishing families already on the edge may not make it through the 2010 BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the socioeconomic effects of which are as difficult to track as its environmental impacts. Indigenous women such as those in the Grand Bayou, Louisiana, area were quick to speak out about the assault on traditional livelihoods and hence on their survival as a people (for example, in the YouTube video Gulf Coast Oil Disaster: One Family’s Plight, and see Peterson and Krajeski, 2011). One-third of the fishing families along the Gulf have Vietnamese origins, and most depend on a sustainable seafood industry to earn their living. In addition to fishing, this involves women in shucking oysters, packing shrimp, and operating small restaurants and personal-service enterprises. Will financial compensation schemes recognize women’s secondary unemployment in hairdressing, nail salons, and other female-operated businesses, also experiencing severe declines? As they wait, levels of stress, conflict, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, and all the other risks attendant on economic viability in a resource-dependent community are rising. Resource-dependent communities are highly vulnerable to fluctuating markets and unsustainable production, with many families relying on income from both partners to compensate for the instability. Disasters increase the strain on women and force difficult decisions. Even before a disaster, women work long

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and hard, as described by this male informant in Manitoba who saw rural communities hit by the “creeping” economic disaster of “mad cow” disease. When men migrated out, for example to the oil fields of Alberta, women stepped up: And so they already had ten hats on and now they’re doing the main job as well. . . . And [men] are away for weeks at a time and the women are in the barns in the morning and they’re getting the kids ready for school and that’s where the kids really suffer. . . . She’s the one that gets the phone calls from the bank. . . . I’d say probably in 85 to 90% of all farming operations, the wives probably are the ones that do the books. . . . So the stress is on her. (Enarson et al., 2007)

Many households in mining or timber communities would recognize themselves in this observation. Further north, along the Alaska coast where Native communities continue to live today with the presence of Exxon Valdez oil and everything else the spill left behind, the stakes were just as high, as recalled by this commercial fisherwoman: “Do you completely cut your losses, get out of fishing, and find a new career? I went through hell and this huge identity crisis in my mid-30s trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Then I found fishing and I loved it. I was finally doing something I really wanted to be doing. I invested all my money in it” (Ritchie, 2004, p. 347). Paid agricultural labor, female and male, is also impacted. Women who return year after year to North Dakota from Texas to harvest the potato crop were unable to find housing during the year of the Red River flood, as I learned from migrant-worker advocates in Grand Forks (author interviews, 1997–1998). Depressed wages and economic pressures drove other Minnesotans and North Dakotans into the same thrift shops migrant women relied upon for cooking utensils, clothing, and other household items, all scarce after the floods. The disaster added to migrant women’s already large work load. An increasingly uncertain climate and the effects of global warming clearly jeopardize women’s livelihoods. Interviewed in small villages in Labrador by Sandra Owens (2005), with support from Health Canada, First Nations women elders described being no longer able to gather and process the foods that traditionally sustained their families, and facing the resistance of their husbands to new foods. In the very different context of Australian farmers striving to earn a living in a decades-long drought, we learn of women forced to take work off-farm and suffering increased emotional stress and physical violence (e.g., Stehlick, Lawrence, and Gray, 2000). In the United States during the Dust Bowl, the harsh conditions endured by homesteaders on the Great American Plains are legendary—and a cautionary note for us today. Families and new towns for miles around were displaced as a result of unsustainable land use, drought, and other factors, with devastating results. Homemaking in the Dust Bowl was a daily struggle: Keeping the dust out was impossible. Even fresh-cleaned clothes, hanging outside to dry on the line, were at risk. When a duster rushed through, she had

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to hurry and get the laundry off the line, because there was usually just enough oil in the blowing sand to soil the clothes. Lizzie swept five, six times a day. She had her boys shovel dust in the morning, after it piled up outside the door. . . . The dust arrived in mysterious ways. It could penetrate like a spirit, cascading down the walls or slithering along the ceiling until it found an opening. Of course she taped windows and doors, draped everything in wet sheets, turned the pots over, covered the sink. (Egan, 2006, p. 179)

Barriers to Women’s Recovery Not realizing the interdependencies of men’s and women’s work or the extent of women’s economic insecurity, and in the absence of the sex-disaggregated data necessary for gender analysis, economists rarely document the particular impacts of disaster on women or their economic recovery. Some barriers to recovery can be extrapolated from narrative accounts and quantitative data, where available. The single-minded focus on such indicators as economic growth, gross domestic product, business closures, or employment rates emphasizes the formal economy and hence men’s jobs. But women work more often in the contingent labor force and informal economy. This makes it even more difficult to recognize or value the work women do in their homes or in communities, including in postdisaster financial relief for those who are killed or disabled. Economic recovery projects typically focus on men’s job losses in maledominated workplaces. This derives from the obvious demand for construction labor, but jobs and occupations dominated by women are also hard-hit. Disparities in financial compensation schemes after 9/11 prompted Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney of New York to protest the use of income data that minimized the economic value of women’s substantial unpaid domestic labor. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) specialist Jacqui Patterson (2011) investigated gendered impacts on women following the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In one workplace, managers told her that just 10 women were employed in a workforce of 300, a pattern that changed only when women complained and the NAACP contacted contractors with their concerns. Patterson further reported that women-owned businesses were awarded less than 3 percent of post-spill contracts going to small businesses ($4.9 million out of a total of $181.4 million awarded). Work and Family Conflicts Ruptures in the dependent care systems that tenuously support women’s family work and employment delay women’s return to paid work. When held responsible for managing the socioemotional and bureaucratic tasks of recovery, they may cope by cutting back on working hours or leaving the paid labor force temporarily, unlike their husbands or partners. Susanna Hoffman (1998) found

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this in the case of the 1991 fires in Berkeley and Oakland, California, among a highly educated and affluent population where insurance checks were made out only in men’s names. In the 1997 Red River flood, women were as likely as men to continue working through evacuation as the floodwaters moved north to rural Manitoba, but women were also more likely than men to lose work in the first place due to flooded workplaces, and to have caregiving responsibilities that competed with their paid jobs. In most households, income dropped because women voluntarily used vacation time, cut back on work hours, or extended maternity leave to make daily life easier while the evacuated family stayed in temporary accommodations. One wife I interviewed “chose” to quit a high-level job to care for her husband, and eventually found a more routine job closer to home so she could connect with her husband, who was both ill and profoundly depressed. Another woman was fired for caring for a young relative during their evacuation to a Winnipeg hotel rather than reporting to work (Enarson and Scanlon, 1999; see also Pardee, 2009, for a similar case from Katrina). These dilemmas were repeated many times over in the hard times following Hurricane Katrina, as displaced mothers sought to help their children adjust while also earning money to support them (e.g., Tobin-Gurley, Peek, and Loomis, 2010). Keeping the family afloat takes precedence in disasters. It is never easy and sometimes overwhelming, as this employed mother in Grand Forks revealed about the Red River flood: “And there are some days, you know, I become immobilized and I just have to sit there and can’t even do anything because there’s so many things to do you just don’t know where to start.” Another confided: “I remember there was a couple of times of just nights of just crying. . . . Because there was eight hours of work and then there was eight hours of paperwork when I came home, let alone a two year old and a little step son” (author interviews, 1997–1998). Conflicting demands of family and employer are stressful for all. A retirement-aged hospital worker in Grand Forks reported having to bring along her husband, still weak from recent surgery, when she was called back to work during the 1997 floods. Another older Grand Forks woman, whose company relocated their head office, had to leave behind her stricken husband and drive back and forth during the “summer that wasn’t.” Commuting caused by relocated jobs and workplaces was especially hard for the following low-income single mother, a Latina new to Grand Forks: I got a FEMA home in Crookston—you know, when my job is in Grand Forks, 24 miles away. And here I’m taking medication because I was in a car accident. . . . So I found myself almost killing myself like three times before I decided uh-huh, I’m not going to live out here. And then leaving my kids behind? I was working four to midnight so it was kind of tough on me. I had to leave for home at three and I’m not even home by the time my kids get home from school. (Enarson, 2001, p. 7)

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Overtime may be required of employees following disasters, including of women with specialized knowledge of office equipment and administrative procedures. Longer and more difficult commutes are commonplace. These factors emerge frequently when women in disasters are asked about tensions between work roles and family needs. Time is always at a premium for women in the “juggling act” of work and family. At a minimum, women who take on a second shift before and after disaster face hard choices about how to use their time, as this realtor revealed at a focus group in Grand Forks: “I’m relocating, resetting up an office of clients and absorbing existing clients. . . . No one can go home and get rest, because you go home to more work. It’s like it’s never ending for many people. . . . I can’t capture enough time to get the work done at my office or the work at the house. And my son got engaged at Christmas [groans all around the table]. We have to get the basement ready for relatives” (author interviews, 1997–1998). When the interests of family and employer collide, the conflicts can be stark. A research team (O’Sullivan and Amaratunga, 2009) who conducted focus groups across Canada with nurses treating cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) learned that these nurses, especially those with children at home, had been pressured by spouses and boyfriends not to report when called to work. Knowing of the illness and death from SARS that health professionals were experiencing, this thought was never far from nurses’ minds. An important question, as yet not significantly explored by hospitals and care facilities, is whether or to what extent those who provide essential health care (for example, in a national flu epidemic) will respond when called, if they are also parents. Will this vary by sex? Work and family conflicts in emergency management were of interest to earlier generations of disaster scholars with respect to men, when most male employees were supported by “full-time” wives. Women’s behind-thescenes family labor still plays an important enabling function today, but is complicated by their own employment. Disasters vastly complicate domestic labor and care work, as elaborated in Chapter 7, and create new tasks when women must seek assistance from external agencies such as FEMA or the Red Cross. In virtually every US disaster, women’s time and savvy have been the building blocks of recovery. Without their flexible work schedules and their willingness to put family concerns first, disaster assistance would be vastly more difficult to access. Disaster relief resources are available through FEMA and other government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, faith-based networks, private funders, and community networks. But only those who can negotiate the system, have some degree of control over their time, and can tap into useful social networks can effectively access this system (Tobin-Gurley, Peek, and Loomis, 2010; Sterrett, 2011; Pardee, 2009). Employers provide varying levels of support to workers during natural disasters and other social crises. In the United States during the Red River Valley floods, many public and some private employers provided continuous salary

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and benefits for several weeks while workplaces remained closed, but less so for working-class women in low-wage manual jobs, part-time workers, and women in the informal sector (Enarson, 2001; Fothergill, 2004). Flextime and flexplace policies, again more available to professional women employed in universities and state bureaucracies, helped women do their jobs and still complete the flood of paperwork, meet insurance adjusters at home, and take children to counselors. Gender-focused researchers find that women more than men strive to manage the “paper flood” of disaster. Wives and daughters typically register the household for assistance before evacuation, deal in person and by telephone with relief agencies, pursue damage claims processed through the local emergency management office, contact private agencies like the Red Cross, and otherwise pursue the frustrating “treasure search” for relief monies. The process is grueling, as revealed by this Canadian woman who was “still fighting the flood” three years after the Red River flooded: I’m the one that can figure out how to keep all the finances going and our heads above water. When it came to all the flood stuff, my husband just walked away from it. It’s been me that’s been with [the Emergency Management Organization] and Water Resources, with everybody. . . . Before we returned, I hired everybody. I had everybody all lined up and ready to go. So I’ve done all the contractors, coordinated everybody, and I’ve decided I’ve had enough for now. I’m also on the North Ritchot Flood Restoration Committee. (Grant and Higgitt, 2001, p. 15)

Paradoxically, women’s own interests are often neglected in relief programs. Examining severe storms in Louisiana in the late 1990s, Cheryl Childers (1999) found that low-income elderly women were disproportionately in greater need of postdisaster economic assistance but less likely to receive it. Damage to women’s home-based workplaces went uncompensated, I learned through interviews with flooded North Dakota providers (1997–1998). Strict regulations about when and why home space qualifies as business space can preclude businesses activities, such as child care, that spill across boundaries. Economic recovery projects ostensibly targeting “youths” hit by disasters undermine the recovery of teenaged girls when these are narrowly designed and promote mainly male-dominated disaster relief jobs in construction, debris removal, or landscaping. Lack of Child and Dependent Care When parents, and especially mothers, are unable to return to paid work because child care networks are disrupted, psychological as well as economic strain increases. The well-being of infants and young children may suffer, though this is an underexamined research question. Paid caregivers who are

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struggling to get back on their feet also lose much-needed income. Lack of child care may further limit mothers from either joining the volunteer relief effort or accessing much-needed disaster relief themselves in the aftermath. Much the same can be said of disrupted or destroyed centers in which dependent senior adults spend their days, halfway homes or transitional houses for disturbed teens, or community facilities serving persons with disabilities. Schools and child care centers, health clinics, outreach literacy, health, and nutrition programs, community organizations, neighborhood centers, and cooperatives are all vital parts of the national “system” supporting employed mothers and their children in the United States. However creatively pieced together, this patchwork quilt of care work is fragile in the best of times and unravels quickly in natural disasters. What happens when all major roads are impassable, no electricity or running water is available, our children cannot be reached, and our partners cannot come home? How does the child care facility fare? Where does the care provider take the children? How can the provider be contacted? What happens when relief workers and volunteers cannot find child care or communicate with their families? Whether we consider child care from the perspective of providers, parents, relief workers, or children, disaster child care is a major concern in a nation that values the safety and well-being of women and families in crisis. Interviews with family day care providers in Miami in the wake of Hurricane Andrew revealed the substructure of caregiving in a US disaster (Morrow and Enarson, 1996). The hurricane left families with children in the hard-hit southern part of the city more dependent than ever on caregivers in the north, where homes were relatively unaffected. One woman recalled desperate parents making their way through debris, hastily dropping off children and perhaps a bag of ice on their way. She had to get to her job in the northern suburbs and had to have child care to do so. Too often, these obvious dilemmas are overlooked. When the Red River flooded, North Dakota census data indicated that two-thirds of the women of Grand Forks were employed, including 74 percent of those with children younger than age six. Most were employed in the service and retail sectors, and in nearly one in ten of these homes (9.5 percent) the income of a single mother supported the family (Enarson, 2001). These families are especially in need of continued child care support just when it is disrupted. For example, when the residents of Grand Forks, North Dakota, and East Grand Forks, Minnesota, were evacuated overnight after floodwaters rose unexpectedly, they suffered the immediate loss of 5,000 licensed child care providers, keeping countless employed mothers at home. Business leaders, elected officials, employed mothers, and child care advocates all concurred that business recovery was delayed due to the flooding of child care centers and child care providers’ homes. A manager of a North Dakota state agency explained to me how she had immediately brought in trailers and staff to provide on-site child care for her predominantly female staff. All were heav-

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ily impacted themselves but were also urgently needed at work to assist others. While her on-the-spot decision helped, contingency planning to provide child care to women in emergency relief roles would have helped more. As the designated emergency response officer, she was responsible for relocating the most vulnerable clients, setting up alternative communication systems, assessing countywide damages, and contracting needed services to support her employees. Though child care had not been included in the emergency plan (“we would never have guessed”), immediately after the flood she contracted out-of-town caregivers for five weeks of on-site employee child care. Another mother remarked, looking back: “The general business sense, the Chamber of Commerce, never thought about child care—it hadn’t registered with them, wasn’t an issue. All of a sudden, right after the flood when businesses were trying desperately to get their employees back, it hit them square in the face. Because that’s when [they realized] there was no child care” (author interviews, 1997–1998). Disruptions in child care are all the more profound in large metropolitan areas, like New Orleans. Some four years after Katrina (October 2009), only half as many child care centers were open as before the hurricane (151 versus 275), Beth Willinger and Janna Knight reported (2011, p. 62). Despite the many hurdles to their gaining employment and affordable housing, decent health care and functioning public transportation, neighborhoods with adequate food sources, operating schools, and (perhaps most important) neighbors, mothers are returning to New Orleans, though at a slower rate than other women. Among those who had managed to return, 69 percent of women in the city with children under eighteen were in the labor force in 2006 and 70 percent in 2008, not much lower than the prestorm pattern of 77 percent in 2005 (Willinger and Knight, 2011, p. 63). The figures are testament to these mothers’ grim economic situation or perhaps more to their heartfelt determination to make New Orleans home again. In their interviews with parents affected by Hurricane Katrina, Lori Peek and Alice Fothergill (2008) learned that lack of child care both delayed their return to the Gulf Coast and made their displacement vastly more difficult. In one case, they learned that child care subsidies from Louisiana were not available to low-income parents who lacked jobs, at least in the city of Lafayette. While some of the fathers they interviewed or heard about through women tried earnestly to help, the need to earn income generally kept men away, in the familiar global pattern of male migration for economic survival. The formal and informal networks through which we care for the young are both vulnerable to the effects of hazards and disasters and an essential link in the recovery chain. But the physical sites of care work for dependents are not consistently hardened against the effects of various hazards, nor do all agencies or providers plan ahead for emergencies. Preparedness is increasing, however; the Office of Child Care in the US Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families now offers valuable guidance. Ellen Junn and Diana Guerin (1996) describe both gaps and progress in preparedness

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in California child care centers before standards were developed, such as those proposed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Public Health Association, and National Resource Center for Health and Safety in Child Care (see resources on the website of the National Child Care Information and Technical Information Center: http://nccic.acf.hhs.gov). But care work is diffuse and decentralized, far below the radar screen of enforceable standards in the absence of persuasive outreach to providers, especially in the vast informal sector.

Women’s Backstage Disaster Work and Occupational Roles Wanting to know more about how women’s work was affected by the Red River flood, and how women responded to it, I organized focus groups at six, twelve, and eighteen months after the flood crest, speaking with over seventy women (Enarson, 2001). These conversations demonstrated how varied women’s disaster work is, including how it varies in social visibility. I also learned that this work is more like than unlike women’s everyday work; that is, women were more socially present when appealing for help in relief centers than as agency administrators, more likely to work for free than for money, and more often worked alongside other women than in mixed-sex settings. Although emergency work of all kinds falls more to impacted residents than to professionals (male or female), men more often than women are employed in the acclaimed roles on the “front lines.” Men are highly visible in their roles as firefighters, elected officials, and certified emergency managers. Their voices are the ones we hear in a crisis, and again in the aftermath when researchers and analysts publish. But behind the scenes, traditionally female occupations such as primary school teaching, counseling, and community work draw many women into disaster work. These activities, paid and unpaid, make them effective, comprehensive, and sustained disaster responders, distinguishing them from men, who often work intensely over a short period of time. It bears noting that “women’s disaster work” is a social category that can be filled by men as well as women, thinking for instance of men in social service agencies or grassroots health clinics serving the disaster-affected poor. For the most part, however, and reflecting the pre- and postdisaster shape of the labor force, it is women who do this work. Just as they strive to protect their households against impending damage, women workers (like men) help prepare their workplaces, too. With Red River waters rising and flooding clearly imminent, women helped protect working spaces, supplies, and equipment as much as possible; later, they helped relocate and repair damaged workplaces. In Grand Forks, for instance, the art museum director worked with just one other helper to move all the original artwork

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to the relative safety of her own home—and then back again. Much of women’s workplace preparedness is familiar; it entails labor that is physically demanding (cleaning muddied offices, discarding destroyed materials, relocating offices), and also entails organizational change (locating new workspace, redistributing work responsibilities, coordinating workplace reconstruction). For women, especially, it is likely to include interpersonal work as well, housing evacuated coworkers or locating displaced customers, clients, and patients. Echoing debates between women and men at home, gender differences at work were evident in the Grand Forks flood. Two businesswomen new to the area lost their downtown store and inventory when they relied on the advice of a long-term businessman who assured them (“Don’t worry about it, girls”) that only water in the basement was likely. In another case, an agency administrator argued with her regional male supervisor about preparedness. He was unwilling to move their office temporarily to safer ground outside the downtown area and resisted her idea of having office calls forwarded to her home, located in a nearby town well out of danger. As she explained, she eventually made independent decisions: So we pretty much dropped it, and without listening to [him] I said, “OK, here’s the deal.” We left—we have one laptop computer—I took it. We loaded our database on a computer. We have a portable printer to go with it. We left with phone books in hand, with reprinted copies of all our lists and phone numbers. . . . It was myself and [the other worker] that’s been here for a long time saying, “Well, what’s the deal? If we plan and we don’t need it, no big deal. But if we don’t plan, we’re stuck.” (Enarson, 2001, p. 8)

After the fact, women were drawn into relief work through their jobs and occupations. At the local art museum, the director provided grants to impacted artists and arranged art shows on flood themes, but she also used museum space to bring people together (e.g., weddings, potluck suppers for displaced residents, community group meetings), and initiated an oral history project on the flood. The city’s female mayor reported personally following up with suicidal residents and distributing funds to needy individuals. Similarly, a woman I interviewed whose work was lay ministry had initiated support groups for survivors but also began searching out and counseling distressed people in public places like relief lines and grocery stores. Women with artistic talents interpreted the event in their fabric art, music, and poetry, in one case “flooding” the community with a popular folk art motif celebrating faith, hope, and resilience. As in many US communities, I expect, women in Grand Forks were highly involved in musical programming at area schools, a natural base for their subsequent efforts to help students and parents come to terms with the flood through music. I emphasize the multidimensional nature of women’s work-based responses to this US disaster to highlight the significance of their behind-thescenes efforts.

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Few researchers have heard women speak to the work they do for money, for love, for their employers and employees, for their neighbors, for other women in their communities, and of course for those in their families and kin networks. Here is one story offered by a rural woman in a professional role in Grand Forks: I never knew when I walked in my door who was coming out of my shower, who was using my laundry, or how many people I was going to feed that night when I came home. I had people in and out. . . . Right after the flood hit us, I was the only one here in the office on the [day] when we were told to evacuate, because everyone else was trying to save their house. But I lived out of town, I knew I could come in and man the phones at that point in time. We shut down not even a week. . . . My phone would ring from 6 am until 11 pm: What do I do? How do I do it? That was weeks of that, plus having people with you and trying to locate people—trying to find people—family, employees, we didn’t know where everybody was. . . . I have two children. They were able to stay in the school system, so that helps for them. I ran around doing a lot of co-counselor stuff for the rural school systems, developing this [handbook] and taking that out to them. . . . So I did a lot of that work out of my home, because I didn’t have an office. Luckily, I had computers and phone lines. . . .We were also trying to put in a crop, because we farm. So here we are trying to get into the field when it’s wet—we farm about 25–30 acres, so it’s not a small place. I don’t do a lot with the physical things, but the bookkeeping and some of the managerial decisions. So we’re trying to do all that—very little sleep. . . . I had the men living with me. . . . They were tired by the time they came back, so I always had the meals ready to go, not knowing what time they were coming—and I never knew when they were going to be there. Some were [from the emergency operations center], some had gotten back into their homes but they needed showers. I washed their clothes for them . . . hot meals . . . trying to help them through. (Enarson, 2001, p. 5)

Women’s Care Work in Disasters: Occupational Work Offstage Caregiving occupations draw on women’s life experiences, social networks, and skills to provide essential (if offstage) support to impacted residents. To illustrate this point, in the following profiles from the Red River flood, I explore nursing, teaching, child care, and crisis work in some detail, concluding with observations about women emergency managers. In addition to the jobs profiled here, women from nonprofit agencies visited the housebound, took care of infants and the dying, and counseled distressed survivors; managers sought human service disaster grants and worked hard to design, staff, implement, and evaluate recovery programs, all the time working in half-repaired homes themselves. Too little is yet known, in my view, of how women in the private sector, especially upper-level female managers, technical professionals, and business owners, apply their talents and resources to respond and help others recover. We

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would know more were businesswomen’s associations to become more involved in disaster resilience. Close Up: Health Care Nurses have been identified as key disaster responders who increasingly call for training and education in emergency preparedness (Mailey, 2002; Amaratunga et al., 2008; Berggren, 2005). They were immediately drawn into key roles in the Grand Forks flood. In addition to primary care in clinics and emergency shelters, they helped evacuate nursing home patients and locate relatives of displaced patients. In the emergency shelters, one respondent told me she felt the local knowledge of health workers was as valuable as the skills of military men “in a truck and a uniform,” adding: “And then they’d call Hazel at her house and say, ‘Hazel, why are you still in your home? You know there’s been an evacuation. Hazel, someone in a truck and a uniform is going to come and get you. Please put your medicine in a bag.’ . . . What would have happened to those older folks if they remained in their home, just stayed there?” (Enarson, 2001, p. 10). Like men who put emergency response before family needs (Dynes, 1986), women put flood victims first when they could, as many employers noted: “They were losing their homes also but they stayed with the folks they felt responsible for” (Enarson, 2001, p. 18). Birth, illness, and death are constants throughout disasters, and women health professionals provided uninterrupted care. Low-income women employed as home health workers were essential links during the flood for the many frail elderly women who depended on their daily care. Similarly, the administrator of a hospice facility remembered “parttime” contract nurses who worked around the clock to locate and treat their displaced patients. In one family, a hospice nurse was married to a National Guardsman who was busy patrolling dikes, so the couple sent their six-year-old to grandparents out-of-town, and “pieced together” child care for their toddler. On call for two weeks until her coworkers returned, the nurse packed along her young daughter on these long drives around the country to treat terminally ill patients. Across the border in a Canadian ice storm, home nurses provided emergency health care to isolated and frail elderly residents whose needs might otherwise have gone unnoticed and who depended on caregivers who knew where they were (Sibbald, 1998). We might find the same in the United States if we work with public health care providers to document and support their efforts in disasters, as I hope we do. Looking at historical accounts of the 1918 influenza pandemic (the “Spanish flu”) in Canada, researchers found that young women were recruited to nurse the ill and dying when war took men away (Scanlon and McMahon, 2009), just as they would be recruited years later to factory work (“Rosie the Riveter”). Without these volunteers, among them many educated

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women who were underemployed in that era, the toll from the pandemic would arguably have been much higher. The same can be said of men, whose efforts were concentrated in body disposal and burial. Close Up: Crisis Workers Crisis workers in grassroots agencies who help victims of violence, the predisaster homeless, displaced migrant workers, the suicidal, and the chronically ill or hungry in flood contexts are not identified or materially supported as emergency responders. In the local antiviolence agency I visited in Grand Forks, female staff and volunteers responded to increased numbers of women at risk following the Red River flood even as they struggled to get their own lives back on track. Without the use of the shelter their clients had shared with homeless women, they worked shorthanded and moved their office repeatedly as demand for their services increased. In work that was already emotionally demanding before the crisis, they now counseled women who had been forced to return to abusers due to lack of alternate housing, and placed women and children into crowded motel rooms instead of a full-service shelter. Their media and political work increased dramatically when domestic violence agencies, which were not seen as engaged in “flood relief,” were threatened with cutbacks by foundations that were redirecting their donations to flood work. Later, the antiviolence agency launched a capital campaign to build a dedicated shelter for battered women, and planned through the state coalition to offer domestic violence training to emergency management professionals. In hard-hit New Orleans, where virtually every domestic violence agency was forced to close after Katrina, new possibilities arose for managers and advocates to reimagine their place in the community and how and why they delivered services, but nothing about this was easy. Bethany Brown (2010, p. 170) captured some of this in conversations with an agency director who spoke passionately about her staff in this time of crisis: You look into the faces of the other two staff people who are there with you. Shell-shocked, these women are. And you are too. But you see traces of determination, lines that seem to say, “We came back because we are survivors and we believe in survivors. We came back to reclaim out work and our lives.” You hug. You breathe life and encouragement into one another. You are determined to bring life back into the building, into the abyss of desolation.

Close Up: Educators and Child Care Providers In Grand Forks during the 1997 Red River flooding, family day care providers took displaced clients into their homes, transported their children and counseled them later, and, most important, reopened their home businesses as quickly as possible. Lines are blurred between paid child care and family space and equip-

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ment, so loans to replace business losses were not fully available to providers, and many family day care homes in the Grand Forks region never reopened. Many factors contributed to these closures, as this single mother of two young children explained: We moved nine times in April! . . . And I changed my job, which was a plus but financially it’s bad, really bad. . . . I was a child care provider, in their home. I was in my home [before the flood]. Then [the parents] offered their home and I did it in their home, and then I did a little bit in the FEMA [trailer] but—it was just overwhelming and I was getting so stressed out I wanted to just sleep after the kids would leave. (Enarson, 2001, p. 19)

Child care centers and providers were assisted by their professional associations. In one agency, the (predominantly female) staff crossed the rising Red River many times the day it crested, transporting extra supplies to emergency child care centers being set up around the city. Later, they developed public education materials about child abuse and neglect in disasters, wrote grants to help replace lost toys, and offered specialized workshops. Teachers of older children were also responders on a different “front line,” as the Red River flooding occurred during the school year. They were instrumental in moving school supplies to safety, salvaging children’s school projects, locating and sometimes housing displaced students, clearing flood debris from classrooms, and integrating flood issues into their teaching over the next year. When a closely knit neighborhood lost the local school that many residents and their children had attended, the school’s principal spearheaded a closing ceremony involving elected officials, current and retired teachers, and students and parents. A similar refrain appears in accounts from teachers and grateful parents in Miami following Hurricane Andrew of 1992: Some sort of normalcy returned to my life when I reported to work. The tired faces of our faculty reported to the smelly, puddle-filled Homestead Senior High School cafeteria just two weeks after the storm. If those first few weeks had been difficult though, it was nothing like the months to follow. As a hurricane victim, I faced my own loss . . . but as a teacher, I had to leave my personal sorrows behind and face my classes of tired, mournful, and bewildered students. . . . Perhaps it was seeing my students’ difficulties that gave me the strength to get up every morning, take a cold shower by candlelight, and report to work. . . . In the aftermath of the hurricane I found a source of strength and power of survival that I hold within myself and because of that I am a stronger person today. (Colina, 1998, p. 181)

No less essential for being out of the spotlight, women’s organized work through their jobs and professions demonstrably advances disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Knowing what puts women at risk economically in a disaster-prone region is a critical first step to effective mitigation and long-term recovery for affected households and the community at large,

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but knowing what they are able to do, the capacities and resources they can provide, is just as important for emergency planning. We must know under what conditions women will report to work in our hospitals and government offices, our nonprofits and local businesses, and whether they will stay to drive people to safety in the school bus or search out their mothers and fathers in the assisted-living center across town instead. We must know what hurdles they will encounter, and what will help them reduce or overcome these obstacles.

Conclusion Despite the cultural fiction of women as homemakers and helpmates to male earners, they are important economic actors in every US town, city, and suburb from coast to coast. Their hands-on relief work, and the roles they play through traditionally female occupations, are not incidental to disaster recovery, but structurally support it. The United States cannot move forward in a crisis without women. Restoring economic resources and capacities is a necessary but not sufficient step toward long-term disaster recovery for women and their families. Women around the world need family-friendly work policies, health care, child care assistance, and related social policies to support them in their roles as emergency responders and rebuilders. The large gaps in predisaster or “normal” times become gaping holes during disasters as women and the children they support “fall through the cracks” economically, time and time again. Without sustained attention to the impacts of disasters on women and their work, disaster interventions may leave women more economically vulnerable to the effects of subsequent disasters and their households less able to withstand future economic strains or shocks, as well as reducing the resilience of neighborhoods and businesses across the nation. It is imperative that we avoid this.

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ith each new disaster the United States endures, I see more clearly the impatience, determination, and frustration of American women. From Katrina, I hold dear the haunting photo of a young black mother clutching a baby tightly to her chest, surrounded by the chaos of a relief center and looking directly at the camera—not with tears but anger. I listen closely when “victims” like her speak out on film, in books, in the blogosphere, or most recently in playhouses that showcase works such as Eve Ensler’s post-Katrina play Swimming Upstream: A Testimony, a Prayer, a Hallelujah, an Incantation. Is women’s passion the cauldron from which disaster resilience will be realized in this country? American women bring a lifetime of social networks, coping strategies, occupational resources, and interpersonal skills to social crises of all kinds—and a lot of patience and creativity, too. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of how women use these assets for the general good in disasters, one woman at a time. This leads to a typology of the organized and collective work women undertake on behalf of others in disaster contexts, efforts that are grounded in service and faith, feminism, and social justice. These are no less important than the larger effort contributed by women in traditional disaster volunteer roles, but not as fully appreciated. Finally, I consider a number of women’s initiatives arising in the aftermath of disasters, which help reduce vulnerability to future disasters. The discussion highlights differences in women’s collective responses to disaster and raises questions about organizational characteristics that promote sustained work around disaster risk reduction.

Women’s Leadership in Voluntary Relief and Recovery Work Making room for one more at the table, pitching in to raise money or distribute relief goods, and working the phone lines are important, but the action verbs of 143

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women’s volunteerism are “listening,” “touching,” “sharing,” “waiting,” “caring.” Our sisters, mothers, and friends reach out to others emotionally. They also support uniformed first responders with the essentials of food and touch, and the kindness of listening, and by picking up the slack on the home front. As Russell Dynes (1986) observed, the household in a disaster is a kind of “resource allocation center” that facilitates the formal emergency response efforts undertaken primarily by men. Sometimes women pitch in directly, for example the North Dakota wife who drove several hours each day while evacuated due to Red River floodwaters in order to take the place of her firefighter husband in the emergency operations center. Women are on both sides of the disaster assistance dynamic, actively seeking out what emergency relief assistance may be available, and volunteering to help provide it—hence the ubiquitous images of women-filled relief centers. I met numerous rural women on the flooded prairies following the Red River flood who had hosted evacuated families, organized work parties to rotate cleaning chores, set up informal clothing and food banks, and in other ways helped those in their communities who were worse-off. From shelter volunteers I learned of the professional woman who became a Red Cross volunteer and worked on her home computer developing a chart of available motel space for evacuees, while recovering from surgery. Relief workers I met also recalled the woman in a wheelchair who organized a database while in shelter so workers could help evacuees locate missing family members. This generosity of spirit is not unique to women—far from it. However, it does help define “what women do” in disasters, in contrast to the images of passivity conveyed in the mass media. For women and men alike, community efforts (like those behind closed doors at home) are far less visible than the efforts of uniformed and salaried disaster planners, responders, and rebuilders. Just as in the United States, women in Canada were found to dominate among the community groups that dealt with a major forest fire in British Columbia in 2003. Their “overwhelming presence” in community-rebuilding efforts stood “in stark contrast, however, to their absence in the decision-making roles” (Cox, 2007, p. 263). While collective work is essential, women’s individual efforts and leadership should never be underestimated (O’Connor, 2010). It is not uncommon for individual women to be singled out for recognition, for instance the Women of the Gulf appreciated by the Audobon Society after the 2010 oil spill (Ludmer, 2011) or conservation activists and scientists honored with the annual Rachel Carson award (www.womeninconservation.org/carson.html; also see Carson, 1962). Grassroots women bring spirit to dispirited neighborhoods, along with emergency supplies, as Diane “Momma D” Frenchcoat of New Orleans did following Hurricane Katrina: [Momma D] delivers food and hope for the hungry. She serves the delusional and dejected, the junkies and the flood survivors who have remained in the city

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despite its mass evacuation. . . . She marches on each day, up and down Treme and St. Philip and St. Ann streets calling out to the frail and the frightened, to those who shutter their windows at the sounds of the military machines grinding on their blocks or hovering above their humbled homes. Her cart is usually packed with baby formula, deodorant, canned soup, and sandwiches. Some of it has been “liberated” from local groceries, she said, where it would have gone to waste in the wake of the hurricane and flood. Some had been given to her by out-of-state soldiers sympathetic to her cause. (Jones, 2005; see also Ransby, 2006)

Women’s disaster volunteerism also takes a cultural form, for instance the spring cultural celebration that Haitian women in Miami organized six months after Hurricane Andrew devastated their neighborhoods. An Australian researcher made this key point about recovery from a bushfire: Women “helped organize fairs, dances, and other ways of raising community morale. In their vital but unsung roles, women rewove the fabric of their communities while men rebuilt the structure” (Cox, 1998, p. 142). As important as this backstage work is, women also act as formal crisis managers by virtue of managerial positions in lifeline industries and by holding public office. The simmering gender politics of American life colors public perceptions of the effectiveness of women in formal leadership roles, including disaster management. For instance, following Hurricane Katrina, then–governor of Louisiana Kathleen Blanco was criticized for being overwrought, not actively seeking federal assistance, and not standing her ground (as a white woman?) when conflicts arose with the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin. The state’s congressional delegation of nine included just one woman— Senator Mary Landrieu—but she was credited with forceful leadership on behalf of Katrina families and with ensuring the state’s ability to assist (Willinger, 2008b). Like Landrieu, former mayor Pat Owens of Grand Forks was applauded for the recovery dollars she brought home following the Red River flood, and also credited for emotional “cheerleading.” Owens made no secret of the fact that she was the primary caregiver to her elderly father, and that his safety was her primary concern. Women in leading public roles of this nature are still the minority, but future researchers will want to examine the role gender plays in disaster management style and effectiveness, for both women and men.

Women for Women: Collective Organizing and Leadership Postdisaster politics are fluid, to say the least, but disasters do inspire women to action. Women’s organizing around housing fairness and environmental justice issues has a long history. It is the context for much of women’s contemporary disaster work and their demonstrated concern with disaster risk reduction (Neal and Phillips, 1990; Phillips, 2009). Where family safety is jeopardized by hazardous water, air, food, and other products, women’s organizing is legendary

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(e.g., Seager, 1993; Taylor, 1997). On the larger landscape, women have been central to peacebuilding and have been leaders in every human rights campaign in the United States, from children’s rights and the rights of workers and seniors, to contemporary campaigns to end racial injustice and campaigns for “ableism,” sexual and reproductive choice, and to promote the rights of migrant workers and immigrants. These strands of social history, as well as women’s environmental activism and advocacy for sustainable development, are part of the past and future of US disaster risk reduction. Women’s collective advocacy takes place in organizations and coalitions of many kinds (Ferree and Martin, 1995; Naples, 1998; Silliman et al., 2004), providing a platform for future histories of women’s organized responses to disaster risk. The typology of organizational action in disasters developed by Dynes (1970) on the basis of case studies is a helpful framework. Some established organizations are found to carry on with their regular tasks following disasters, while others are described as “extending” their tasks because they apply increased resources to familiar tasks (new funds are found to support a branch office). Others take on new roles, expanding into disaster relief work as never before or developing into something altogether new through organizational innovation. Sometimes these new organizations stabilize and grow, but many, especially those that form to meet urgently felt needs of the moment, come to an end as abruptly as they began. All types are evident in women’s organized action after US disasters, but this “how” typology leaves unanswered the questions of why and with that effects women organize in different ways. Women’s collective efforts on behalf of other women in disasters are clearly inspired by different ideas, modes of organizing and leading, and desired outcomes, rooted in the feminist theories reviewed in Chapter 3. Three major strands of women’s disaster leadership are introduced here, all of them conceived as much along material, cultural, and historical lines as along ideological lines. Grounded in Service and Faith As I argue in the concluding chapter, women’s organizations of all kinds are local actors and natural allies of emergency planners seeking meaningful community movement toward disaster resilience, perhaps none so much as those based on the values of service and faith. Women’s professional, educational, and service organizations. My continuing education about the power of mainstream women’s organizations in disaster work began in Miami after Hurricane Andrew. Interviewing businesswomen there, I learned that the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) not only helped with small grants (and later a disaster relief fund), but also sent shoes—because women and their families needed shoes, too. A year

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later, NAWBO partnered with Business and Professional Women (BPW) to help members get back on their feet. A significant third hand was added to this new BPW-NAWBO partnership when the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) came aboard to assess and monitor the impacts of hurricanes on women and make recommendations for long-term assistance. National women’s business organizations have since developed and promoted numerous disaster preparedness materials geared to women-owned small businesses. Youth groups involving women bring their resources to bear, too. Realizing its mission of “eliminating racism, empowering women,” the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) solicited and archived women’s firstperson accounts from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Girl Scouts USA has recently partnered with women emergency managers to promote a new preparedness badge for its young members, sparking girls’ interest in science and technology while providing mentoring to future women emergency managers. Taking a different tack, some troops have undertaken joint trainings with local Boy Scouts, finally bringing girls into the picture through the national Community Emergency Response Team program. College-based activities bring many middle-class women to disaster relief through alternative spring service breaks, campus sport teams, clubs and sororities, as well as student internships and faculty research trips. Academic women raised gender issues after Katrina in their professional capacity, writing from the Gulf Coast and from far away about what they saw or feared was transpiring. Many began to reshape their research agendas to help answer pressing new questions about women and men, boys and girls; some took to heart the implications of the disaster for their profession, for example in social work (Pyles, 2006). The Association for Women in Development stands out as a community of practice for women’s empowerment in disaster work, articulating gender concerns in US disasters and far beyond. After Katrina, the reorganized Newcomb College Center for Research on Women stepped up on their home campus at Tulane University and in the community. One outstanding result was the comprehensive online report “Katrina and the Women of New Orleans,” edited by Beth Willinger (2008a), rich with empirical data and gender analysis. For other women, social networks and clubs are clear pathways to activism, now as in the past. The US women’s-club movement was a progressive force in the early decades of the twentieth century, challenged by excluded women of color to speak out against racism. The National Association of Colored Women (NACW) was an early example. Like the National Congress of Black Women, the NACW partners with others in the student-led Gulf Coast Civic Works Project (GCCWP) to pass legislation supporting job-intensive recovery through investment in public infrastructure. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs, founded in 1868 to offer women an alternative to exclusionary men’s clubs, made a $180,000 contribution to the New York Fire Department to assist in

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bringing its equipment back online after September 11. From a different base, Soroptimist International provides an excellent demonstration of increasing interest in disaster work among women’s service organizations, including direct relief, research, and advocacy both abroad and in the United States, and now including preparedness and mitigation (e.g., see Soroptimist International of the Americas, 2009). The websites, newsletters, blogs, and books of the US women’s-club movement are a treasure trove of insights into how women step up in times of disaster. This is a history waiting to be written, and the time is now. Haitian women learned to their sorrow in the January 12, 2010, earthquake that women’s centers can collapse, archived records can burn, and beloved leaders can be killed before individual and collective oral histories are recorded. Women’s think tanks and funding networks. While some looked at scenes of stranded families on rooftops and highways and saw race and class alone, gender analysis was used to advantage by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the nation’s leading gender policy think tank, following Hurricane Katrina. Its reports, rich with quantitative and qualitative data, have documented women’s progress and many remaining obstacles to recovery over time (Gault et al., 2005; Williams et al., 2005; Jones-DeWeever, 2008; see also Henrici and Brown, 2010; and Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2010). “The Calm in the Storm: Women Leaders in Gulf Coast Recovery” (Vaill, 2006) is a further instance of women’s proactive scholarship. Funded by the Ms. Foundation for Women and the global Women’s Funding Network, this report circulates widely as a counterpoint to the “vulnerability” narrative so readily at hand. Efforts to gender the climate change discourse and policy proceed at a glacial pace, but women’s leadership is evident on many fronts. For researchers, an example is the new network of activist scholars known as Gender Justice and Global Climate Change (G2C2), initiated by leading feminist scholars at Pennsylvania State University (and see Dankleman, 2010). New global momentum is building for US women to collaborate internationally with gender and climate justice activists. Faith-based work. Glance through any disaster recovery archive of photography, community newsletters, original poetry and music, or oral histories, and women of faith stand out. The gender-based auxiliary Mennonite Women USA is one example among many, adopting the slogan, “A needle is just as powerful as a hammer,” in their women’s quilting project. Children’s Disaster Services, a standing network with trained child care professionals supported by the Church of the Brethren, is well-prepared to travel immediately to disaster sites to offer respite care to parents and age-specific care to children (see Peek, Sutton, and Gump, 2008, for discussion of this network’s Katrina work). Often, women’s

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faith-based work in disasters is conducted by women in the United States in support of women elsewhere. Following the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, which killed thousands, Muslim women came together to help: Nawaz and her friends began thinking about collecting supplies and raising disaster relief funds. They started recruiting new members to their group— which has no name as of yet—at local mosques, in their neighborhoods and during iftar, the communal meal at nightfall in which Muslims break their sacred fast. In the past two weeks, the group—whose core was made up of friends in the neighborhood—has since swelled to 36 women and now includes homemakers, students, teachers, doctors, and other professionals. The women have raised about $14,000 in all. (Stevens, 2005)

United Methodist Women directs its efforts through the Women in Disaster Situations initiative, which moves beyond urgent relief to address the root causes of gendered vulnerability, for example by promoting the United Nation’s 2000–2015 Millennium Development Goals and striving for sustainable ways of recovering from disasters that respect women’s human rights. The spirit of its work on behalf of women and girls in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake is one of “greater self-determination, gender equality and democratic accountability,” as the group noted in its written testimony for the fifty-fourth session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, in 2010 in New York City. Similarly, American Jewish World Service (AJWS) is an active supporter of grassroots women as leaders in disaster situations. AJWS addressed the United Nations, too, in the forty-ninth session of the Commission on the Status of Women, in 2007. Reflecting its sustained partnership with global women’s networks for disaster resilience, AJWS spoke to the need for a woman-towoman approach cutting across geopolitical boundaries so women could share their knowledge. Women’s shared spiritual values, as well as affiliations with religious organizations, motivate proactive disaster work. Adopting a participatory action research approach, Kristine Peterson and Richard Krajeski (2011) listened to bayou women of the Gulf Coast as they reflected on the horrific events of Katrina. Peterson and Krajeski, who have deep roots in faith communities and community-led disaster resilience, found that faith and place were foundation stones of these women’s responses. In addition to countless community meetings and personal testimony, local women hosted nonlocal relief volunteers, took care of their own, and demonstrated the power of a united people to outsiders. They articulated a broad vision of disaster recovery as cultural survival, “speaking truth to power” (p. 227) in the wake of the storm. These women are risk-takers who “will no longer be silent bystanders as they see their land, their culture, their people, and their precious life-world split apart by politics, policies, and a disappearing coast” (p. 223).

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Grounded in Place and Local Activism Derided as “emotional” and too flood-stressed to be effective, a small group of women caught up in the 1997 Red River flood persisted in their efforts to save a historic downtown neighborhood school in their mixed-income neighborhood. Mothers still totally absorbed with mucking out their homes (in frigid spring air with no hot water) faithfully drove back to town from their temporary lodgings to circulate petitions urging the school district not to move the school to more affluent suburbs but rebuild it. Their effort was about the school and the integrity of this hard-hit neighborhood, but also much more. “I needed to feel my community present here,” one harried mother told me. “The sense of everything disintegrated, everything being lost. And I think personally for me, it meant everything to have a rallying point where the community came back together again and we were working as neighbors and as friends” (Enarson, 2001, p. 14). In New Orleans, longtime activist Latosha Brown saw a similar threat and took different action. Understanding very well that “strong women have always dominated the South,” she was also aware of community divides before and especially after the Gulf Coast storms of 2005 and the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, seeing underresourced community groups competing for scarce funds (Juhasz, 2010, p. 48). In response, she brought to fruition a new Gulf Coast fund (http://gulfcoastfund.org), providing small grants to grassroots recovery groups, most of which are led by women. University of New Orleans sociologist Pamela Jenkins (2011) stayed in touch with local activists after losing her own home to Katrina. She relates local women’s collective work to the gradual erosion of state support as seen in mental health clinics now shuttered, affordable public housing units demolished, and community health clinics closed. In response, women of color, local social service professionals, and grassroots organizers in New Orleans came together to fill the gap as best they could. Public-housing tenants were among the most active (Luft, 2008; Pyles and Lewis, 2007). Jenkins used a gendered and racial lens to document the collective care work undertaken by these activist women, who found new places and ways of working, such as meeting mental health clients “in coffee shops, at the mall, or under the tree” (2011, p. 174). As Jenkins concludes, “The storm passed that morning and floodwaters came. To all appearances, the lives of these committed community ‘other mothers’ stopped short. What did they do? They stood back up. This is our story—not fully written yet” (p. 176). We will learn much from the mothers and “other mothers” (Collins, 1990) who demonstrate that interdependence is a thing to be valued. For history and sustainability: the fight for Turkey Creek. Not just in New Orleans but all along the Gulf Coast, women and men are besieged by storms and, in 2010, by the nation’s largest oil spill. Turkey Creek, located a

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short drive east of New Orleans, is home to many independent women such as black activist Rose Johnson (“Ms. Rose”), profiled in research conducted by Mia White (2011). Traveling to the region to investigate women’s participation in local disaster recovery, White was drawn to place and people, and stayed for over two years. Well-regarded locally, Ms. Rose worked through the local Sierra Club and the Mount Pleasant United Methodist Church to fight for protection of the wetlands and the history of her people: “It honors our parents and our grandparents who worked so hard to raise us, to care for our families and the land, and they weren’t treated well. This land is so sacred and deserves to be protected” (p. 163). With corporate interests and developers poised to seize the lands beneath the feet of the black activists and former slaves who had made it their home, Ms. Rose and her friends fought back, buying one parcel at a time until Turkey Creek became secure enough to be listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. For health and autonomy: Vietnamese women and the Chef Menteur landfill. Robert Bullard (2008, p. 769) writes: “What has been cleaned up, what gets left behind, and where the water is disposed of appears to be linked to more political science and sociology than to toxicology, epidemiology, and hydrology.” This was certainly in evidence at the Vietnamese community of Versailles in New Orleans East. A people already displaced by war three decades earlier had built a thriving ethnic community with little but their hands, cultural memory, and values. Still a minority in New Orleans East, most were content with the distance they felt from government, sociologist Gennie Nguyen (2011) found, until their city council seemed ready to approve a massive landfill— Chef Menteur—nearby. Nguyen tracked women’s increasingly vocal opposition, writing of women like Mimi Nguyen, who conducted research for a city council–woman, the first Asian American and first Vietnamese to hold such a position. Political differences among women as well as gender relations in different generations came into play as Versailles mobilized against the landfill. Working primarily from a church that had sheltered their community for decades, women took up disaster relief advocacy with determination. The young women Gennie Nguyen met drew on their multiple and interlaced identities, “recognizing the struggles and sacrifices of the previous generations and moving in and out of different gender, ethnic, racial, and national identities in order to build effective coalitions” (p. 207). This second-generation of Vietnamese American women in New Orleans East was a powerful model for women’s future community organizing around disaster prevention, response, and recovery. For environmental protection: protesting British Petroleum oil politics locally. Oil and fish coexist along the Gulf Coast and in most of the homes in the region—or did, until the BP/Deepwater Horizon explosion created the largest US environmental catastrophe to date and called into question years of

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safety violations and smaller spills. Gulf Coast women often have a foot in both camps, so were not necessarily among the vocal protesters, but some spoke out in their roles as specialized subject experts. Among these was Casi Callaway, profiled by activist Antonia Juhasz (2010) in her piece for Ms. Magazine on this “man-made, woman-saved” catastrophe. Through Callaway’s leadership, Alabama had a women-led environmental protection group that eventually became credentialed by British Petroleum as an approved monitoring team. “We’re the front line of defense and the eyes on the beach,” tracking the visible effects of the oil spill, she explained (p. 49). This on-the-ground action is also exemplified by sociologist and environmental racism activist Beverly Wright whose post-spill and post-Katrina work through Dillard University’s Deep South Center for Environmental Justice is renowned. Taking a radically different approach, New York–based activists from Code Pink, the peace and justice movement legendary for colorful protest, organized a spectacular demonstration at British Petroleum’s Houston headquarters. Among its demands was the “stripping” of the oil giant’s corporate charter; their nude protest was modeled after Nigerian women who used nudity to draw attention to the impacts of Chevron’s extensive oil drilling and the political repression of its supporters. A proudly “unreasonable woman” (Wilson, 2005), Diane Wilson has written about her life as a woman shrimper with a long history of anticorporate environmental activism. When the BP/Deepwater Horizon spill erupted, she went aboard the oil rig with Code Pink, joining others who were partially nude and carrying signs proclaiming, “The Naked Truth About Drill, Baby, Drill.” As Wilson explained (Feminist Peace Network, 2010, n.p.), “You could say we was cheatin’ because we decided to use sandwich boards to cover our private parts, but that’s about as nude as those of us from Texas can get. . . . We’ll leave the full-on nudity to the women from California.” Grounded in Feminism and Social Justice Feminist politics do not dominate women’s disaster work, but it is hard to miss their spirit of protest against male dominance. I won’t soon forget the six Latinas in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, after the 1997 Red River flood who took precious time out to meet with me for their own reasons: “I want you to listen to these women. I want you to hear their stories and how they struggled,” one of them urged (author interviews, 1997–1998). She wanted researchers and policymakers to attend to the neglected experiences of Latinas like herself, a former migrant worker, in a major US flood. Why are these stories and struggles so important? Why are they so little heard? The Latinas spoke of being outside the loop while other women seemed to know where and when relief supplies would be distributed, and recalled the long-standing marginalization of Latinas politically, especially in East Grand Forks. I remember one middle-aged Latina who was both maddened and sad-

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dened by the reception she and her husband received after a lengthy wait in a relief line. Only as they made it to the front could they read the sign stating, “We serve only Minnesotans,” with a subtext they grasped immediately. Their families had worked the potato fields for years before being able to settle. Now, three decades later, with stable jobs and deep roots in town, they had become marginalized once again. Other women spoke of the need for a new group to bring Latinas together and seek elected office. To my knowledge, this fledgling movement did not materialize, but the groundwork was laid. The links between disaster and good governance are tenuous in many parts of the world, including the United States, and democratic action following disasters fails for many reasons. The history of women’s activism around racism, economic exploitation, poverty, homophobia, and violence at all levels, especially structural violence in communities of color, is the essential context for understanding women’s work in disasters today (Ross, 2005; Luft, 2008, 2009; Luft with Griffin, 2008), though these connections are still too rarely made in practice. The radical feminism of Code Pink. New York–based activist group Code Pink’s work in New Orleans began with rebuilding houses and distributing supplies following Hurricane Katrina, in collaboration with the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Common Ground. Its work soon expanded, with Code Pink feminists insisting on linking justice for women, an ethic of environmental care, and transition away from war and war preparations. Their presence in New Orleans made the connections abundantly clear, as described by an activist (Milazzo, 2008) who traveled with Code Pink to New Orleans on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls. Supporters marched with brass bands and a huge pink slip reading “Lead Us Out Of Iraq.” Diane Wilson, the local activist and shrimper mentioned earlier, made the same connection: “In [New Orleans, Louisiana] they understand that when there’s no war, there can be rebuilding. They understand that when there’s no war, there can be better health care and operational hospitals—not just in NOLA—but everywhere. Their experience with poverty, victimization, and fragility had taught them lessons other Americans still haven’t learned” (Wilson, 2005, n.p.). Women of color and the leadership of black feminists. The analysis of women of color also stretched the boundaries of traditional postdisaster voluntarism. Writing in the e-journal Sister Song, longtime black feminist and health rights activist Loretta Ross (2005) decried the pattern of “security” concerns that trumped the obligations of the state to protect a stricken populace. Feminists have long decried the militarization of “homeland security,” a critique that applies to disaster work as well. Women living in a “borderland of insecurity” are imperiled by hazards and disasters in ways that other Americans are not. This includes the thousands of women killed by violent partners each year in the

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United States and otherwise subjected to routine terror (see Hawthorne and Winter, 2003, for feminist perspectives on September 11). Women of color have long felt the force of the state, such as in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: Notably, while the police and military were protecting the property rights of business owners, they somehow neglected to protect the lives of women and children jammed into the Superdome and the Convention Center. Women, children, the sick, and the elderly died waiting for help. Unfortunately, actions like these denigrated the undoubtedly heroic actions of many people in law enforcement and the military as they risked their lives in contaminated water to rescue survivors. (Ross, 2005)

Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, a nationwide activist network working against racism and violence, also took a strong public position in the immediate aftermath of Katrina (David and Enarson, 2011, p. 3): “Women living at the intersections of systems of oppressions are paying the price for militarism, the abandonment of their communities, and ongoing racial and gender disparities in employment, income, and access to resources and supports.” One outcome of its work was the New Orleans Women’s Health and Justice Initiative. With yet another hurricane headed to the region in 2008, the clinic reached out to high-risk patients to help them prepare (Luft, 2009). Trying out the 311 number implemented by the city of New Orleans after the Katrina/Rita debacle—and never getting through—clinic staff stepped into the lurch, making more than 700 calls, speaking (with Spanish interpreters standing by) with their former patients about evacuation plans and passing along information about how to leave the city and where they might go, or how to stay safe if they chose to remain. Clinic staff also prepared themselves, sought and obtained the funds necessary to serve the women to whom they felt accountable, and then followed up with a witnessing project to document shelter conditions in New Orleans and nearby states for Hurricane Gustav evacuees. Informed by the violence and health issues they lived with before Gustav (or any other natural hazard), their objective was to connect the dots: social vulnerability to hazards and disasters is not equally distributed but reflects and reinforces existing power structures of race, class, and gender. The notion of racialized disaster patriarchy (Luft, 2008) helps explain some of the divisions they saw among women regarding Katrina work. Young, white feminists who came to the South to volunteer often found themselves working alongside black women leaders who, ironically, did not connect race and gender but instead conveyed a tired gender-“neutral” stance that short-circuited change. Incite! also spoke out strongly in solidarity with women who endured Haiti’s 2010 earthquake and highlighted the special oppression of lesbians in disasters. One member recalled: “I also wrote of how a friend who had been on life support before the hurricane died two days after the storm came ashore, how her lesbian life partner was not allowed to stay with her at the hospital,

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and how she had no idea when she might be able to claim her partner’s body” (White, 2005). A new model for postdisaster domestic violence services. Sociologist Bethany Brown (2010) conducted a pathbreaking study of postdisaster organizational impact and change in the domestic violence community. She found that Katrina afforded a window of opportunity for transformation at many levels. All the shelters she studied were severely affected and struggled to meet the urgent needs of disaster-affected women, improvising in ways that more hierarchical organizations could not. This was best illustrated by Crescent House, a traditional shelter before the storms of 2005 that now operates the multifaceted Family Justice Center, working holistically on intersecting issues in women’s lives. Having long feared that bureaucratization of the battered women’s movement had shifted their work away from women’s empowerment, the shelter was poised for change. Ironically, just two weeks before the hurricane, the shelter director had asked, “What would we do if the slate were wiped clean?” (Brown, 2011, p. 179). Two weeks later the shelter began transitioning away from emergency shelter toward a radically revisioned case management model to help women achieve violence-free lives under their own control. Building local capacity: US women’s funding networks. The Katrina Women’s Response Fund, organized by the Ms. Foundation, helped women regroup immediately in the aftermath of the hurricane and illuminated gaps in response and recovery that disadvantaged them. Knowing the strengths and limitations of the many grassroots women’s groups it had supported in the past, the Ms. Foundation stepped up to enable women along the Gulf Coast as disaster recovery advocates. Grantees worked with families of incarcerated children, the United Houma Nation, NGOs advocating for immigrant women, and a host of others. The Ms. Foundation provided training and other technical assistance to scale up its response efforts, offering guidance on working with the media, managing volunteers, and using oral histories and film to record the grassroots experience. An assessment of this Katrina relief support work (Yu and Lewis-Charp, 2006) reveals its focus on moving women-led community groups beyond immediate need and toward resilience in the face of future US disasters and the economic and political challenges of the region. Throughout the United States, women have worked through a variety of nonprofits and foundations that support the disaster recovery of women and their families. Global women’s funds focusing on women’s human rights and leadership roles in disasters also attract the energies of US women, a subject to which I return in the final chapter. Women’s work to promote “special population” rights. Women have historically been active in the nation’s leading human rights campaigns, a passion

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that naturally informs the work of women during disasters, too. To take just three examples, women’s organizations have promoted a human rights approach to the needs and capacities of children and of persons with disabilities in disasters and have recently begun to address sexual minority rights in crisis. These are areas of concern often labeled “special” (special needs, special populations) in emergency management (for critiques, see Enarson, 2007; Phillips et al., 2009). Mothers, caregivers, child guardians, and child care professionals—not exclusively, but predominantly, a female universe—have stood up for children historically in the United States. Nonprofits such as the Children’s Defense Fund are a case in point. President Marian Wright Edelman made sure that Katrina-affected children were helped, for example through before- and afterschool activities, investigative reporting about children’s status and concerns, and guidelines for adults working with children after disasters. The Children’s Defense Fund also assessed the degree of preparedness in US child care centers and public schools and found most wanting. Women are the group most likely to live long enough to become disabled, and the largest group of paid and unpaid personal attendants for people with disabilities; as social justice advocates, long attuned to the need to prepare for the unexpected, they are increasingly committed to disaster resilience. One example is the consulting firm headed by disability advocate Elizabeth Davis, who with many of her colleagues brings a strong gender perspective to her work (see Davis and Rouba, 2011). Recent changes in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have raised the profile of disability awareness, for example through the appointment of the first-ever senior adviser on disability issues. Like other evacuees, members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) community who were displaced by Katrina or Rita sought return, including return to a cherished cultural space (Richards, 2010), but safety issues were paramount at the outset. Fearing that lesbians and other sexual minorities would be subject to gay-bashing or worse, one center taking in numerous Katrina evacuees organized to find alternative places for this community. To offer long-term support, they formed support groups for displaced residents identifying with the GLBTQ community. Spokeswoman Sally Huffer was determined: “Two, three, four months down the line, we will still be there for them” (Hernandez, 2005, p. 52). The paucity of research on sexualities in disaster contexts, specifically the capacities and vulnerabilities of sexual minorities, makes it difficult to gauge women’s involvement, but women have written on barriers to lesbians in the aftermath (D’Ooge, 2008) and explored how gay and lesbian advocacy groups stepped up after 9/11 (Eads, 2002). The predominance of women in these social movements should not be minimized. The bridges emergency managers seek to build with local communities

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will necessarily rely heavily on women’s leadership, particularly at the local level where national patterns find expression and disasters begin and end.

Emergent Women’s Organizations After Disasters With roots in preexisting social networks and organizing practices, newly emergent groups are nearly ubiquitous in disaster, typically including women as members and leaders (but see Wilson and Oyola-Yemaiel, 1998). I turn now to illustrative examples of women-led emergent groups that have articulated gender concerns. There is no parallel universe of men-only initiatives focused on gender disparities. But what is most distinct about these initiatives is how women who are positioned very differently define and defend women’s collective interests. “Jersey Girls” After the 9/11 Attacks A lightning rod for conservatives and for misogynists, the Jersey Girls grew more powerful over time by refusing the mantle of the weeping widow after the September 11 attacks and not according their government the unbounded faith so many expected of the “victims.” Accused by conservative pundit Anne Coulter of “enjoying” their new lives as women widowed by 9/11, Kristen Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg, and Patty Casazza, all of Jersey City, were forced to state the obvious: “[T]here was no joy in watching men that we loved burn alive. There was no happiness in telling our children that their fathers were never coming home again. We adored these men and miss them every day” (“Coulter Lambasts 9/11 Widows,” 2006). What had they done to so disturb the righteous right wing? The Jersey Girls organized quickly for the rights of surviving family members and an equitable and transparent compensation process. They were soon instrumental in pushing for an official investigation of the attacks, devoting their considerable resources and leadership skills to demanding governmental accountability and closer examination of the root causes of the attacks. They spoke out publicly against the George W. Bush administration’s version of these events, did their own research, and made their position known through skillful use of the media. Most galling to conservatives was the growing political consciousness of these grieving widows and their subsequent critique of post-9/11 domestic and foreign policy. Chosen to represent the Jersey Girls before Congress when hearings finally began, Kristen Breitweiser came prepared to Washington, DC, later recalling the atmosphere this way: “Oprah was what they were expecting . . . [but] 60 Minutes was what they were going to get” (Faludi, 2008). The anger the Jersey Girls faced was palpable. Breitweiser continues to speak out though she was branded a “prostitute for the radical left hate Bush and

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America groups” and “a gold digging, attention-addicted, useful idiot ghoul girl” (Faludi, 2008). The 9/11 Families group, in which these four women played such a large part, also worked hard for equitable application of existing rules for financial compensation, which were based on past and potential earnings of lost partners; they persisted even when this effort was discredited, due to the resulting large sums of money subsequently awarded to affluent professional women. Similarly, in the case of the wives of deceased firefighters (the “anointed widows” described by feminist author Susan Faludi [2007], these women were harshly criticized for the choices they made about their futures, their relationships, and even their bodies in the years that followed. “Women Will Rebuild” After Hurricane Andrew Participant observation research is never easy. How well I remember leaving behind the chaos of my own home to join Miami women who, despite their own exhaustion and unsettled domestic lives, came together on Saturday mornings to hammer out principles of engagement for the newly formed coalition Women Will Rebuild Miami. Hurricane Andrew, then the nation’s most economically costly disaster, had just hit the southernmost part of the metropolitan Miami area (South Dade County) with terrific force in the early morning hours of August 23, 1992. While fatalities were thankfully low, entire communities were literally wiped out and virtually all public and subsidized housing in the area, home to many of the region’s poorest women and children, was either damaged or destroyed. Every cultural group was affected, from Mexican migrant farmworking families and Haitian refugees maintaining extended households, to affluent Anglos and Cuban Americans, African Americans in struggling working-class communities, and newly arrived, sometimes undocumented, immigrants from Central America. Along the Gulf Coast, direct service organizations in the aftermath of Andrew were overwhelmed by the sheer scale of need and their own lack of preparedness, with staff struggling to help their constituents while working under terrible conditions. Donations poured in. At the personal request of then-president George H. W. Bush, a recently retired publishing executive appointed the founding board members of We Will Rebuild, an invitation-only group of Miami insiders. The job of rebuilding destroyed communities seemed firmly in the hands of Miami’s elite, male-dominated, mostly Anglo, downtown business community. Women long active in Miami local politics “saw the good ole boy network once more taking charge, running things when they had no real idea of what the problems were, especially the problems of women. It was business as usual” (Enarson and Morrow, 1998b, p. 190). It was a difficult time for feminist organizing, as one active member recalled: “At that point in my life I was dealing with about 30 employees of which

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most had lost everything. My office, my home, the lives of many people in many companies were majorly affected. I felt like I was being pulled in so many different directions and so many things had priority—all of it was important” (Enarson and Morrow, 1998b, p. 192). But another coalition, Women Will Rebuild, came together quickly as women’s groups across the political spectrum were able to identify common issues. Business organizations, seeing that the needs of female small-business owners were being ignored, worked with religious women leaders active in the tent cities that served Miami’s poorest women. Mainstream Cuban American women’s groups aligned themselves through Women Will Rebuild with more radical Haitian American community activists around shared goals. The divisive issue of abortion choice was put aside, if only temporarily. Over fifty women’s groups eventually joined the coalition, including women business owners, women in construction, feminist organizations, immigrant groups, university women, civic service clubs, migrant farm-workers, and sororities, as well as local chapters of traditional women’s groups such as the YWCA and League of Women Voters. Explicitly adopting a feminist approach based on inclusivity, shared leadership, and consensus decisionmaking, Women Will Rebuild set its sights on gaining a seat at the table and more funds for women and children. Skillful media work kept women’s issues in the limelight and members used “silent witness” tactics to make their presence known at meetings of the elitist We Will Rebuild coalition. By the time Women Will Rebuild disbanded at the end of 1993, nearly one year after the hurricane, the coalition had raised the profile of low-income women and children at a time when the larger community was not concerned; created a roster of fifteen highly qualified women as potential appointees to the executive board of We Will Rebuild and saw some appointed; and struck a new committee on families and children and another on domestic violence. Their pressure no doubt contributed to increases in funds budgeted for hurricaneaffected domestic violence programs and youth recreation services. Women Will Rebuild did not meet all its goals, nor was the coalition able to identify new goals that would sustain it over time or bring in new members. But the coalition brought Miami women together as never before, laying the groundwork for women’s local leadership in future disasters. “Women of the Storm” and “Katrina Krew” In the hectic months following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, a group of wellheeled women came together in New Orleans with a shared sense of urgency, wanting federal action to meet the obviously unmet needs so much in evidence. In the first instance, the goal of Women of the Storm was to force attention, believing that, if congressional representatives were to visit the area and see the damage firsthand, federal assistance would flow. This confidence in electoral

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powers arose in part from the white privilege and affluence that Women of the Storm leaders had enjoyed, and on whose behalf governments had indeed functioned in the past. Sociologist Emmanuel David (2008) observed gender, race, and class dynamics in this group of elite women for many months, analyzing their deployment of traditionally feminine and (white) Southern womanhood to ritualize and memorialize the Katrina disaster and meet their goals. Their bright FEMAblue umbrellas helped brand Women of the Storm, as did members’ handwritten notes to visiting members of Congress (“Southern women write thank you notes, that’s what we do”). The blue umbrellas soon became part of the “visual nomenclature” that both symbolized women’s solidarity and defused their work politically, as one participant explained: “[F]irst of all, our blue umbrellas say to people that we’re gentle. We’re not here to hurt you or hurt your feelings or anything like that. We’re just trying to represent New Orleans in the best possible way” (p. 144). It would not be long before this post-Katrina women’s group tackled the more ambitious agenda of wetland preservation. Five years after Katrina, when British Petroleum’s massive oil spill fouled their environment, they stepped in again to highlight coastal erosion, using videotaped celebrity appearances to promote their new signature issue of coastal erosion. Though their funding base was questioned, they persevered (Loupe, 2010), leading a call for action in the summer of 2010 that united past Katrina activists around environmental restoration. Emergent women’s groups such as Women of the Storm often have parallels in elite women’s earlier civic organizing around disasters. For example, leading women in Galveston, Texas, acted in the spirit of the Progressive Era to help rebuild their city following the hurricane of 1900 (“The Great Storm”), then the most destructive disaster in US history (Turner, 1997). Creating the Women’s Health Protective Association, they moved quickly from emergency relief to good governance and public health campaigns, and eventually to women’s suffrage. Like those behind Women of the Storm, they “were among the most visible white upper- and middle-class women in the city. More importantly, they responded to the crisis of the storm as they had to other needs within the city—collectively and with a sure sense that theirs was an important role to perform in civic betterment” (Turner, 1997, p. 39). Parallels are also apparent in the women-led Katrina Krew network, as analyzed by David (2010a; and see 2010b on the significance of studying elite women). Among the network were many college-educated white mothers who believed that uncollected trash was a health hazard and debris removal a precondition for the return of the displaced. For nearly a year, Krew members worked two days a week on dirty and physically demanding tasks. In contrast to the opportunities Galveston’s privileged women saw in an era of expanding state power and services, the women in Katrina Krew were keenly aware of the labor shift from government to the private sector—in fact, to women—and dis-

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banded less than a year later with this warning: “Mama’s not going to be there to pick up after you ever time” (David, 2010a, p. 399). “Who and what gets let off the hook when women step up ‘resiliently’ to pick up the pieces following disaster?” David asks (p. 393), posing a question at the heart of women’s extensive care work in the family and community. It remains unclear what elite women (or others) might have achieved had they articulated a sustained critique of a masculinized neoliberal state all too willing to let women and the “third state” of nonprofits and voluntarism step in. For all this, the extraordinary sight of affluent women knee-deep in the detritus of the hurricane further illustrates the diversity of women’s leadership in crises. Not orchestrated from on high but initiated, structured, sustained, and then disbanded by women themselves, the Katrina Krew joined in spirit many generations of women actively mobilizing in disasters before them. “Coastal Women for Change” Former beautician Sharon Hanshaw drew on a lifetime of adversity and deep roots in her community to found Coastal Women for Change after Katrina swept through her hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi. “I lost my home and the business I worked so hard to build. It wasn’t just my possessions that went missing in the storm; it was my livelihood, my community and my way of life that were taken away from me. . . . Today, we are working to rebuild our community piece by piece, but it sure hasn’t been easy.” Interviewed a year after the storm, Hanshaw declared: “You have to stay and fight through whatever comes. . . . This is my family’s home, their future, and you want them to be proud of the community, of where they live” (Terzieff, 2006a). Relocating outside their community was not an option for this resident of twenty-one years. With support from the Ms. Foundation and others, Coastal Women for Change was born with a mission of community leadership and women’s empowerment. A strong Internet presence and women’s network helped the new group rapidly expand in membership and mission. After conducting their own surveys in East Biloxi, Mississippi, where people’s needs were so readily overlooked, and informing their community and elected representatives of the findings, they organized to have a voice on the local planning commission. Part of their work now includes offering hurricane preparedness information to women, but Hanshaw and other members of Coastal Women continue to stretch their vision of disaster recovery and resilience. One project promotes food security through community garden plots, and another links women’s leadership on disasters to women’s global work to reduce climate change. Oxfam now features Coastal Women for Change in its Sisters of the Planet campaign. Sharon Hanshaw traveled in the spring of 2010 with the Climate Wise Women tour, an international effort to personalize the impacts of climate change on women and recognize their leadership on this issue.

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“Katrina Warriors” In New Orleans, too, local activists saw the need for collective action, dedicating their work to the lively and creative “warrior” spirit grounded in the Mardi Gras Indian culture of the city. The Katrina Warriors are devoted to keeping alive the passion and memory of all those lost to the storm, and using women’s leadership skills to build lives free of violence, as explained on their website (see Katrina Warriors Network at http://katrinawarriorsnetwork.word press.com). Katrina Warriors came from the recognition that women had emerged among the leaders in the recovery effort—in families, in what was left of their organizations, in churches and schools, in all racial, ethnic and economic areas; and included women from New Orleans “aristocracy,” academic and women’s studies communities, YWCA, church women whose groups had been a mainstay in feeding and helping the poor and homeless before Katrina, residents of the Ninth Ward, and the Mardi Gras Indians whose rich African-Caribbean history was the soul of the Black community.

Unlike most other US women’s groups after disasters, this emergent group looks outside their region. After successfully engaging internationally known antiviolence activist Eve Ensler, founder and guiding spirit of the global V-Day campaign to end violence against women, they were able to forge connections that ensured their continuity. In the spring of 2006, Ensler met with the Katrina Warriors and later used their words to advantage in performances of her Vagina Monologues. These vignettes about women hit both by disaster and by violence were very effective in keeping the spotlight on gender violence. Two years later, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the global VDay campaign, Ensler returned to New Orleans to transform the Superdome into a two-day “Superlove” festival, offering a healing space and time for women’s reflection and rededication to activism. Still committed to the women of the Gulf Coast, Ensler’s latest initiative builds on that of the original Katrina Warriors. The play Swimming Upstream: A Testimony, a Prayer, a Hallelujah, an Incantation was written with Ensler’s help by sixteen Katrina survivors. First performed locally in 2008, Swimming Upstream returned for performances to mark the fifth year of life after Katrina in New Orleans’s Mahalia Jackson Theater and then played in Harlem’s Apollo Theatre, attracting both local women and female celebrities. Proceeds were earmarked for women’s programs, including educational scholarships. A community event sponsored by Katrina Warriors in 2008 invited residents to come together again against gender violence. Making an explicit link with ecological sustainability, they urged women to plant trees and marsh grasses (www.vday.org/node/593): “Praise the women / preach the word . . . power the movement / protest the violence . . . plant the future . . . push the edge / play the music . . . plug in the men / party / performance / pink parades! Join us!”

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* * * These emergent organizations, networks, and groups have something important to teach us. The depth of resistance to women who break gender rules was hard to miss in public reactions to the Jersey Girls, highlighting the need for closer analysis of disaster patriarchy (Luft, 2008). Women Will Rebuild illustrates the importance of group process in disaster work, and the need for clear philosophical values, which are also evident in women’s faith-based work. Women of the Storm and other elite women’s networks clearly demonstrate how economic and racial privilege is interwoven into gender and disaster politics. Coastal Women for Change and Katrina Warriors, both tied to global networks, strongly suggest how international collaboration strengthens local organizing. There are important lessons to be learned.

Observations and Questions Drawn from a larger universe of collective work by women, these instances raise questions about sustainability and long-term disaster resilience. Though the time frame for conclusions is short, few of these women’s initiatives have had much staying power. Table 10.1 suggests parameters of difference among women’s collective disaster work that run parallel to, but also cut across, the categories used in this chapter to organize the discussion. To build on success, we need to know much more about the conditions shaping women’s disaster initiatives as they develop over time. If we hope to learn what best accounts for sustained and collective focus on gender and other power structures in disasters, we would want to learn more about the origins of an organization, the values and practices that inform its work, the demographics of its core membership, the degree to which the organization focuses exclusively on gender, stages of integration into other networks, funding streams, the implications of institutionalization, and especially the role of ideological focus in women’s rights during crisis (see Table 10.2). Comparative research on women’s and men’s organizations active in disasters would be valuable as gender analysis is sorely needed in disaster organization research. Most assessments of organizational sustainability have roots in business management and take for granted the very characteristics that women’s disaster organizations may lack through choice or circumstance, such as a governing board or strategic planning process. From the perspective of women’s disaster work, we would also want to know more about value-driven organizations that have a clear ideological line of action. How is the work of such groups interpreted and made meaningful (or not) to its members? How are members engaged and why do they leave? We might also seek to learn whether a broad

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Table 10.1 How Women’s Collective Disaster Work Varies

Local presence (grassroots) Broad based (diversity) Wide ranging (multiple goals) Linkages (networks) Integration (disaster planning) Resources (material support) Visibility (media/ social support) Sustained focus on disaster risk

Service Professional

Faith Based

Place Based

Feminist/ Social Justice

Emergent/ Postevent

Generally

Generally

Generally

Generally

Always

Potentially

Generally

Rarely

Generally

Rarely

Generally Generally

Generally Generally

Generally Potentially

Generally Potentially

Rarely Rarely

Rarely

Rarely

Rarely

Rarely

Rarely

Generally

Potentially

Rarely

Rarely

Rarely

Rarely

Generally

Generally

Rarely

Rarely

Potentially

Potentially

Potentially

Potentially

Potentially

base supports the group’s main aims or takes it off-track, and whether a gender or “gender plus” approach serves members better. Were these questions included in national research agenda around disaster risk and part of the feminist research agenda, too, we would learn something important about resilience. It is vital that women’s organizations, especially those working closely with high-risk groups in high-risk locales, be fully equipped, prepared, trained, and ready to act when necessary on behalf of women and girls. It is even more vital that we not reinvent the wheel when a tornado displaces a wildfire from the headlines, and one hurricane season succeeds the next. The capacity of women’s organizations to coordinate preventative or mitigative efforts, as well as their postevent adaptive capacity, is potentially an important contributor to overall community resilience. This seems more likely when organizations learn from experience and when their foundations, ideologies, and practices support not only emergency relief or emergency planning, but also fundamental social change to anticipate and reduce avoidable harm. Bringing women’s coalition work into the picture is essential, but more research is needed to make the case and pave the way.

Conclusion This account of women’s self-organization and political mobilization after disasters in the United States ends with uncertainty. The long-term prospects that social transformation will rise Phoenix-like in the aftermath are not good, judging from past disasters, whether we consider work inspired by emergent femi-

Table 10.2 Research Questions About Women’s Work to Reduce Disaster Risk Foundations

How significant over time are organizational origins to a sustained focus on gender equality and women’s empowerment in disaster reduction?

Structure and process

How does organizational hierarchy/bureaucratization affect the sustainability of women’s organizations active in disaster? How does feminist process shape women’s formalized disaster work?

Membership diversity

How does the diversity of membership matter? Are women-only groups more sustainable than mixed-gender groups? Are single-group organizations more sustainable than coalitions?

Membership and participation

How are members engaged and what sustains them over time? How do women’s organizations recruit and retain members during or after disasters?

Leadership

How are different leadership styles related to sustainability? Leadership at what levels and over what time periods?

Scope of activity

How well do broad, holistic goals serve the organization over time? When organizational actions are focused in one area (e.g., women’s health services in crisis) instead of many, is the organization overall more sustainable or less?

Focus area

Under what conditions and in what part of the disaster cycle is women’s organized disaster work most sustained? Is work in one sector or in one hazard context notably more or less sustainable?

Visibility and media attention

To what extent is positive or negative media attention a factor in sustainability? How do women build or develop this media presence? How are social media used to convey women’s needs and interests?

Funding mechanisms

How are women’s organizations that are consistently active in disasters sustained financially? When is external funding essential to sustainability, if ever? How does internal fundraising affect this?

Institutionalization/growth

How do women’s groups that are transitioning to more formalized organizations sustain their disaster work, if at all? What differences, if any, does size make over time in their disaster risk reduction work?

Networking

How well are women’s initiatives integrated into Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters (VOAD) or faithbased networks or other emergency response or planning efforts? How does this relate to sustained disaster risk reduction work? How, if at all, do women’s organizations not linked to larger networks sustain a focus on disaster?

Outcomes

What are the consequences when women’s organizations fail to meet their disaster-related goals? How significant is this for sustainability?

Disaster focus and hazard awareness

How do women’s organizations maintain focus on disaster risk reduction in the face of “new,” invisible, or slowly developing hazards and disasters? Is women’s disaster work more or less sustainable when it encompasses mitigating and/or adapting to climate change?

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nist action or more traditional disaster work rooted in faith, service, place, or social justice values. Yet it is important to document how and why women step up—because the need is so great, because they always have, because others do not. Much of the work described in this chapter was undertaken by women working with and for other women, but not always with a critical gender consciousness or sensitivity to the nuances of gender as it relates to other power dynamics. This does not diminish women’s grassroots leadership but makes all the more imperative our need to document and attend to women’s leadership, especially at the local level. We cannot afford to rediscover truths about injustice, exclusion, resistance, and resilience—time and time again, one disaster at a time. The stakes too high. I argue in the next chapter that women’s leadership is the essential key to disaster resilience, based simply on what women have already demonstrated and stand ready to share.

11 Building Disaster Resilience

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n 1995, the cover of the publication Stop Disasters, then the foremost voice of the United Nations on disaster reduction for the public, carried the title “Women and Children—Keys to Prevention.” Was this provocative claim valid—then or now? “Preventing” disasters may seem illusory, as the hazards of a perilous earth are confounded with socially produced (or chosen) vulnerability to hazard. But, social vulnerabilities to disasters can indeed decline; people’s capacity for self-protection can grow, and the political will of governing forces to reduce avoidable harm can expand. Tectonic shifts are under way in thinking about social power in disasters. Persons living with disabilities, the very young, the very old, and others previously marked as “vulnerable” are increasingly understood in positive terms. Children in school-based awareness campaigns, for instance, are an excellent link to adults; though uniquely endangered by obvious constraints of ability, life experience, and social power, they can also be resourceful and proactive. Much the same is true of seniors, persons living with HIV/AIDS or disabilities, non-English speakers, and other groups marked as “special.” Clearly, as discussed in Chapter 4, a dualistic viewpoint (vulnerable or capable, which is it?) is not helpful. The case for women’s leadership in disasters, primarily in the aftermath, was made in the preceding chapter. Can we imagine becoming a resilient nation without substantively engaging our sisters, mothers, daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and “other mothers”? It seems as unlikely as reaching out just to the middle class, or just to Americans of one generation. With this in mind, the point of departure, as discussed below, is the thorny concept of gender mainstreaming, as it relates to disaster risk reduction. I consider signposts of progress and caution as emergency management slowly becomes more aware of how gender matters in disasters. I then take up the notion that disasters can be em167

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powering for women, ending with a call to women’s organizations to take up the challenge of reducing disasters.

Mainstreaming Gender in Disaster Work Public safety remains a primary obligation of responsible government in crises; this proposition is not belied by the initiatives of the private sector in disasters, or the spirit of volunteerism demonstrated by individuals in crisis or the collective efforts of such groups as Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters (VOAD). The Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and tribal, state, and local government emergency management agencies are the employing agencies, standard bearers, implementers, and gatekeepers of the profession. The community of practice is large and diverse, but governance is the heart of emergency management. Emergency managers are those whose job it is to cajole, nudge, enable, encourage, or otherwise promote community resilience. Historically based in civil defense and in jobs and occupations dominated by men, the emergency management culture of practice is response-oriented, fostering a climate in which the “tyranny of urgency” (Baden and Masika, 1996) prevails. The concerns of sex and gender, like those arising around age or ability, are seen (if at all) as secondary distractions. These cultural norms matter, as one volunteer-turned-professional explains: It is my observation that public service personnel progress through the ranks depending on how well they fit into the “good old boy” culture. Most of the women I know in the field of emergency management got their start as public educators and do not seem to be as motivated by whistles and red lights. Like myself, these women tend to emphasize the basics of emergency management—preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery. Perhaps when more women are employed in fire departments, law enforcement, and the military, women in emergency management will be accepted more readily. (Barnecut, 1998, p. 157)

The professionalization of emergency management increases demand for community-based, problem-solving approaches, creating greater support for gender integration. Like women, many men now bring nontraditional skills to work and have family responsibilities they cannot put aside in a crisis. This may shift emergency management organizations toward more family leave, dependent care support, opportunities for part-time employment, flexplace and flextime, and other family-friendly approaches. These changes are the precondition for gender integration and, as Joe Scanlon (1998, p. 49) observed some time ago from a Canadian perspective, for effective emergency planning:

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Who stays and who reports for duty when one parent is a police officer and the other a nurse? What happens when one is a chemist with knowledge of hazardous chemicals, the other a teacher, and an incident occurs when children are at school? . . . Planning involves looking ahead. It is time to examine how the changing nature of the family may affect emergency responsibilities. One way to start would be to have traditional emergency agencies survey their staff to see how many are single parents and how many have spouses with emergency responsibilities. The next step would be to examine those with problems or conflicts, then work out some solutions: perhaps writing these persons out of emergency plans, perhaps working out child care arrangements, perhaps meeting with other emergency agencies to discuss priorities.

No comprehensive research has been conducted on gender, race, and class in US emergency management (for earlier data on gender barriers to women, see Phillips, 1990; Wilson, 1999; Gibbs, 1990; Robertson, 1998). However, when the advocacy group Emergency Management Professional Organization for Women’s Enrichment (EMPOWER) conducted an Internet survey in 2006, over 200 people responded from the United States, Canada, Cayman Islands, England, Australia, and New Zealand. The resulting (nonrandom) sample was 71 percent female and 29 percent male (EMPOWER, 2006). The largest gender difference reported concerned “influential factors in professional advancement,” with women much more likely than men to cite mentoring. In an important Canadian study of a major provincial public service agency, Linda MacQueen (2009) found that women and men held substantially equal titles, gained employment in similar ways, were motivated by the same factors, had comparable career aspirations, and agreed that professionalization was a positive trend. More women than men (20 percent versus 52 percent) had university degrees, with roughly equal numbers reporting having completed emergency management training or certification. Yet women were nearly twice as likely as men to hold temporary emergency management positions (31 percent versus 17 percent). Of concern is the finding that women feared the demand for college degrees would disadvantage them over time. Presumably, this relates to the different backgrounds women and men bring to emergency management positions. The International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM) (2005) solicited a set of short testimonials in a newsletter article on the subject. Both women and some of their male mentors highlighted the achievements and aspirations of women emergency managers. Building on a recent conference session about cultural diversity, the 2010 IAEM conference included a groundbreaking session on women in emergency management, organized by the International Network of Women in Emergency Management (inWEM). Active primarily in the United States (and overlapping in interest with the Canadian Network for Women in Emergency Management on LinkedIn), this group provides a forum for discussing the issues raised in this chapter. Another inWEM interest lies in

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honoring pioneering women who rose in the ranks without benefit of formal support networks or mentoring programs. With broader goals and strong support from many of its male colleagues, the advocacy group EMPOWER supports women in the profession through mentoring, networking, and leadership development. Its members are a strong presence at professional meetings in emergency management, and the network sponsors annual conferences, webinars, and other opportunities for knowledge exchange in different venues and regions. As noted earlier, EMPOWER has also undertaken innovative new work with girls. Women who aspire to work in these fields are a determined lot with high hopes, seeking to engage with emergency management in many ways, among them this woman who posted anonymously on a government contracting website: My partner and I recently opened a contracting business for disaster relief, debris and tree removal, trail clearing, FEMA temporary housing electric, plumbing and a/c hook-ups and removals and general contracting. We are a small woman-owned business with experience and are working on our 8(a) certification. We decided to go into this business after I lost my job and went to Texas with a friend to work after Hurricane Ike. For the first time, I truly felt like my work made a difference in the lives of others. I loved it and now here we are. We are most certainly in a man’s world, but we are experienced, intelligent and honest. (Anonymous, May 22, 2009)

Women in first-response roles are increasingly vocal about their aspirations and the barriers they face, among them the neglected women firefighters and others who responded at Ground Zero on September 11 (see Hagen and Carouba, 2002) and suffered the health consequences. Among the topics explored in Many Women Strong: A Handbook for Women Firefighters (Berkman, Floren, and Willing, 1999) are employment law, family leave, child care, sexual harassment, personal grooming, equipment and supplies, and, significantly, threats to reproductive health, with data relevant to female and male firefighters alike. One telling conclusion involves health: “Fetal and maternal susceptibility to toxins in the workplace often have been used as an excuse to keep women out of particular jobs. Once it is shown that men, too, are harmed by these toxins (vinyl chloride and lead are two examples), the toxins are regarded in a new light: they become ‘workplace hazards.’ The prevailing view quickly alters to find ways to manage exposure risks rather than prevent employees from working” (p. 42). The video A Day in the Life of a Firefighter and Emergency Responders was developed by the US Fire Administration as a companion piece to its groundbreaking study of women firefighters (Hulett et al., 2008), working with the International Association of Women in Fire and Emergency Services [i-Women]. Allowing women firefighters to speak directly, this group promotes the positive message of the video on its website: “Have you ever dreamed of becoming a firefighter? Do you have what it takes? We’re here, we love it, we’re

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successful, and you can be, too! If you have ever dreamed of becoming a firefighter—go for it. It’s a GREAT job and nothing should stop you.” A great many other resources supporting gender integration can be found on the i-Women website (www.i-women.org). The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is also proactive. One advocacy publication profiles women scientists breaking new ground around the world, presented as a counterweight to discouraging data from a 2001 survey on the minimal presence of women in the upper ranks of the organization (WMO, 2003). In a similar vein, Australian sociologist Merilyn Childs (2006a) reports that women compose a third of that country’s volunteer fire service, but just 5 percent are in frontline roles. Like Christine Erikson, Nicholas Gill, and Lesley Head (2010), who emphasize the symbolic cultural power of women’s participation and exclusion in firefighting, Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner told those gathered for the 2005 inaugural meeting of Australian women firefighters: “Fire and fire management are essential to the Australian story, to our culture, to our halls of heroes. In the Australia of this new century, women must also be seen in those halls, women’s achievements and contributions must be part of that story . . . or the story is incomplete” (Pru Goward, cited in Childs, 2006a, p. 34). Few American women would disagree. Barriers to women in firefighting have deep roots in the United States, as I found in my dissertation research with women new to woods-working roles in the US Forest Service (Enarson, 1984). A forthcoming Canadian book on men and masculinities in different firefighting roles is another vivid reminder of the masculinization of work culture in many of the occupational worlds into which future women emergency managers will move (Pacholok, forthcoming; see also Pacholok, 2009). These new resources and advocacy networks promise to fundamentally alter the image and practices of emergency managers in the United States. But many barriers remain, in addition to the “sticky floor” and “glass ceiling” that limit occupational desegregation by sex in the United States. Handling lifethreatening crises brings into play cultural norms validating the presumed superiority of men’s physical capacities, their scientific and technical skills, authoritative leadership and communication styles, and the notion of men as providers, protectors, and warriors. These are the gender rules of our time that shape how we think about disasters. Without a concerted shift away from topdown control and command styles to more community-based and womenfriendly approaches to risk reduction, these rules will continue to define those who wear the hats of disaster management in the United States.

Mainstreaming: Intent and Implementation Changing the faces of practitioners and policymakers is a necessary step toward gender-responsive policy and practice, but awareness of the value of gender fair-

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ness is even more essential. The professionalization of emergency management now under way invites potential practitioners to consider the research reviewed in earlier chapters and how it might be implemented in practice (for an extended discussion of health concerns, see Richter and Flowers, 2010; and see this book’s appendix for a list of online mainstreaming resources). But budgetary constraints are real: Should scarce resources be directed so specifically toward gender? Addressing this issue in a training manual designed for practitioners in Canada (Enarson, 2009b), I recommended these pragmatic steps: 1. Risk mapping should identify all subpopulations at risk: Sex-specific data and community mapping that is participatory and based on community knowledge of culture and gender more accurately reflects vulnerabilities and capacities at the local level. 2. Public participation in emergency planning must be as inclusive and meaningful as possible: Community meetings must be planned for times and places that are realistic for women and include child care. Networking with women’s and men’s groups for information reaches additional subpopulations. 3. Stakeholder groups should be diverse in order to fully engage all sectors of the community: Women’s groups are potential community partners for local emergency managers, as are men’s professional, sporting, and faith-based networks. 4. Risk communication must reach those most in need of information and awareness: Gendered messaging, images, language, and distribution networks will reach more people more effectively. 5. Preparedness information should be relevant to all social groups: Identifying everyone’s needs is important, e.g., birth control and information for pregnant women or women of child-bearing age. 6. Hazard mitigation information is needed by some more than others: Targeting women’s businesses, women in construction, women renters, and women-operated social service agencies increases the potential for nonstructural mitigation. 7. Stockpiling of critical supplies is needed to meet all needs: Recognizing women’s and men’s different needs is essential to maximize effective response, e.g., protective masks suited to both female and male health providers to prevent contagion, or vitamins for pregnant women. 8. Service continuity plans should anticipate staff shortages: Gender-based work and family obligations will create conflicts and strains for both women and men, but advance planning can minimize disruptions. 9. Evacuation sites must be safe for all: Gender-sensitive planning can ensure women and children at risk of assault or abuse are not unnecessarily exposed during the period of evacuation. 10. Emergency assistance must reach those who are most vulnerable: Sex and gender expose women and men differently in different hazard contexts, so gender analysis helps identify those most at risk.

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11. Shelters must be equally accessible and designed to meet the needs of residents: Functioning is improved by meeting sex-specific needs, e.g., for personal hygiene items, quiet space for breast-feeding mothers, privacy for girls and women. Child care is needed for children and respite care for their caregivers. 12. Temporary accommodation sites must provide an enabling environment for recovery: Working with women’s groups in their design, siting, and operation can help avoid postdisaster conflict, e.g., due to insensitivity to the needs of children and youth, perceived lack of safety, distance from public transport or child care centers, etc. Outreach to women also helps support caregivers in their critical roles at this time. 13. Postdisaster recovery plans must recognize different losses and coping capacities: Psychosocial programmers with gender-aware training for women and men will reflect gender norms and reach everyone in the family, potentially reducing postdisaster stress and the potential for violence. To support these kinds of changes, the virtual Gender and Disaster Network (GDN), a pathbreaking international organization, was founded in 1997; it now engages over 1,200 women and men employed in many different roles and contexts (visit the GDN at www.gdnonline.net). The work of the GDN is currently organized in the United States through the Gender and Disaster Resilience Alliance (GDRA), a fledgling network founded in 2009 by US-based academics and activists, of whom I am one. The GDRA (www.usgdra.org) strives to reduce disaster risk through grassroots women’s leadership, with explicit outreach to men and a focus on prevention rather than disaster response. Both networks offer a listserv for information exchange and dialogue on pressing issues, academic studies, field reports, along with practical guides for addressing gender concerns throughout the disaster cycle. The GDN also hosts an international compilation of gender and disaster resources, the Gender and Disaster Sourcebook, which can be searched by topic and region. These and related networks offer numerous online tools for gender mainstreaming (see the appendix to this book), but the “tool box” approach is limiting. At a Natural Hazards Workshop (Enarson, 2008a), I developed a short list of online sources for gender mainstreaming but also suggested face-toface ways that we might come together in “real time” and find common ground—domestic violence advocates meeting with local Red Cross volunteers, emergency health planners with women’s health experts, emergency management students with antiracist community networks, and so forth. Conference and workshop themes, plenary speakers, breakouts, practice-based workshops—all are recurring opportunities for exploring how sex and gender matter. For the most part, these are lost opportunities. Why, for example, in organizing the 2004 Honolulu workshop on gender equality and disaster risk re-

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duction, did we not include a breakout session for male participants to consider men and disaster reduction from a gender perspective? Happily, many of the men who attended created their own space for dialogue and shared recommended actions at plenary (see Anderson, 2009, p. 45). Development worker and disaster practitioner Prafulla Mishra (2009, p. 37), who helped craft the call to action put out by the men’s caucus, spoke for many when he later wrote: “Engaging with men as agents of change rather than barriers to change would help push conventional boundaries. To effect lasting change we must identify positive role models within the community, use the real life experiences of men in disasters and in other times of their lives, identify effective entry point activities for men and boys, and design and implement programmes that address underlying gender inequities.” Despite the many resources and growing momentum, gender is still likely to be dismissed as “too narrow” or “too political” in a way that concerns for emergency managers relating to race, class, age, and disability are not. Is one reason the neglect of men and male power? The interpersonal and organizational powers that accrue to men in contemporary US society, and to men in emergency management roles, must be examined, especially among men whose values affirm dominant heterosexual and middle-class gender norms. The symbolism of a female-headed Department of Homeland Security is significant, but disaster work remains a male-dominated domain materially and symbolically. Without resorting to red-hot language about “man-made” disasters, we can recognize that it is not male gender but the complex of social characteristics within the corporate and governing elites of the United States that are at issue; these are the people empowered to make critical institutional choices that bear on women’s and men’s disaster vulnerability. The emergence of more upper-class women in these roles points only to the inadequacies of a “musical chairs” approach to social change unless systemic structures and values are also challenged. Feminist critics ask: What is being mainstreamed and why? Gender mainstreaming of disaster risk reduction can be imposed (and ignored) from on high or bubble up from below; it can be tolerated or promoted, enabled or starved of resources; it can certainly be championed by men and women but just as easily be disparaged as an external political agenda or cultural imposition and confined to bureaucratic backwaters. In their book Mainstreaming Politics: Gendering Practices and Feminist Theory, Carol Bachhi and Joan Eveline (2010) collect case studies from developing and developed nations and in different areas of practice to critique dominant approaches to mainstreaming. These seek mainly to identify “differences,” which can then be “evened up” without transforming organizational cultures, structures, and policies that in and of themselves are gendering processes. Like emergency planning and resilience building, gender mainstreaming is not an outcome but a process. Its value resides not as an organizational “fix”

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but in the way that mainstreaming campaigns contest meaning: Whose “homeland” and whose “security”? Resilience to what? Innovation and resistance are both possible, Bachhi and Eveline write, calling for a “somewhere in the middle” approach: “Such a perspective means that the project of achieving something called ‘gender equality’ ought to be understood to be a long-term and ongoing project, always involving ‘unfinished business’” (2010, p. 3). To take just one example, feminist critiques of masculinist notions of homeland security (e.g., Goldsworthy, 2009; Dankleman, 2010b, pp. 66–67) and opposition to a militarized and colonial state more broadly are plentiful—but how do ideas outside the mainstream become meaningfully “mainstreamed,” if at all? Not the practice but the politics of gender mainstreaming makes the difference. Effective mainstreaming, despite its limitations as a change strategy (among others, see Alston, 2010, writing from Australia), takes political imagination and leadership, sufficient and appropriate resources, long-term partnerships, and sustained attention. It challenges established priorities and power relations and empowers women as decisionmakers—or can. At a minimum, it is a social process that shines a bright light on existing divisions and boundaries and asks for dialogue about a different future. In the final two sections of this chapter I suggest more promising avenues for change.

The Empowerment Thesis: Challenging Male Power in Disasters Is gender mainstreaming in the practices of emergency management empowering to women? Are disasters? Using the language of gender role theory, disaster researcher Alice Fothergill (2004, p. 141) noted that, while overlapping roles are said to create stress, the women she interviewed after the 1997 Red River flood felt differently: The tasks may have been operating several sump pumps on their own through the night, or safely evacuating their children and the neighbor’s children when the streets were filling with water. . . . [W]omen who took on high-intensity emergency jobs, such as Esther and Beth, spoke of their new level of authority and responsibility with amazement. Both of them retained their higher status after the disaster and found that they felt more self-confident in their work roles and were treated by colleagues with more respect and deference.

In the archive of US gender and disaster literature, women’s narratives do convey a strong sense of movement. In my own Red River interviews (1997– 1998), I heard from women who felt inadequately trained (“We were Girl Scouts—we made aprons!”), while others were pleased to develop new skills (“I can do wire now!” one woman exclaimed about rebuilding her home). Disasters provide ample opportunities for nontraditional lines of action, especially

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for women in the short run (Enarson and Morrow, 1997; Fothergill, 2004; Stehlik, Lawrence, and Gray, 2000). Contested decisions make power differences between women and men more salient, for example when women’s efforts to increase safety are undermined by men who resist, delay, or refuse to prepare against known hazards or ask for help. One risk-aware wife in North Dakota, for example, recounted how she had “begged” her husband persistently until he eventually did “consent” to buying the drain plugs recommended for preventing backwash of contaminated Red River water. During the flood, women seemed ready to assert themselves when conflicts arose with male laborers, suppliers, contractors, and officials. Among them was this widow, whose husband had recently died in the home they had remodeled together: Well, I’m a pretty stubborn Norwegian! And one thing that my husband taught me is you tell it like it is. . . . And I don’t take any guff from anybody. . . . And my windows were measured wrong so I had to have them reordered. My doors when they came in were wrong compared to what I ordered, and I went back to the person and he was hem and hawing, and I just said “Don’t mess with me.” I took my finger and I said, “You don’t mess with me. Give me what I ordered.” (Enarson, 2001, p. 14)

Many of the women affected by Hurricane Katrina shared these experiences. Asali Njeri Devan, whose story is included in Eve Ensler’s play Swimming Upstream, is one such woman: Before the storm, I knew where every single item in my house was and got really bothered when something got scratched, broken, or went missing. . . . During the storm, something snapped in me, and I felt loosened. Loosened. I just don’t care so much what people think or what expectation they might have of me or even what expectation I might have of myself. . . . And so, I’m going for a PhD, because it doesn’t matter anymore if I’m smart enough or have time enough, or I’m sort of old for this, or I have too many responsibilities or children. I’m going. And the only time is now. That’s how I think after the storm. (“Swimming Upstream,” 2010)

How long do gender breakthroughs last in the “new normal,” and are these new opportunities simply more work for women? Low-income women in poor neighborhoods were not empowered by the Gulf Coast storms of 2005 (see David and Enarson, 2011) and no evidence to my knowledge supports this conclusion about the 2010 BP/Deepwater Horizon or 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spills, nor for other disasters of their kind in recent US history. This does not imply powerlessness, passivity, incapacity, or lack of leadership on the part of low-income women, as most of the available data testify. While the window of opportunity for challenging gendered divisions of labor is intriguing, it must be understood in context as a small part of women’s disaster experience, and

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should be analyzed over time, across social groups, in diverse cultural contexts, and with respect to different kinds of hazards and disasters. The depth of opposition to gender mainstreaming and to women’s steps toward empowerment must also be acknowledged. Antifeminist disaster work has not yet been examined, although the framing of events as gendered is contested overtly and covertly (Luft, 2008). To my knowledge, antifeminist or conservative women’s organizations have not been active in disasters in a concerted, self-reflective way comparable to the involvement of feminist groups. This may change if an alliance is struck with the men’s rights movement, which seems possible. Radically different from the pro-feminism of progressive men, a virulently antifeminist male voice can be heard in the blogosphere, for example in reactions to an interview I did with Salon.com about the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and in postings from men in response to a Ms. Magazine piece on women’s leadership in disasters (see also Faludi, 2007, on the reactionary gendering of the 9/11 “terror dream” and continuing backlash). Misinterpreting the World Food Programme’s decision to distribute relief goods first through women, some bloggers objected vehemently to the “outrage” of an “anti-male agenda imported into Haiti by external women’s groups.” For one man, it was all too much: “[I]f men are needlessly dying because these women’s groups are hoarding supplies for women only, the Haitian government should send troops in to seize the supplies and distribute them equally to needy men and women alike. That would be a true act of mercy” (Price, 2010). Men do still control the leading emergency management agencies, do still dominate high-status professions and the upper echelons of emergency management organizations, and do still benefit as a group from organizational cultures and reward systems tilting their way. At the same time, as noted geographer Kenneth Hewitt (2010) wrote in a lively online exchange among members of the Gender and Disaster Network, we must attend to the genderrelated inequalities of men in different social locations as well as the power they do and do not have or exercise: And yes, a nearly universal patriarchy notwithstanding, a majority of men in the world today suffers from various degrees of oppression and abuse. I know few women, gender-specialists and activists or not, who would not agree. It involves, negatively, men’s impoverishment, labour exploitation, exclusion on religious, ethnic and other grounds; and “positively” their disproportionate selection and targeting in violence by oppressive regimes, in organized crime, incarceration, and military conscription. Moreover, feminists were the first to recognize that the condition of women, in disasters or otherwise, depends especially on that of the men folk with whom most of them are closely associated—fathers, husbands, sons, grandchildren. They saw, long ago, that women’s rights and improvement cannot be achieved without social justice for their men folk too.

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The empowerment thesis must be expanded to the transformation of the overarching oppressive gender hierarchies that play out so dramatically in disasters. Community-based testing of the proposition is also needed. Gender equality as a variable distinguishing the short- or long-term recovery of disaster-affected communities has not been investigated in the United States. The case of La Masica, Honduras, is an oft-cited example, as both women and men were involved in preparedness and mitigation before Hurricane Mitch struck, one outcome of which was timely evacuation and no storm-related fatalities (Buvini´c, 1999). The proactive organizing of global women in poor countries, now quite well documented, is beyond the scope of this discussion, but strongly supports the thesis that gender-responsive development is closely aligned both to women’s empowerment and to the reduction of disaster risk. In the United States, when the innovative FEMA initiative known as Project Impact was in place, participating communities were encouraged to assess their resilience against a host of social indicators. Had indicators been in place on social equality measures, including gender relations, comparisons would have been possible between Project Impact communities and others at similar levels of risk in similar hazard zones. Sex-specific benchmark data about housing conditions, employment, mental and physical health, civic participation, and a host of other relevant factors could and should become part of the archive for postdisaster comparisons; these data could be used to suggest priorities for steps that can reasonably be taken, from a US perspective, to promote sustainable disaster recovery. High-level officials in the State Department and in the US Agency for International Development (USAID) spoke out against gender disparities in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and following the 2010 Haiti earthquake—and will do so again. Why are these connections missed domestically? Our disinclination to apply global learning about women, gender, and disaster was striking here at home as the Katrina debacle began to unfold, decreasing the prospects for minimizing gender inequities and “averting the second, postKatrina disaster” (Enarson, 2006).The public good is poorly served by divorcing US and international experience.

Gender and the Hyogo Framework for Action: Reducing the Risk of Disaster Gender equality is central to the vision and actions of disaster risk reduction as articulated by leaders of the UNISDR. Meeting in Kobe, Japan, soon after the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, those attending the 2005 World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction had a great sense of urgency. What frameworks or systems could best reduce the risk of avoidable harm in the next decade? What tools or resources could turn the ship around?

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The vehicle for change became known as the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA). National signatories to the HFA committed to integrating sustainable development and risk reduction, as well as to this “strategic priority”: “A gender perspective should be integrated into all disaster risk management policies, plans and decision-making processes, including those related to risk assessment, early warning, information management, and education and training” (UNISDR, 2007b, p. 4). Knowing how useful concrete examples and suggested actions are to national actors, the UNISDR commissioned Words into Action: A Guide for Implementing the Hyogo Framework, a set of step-by-step guidelines for realizing the five broad goals of the framework. Here, too, gender is a clearly identified “guiding principle” and a crosscutting concern “requiring attention throughout the planning, implementation, and evaluation phases of the activities adopted to implement the Hyogo Framework for Action. Toward this end, the need for sex-differentiated data is stressed, as is the need to analyze the gender division of labor and power relationships between the sexes as these may impinge on the success or failure of all risk reduction strategies” (UNISDR, 2007c, p. 11). How gender-sensitive is the Hyogo Framework in practice? The Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction, active in the global South around disaster risk and sustainable development, undertook a survey in 2009 to assess how community organizations perceived the framework. Its report, “Views from the Frontline,” offers powerful examples of good practice and the benefits of local engagement, but overall finds large gaps between intention and reality (for more, see www.globalnetwork-dr.org). A corollary report, “Women’s Views from the Frontline” (Huairou Commission, 2009) echoes this conclusion. Women’s organizations that responded to the survey cited lack of capacity, insufficient financing, and lack of institutional leadership roles for women as barriers to their meaningful engagement in the national goal of realizing the spirit and letter of the Hyogo Framework for Action. Positioning gender as a rhetorical frame and identifying it in a nonspecific fashion as “crosscutting” ensures that gender remains forever just out of sight. This is evident in a casual review of national submissions to the UNISDR on implementation of the HFA, as the gender dimensions of disaster reduction are rarely cited. Seeking to make the connections between gender equality and disaster reduction more transparent, I have suggested a number of steps for nations to consider as they move to implement the five core areas of the Hyogo Framework: (1) make disaster risk reduction a priority; (2) identify, assess, and monitor disaster risks and enhance early warning; (3) increase awareness, education, and training; (4) reduce underlying risk factors in key sectors; and (5) strengthen disaster preparedness (Enarson, 2009d; and see Grassroots Organizations Operating Together in Sisterhood International, n.d.). These recommended steps follow from my reading of the literature but also from conferences on gender and disasters conducted globally over two

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decades (Pakistan, Australia, Costa Rica, Canada, the United States, Turkey, China, Philippines, and Japan); from the groundbreaking 2001 Ankara meeting organized by the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women (UNDAW) on “bringing a gender perspective to environmental management and mitigation of natural disasters” (see UNDAW, 2001); from compilations of good practice (e.g., UNISDR 2007a, 2008, 2009); and, of course, from the firsthand observations shared by contributors to the global Gender and Disaster Network listserv about gendering disaster risk reduction. Importantly, the US Agency for International Development, through the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, has supported considerable international (but not US) work in this area. Practical action steps suggested for gendering the Hyogo Framework for Action (see Enarson, 2009g, for a short summary) relate specifically to the five action areas of the Hyogo Framework, ranging from the very basic to the more challenging. Basic steps include collecting data by sex and age, consulting with women’s groups, employing gender experts, supporting gendered participatory risk-mapping, and providing gender training for women and men. More challenging steps include gender budgeting, engaging women’s ministries in disaster reduction, contracting with women’s organizations on specific projects such as risk assessment and capacity building, developing personal networks between disaster risk managers and local women in hazardous areas, and employing gender-balanced emergency planning teams. How does the United States measure up? Unfortunately, implementation of the Hyogo Framework in the United States has been judged negatively on key gender issues (all country reports can be found on PreventionWeb, www .preventionweb.net). For example, asked to assess its progress toward meeting the second priority area of the framework (identify, assess, and monitor disaster risks and enhance early warning), the United States acknowledged that gender-disaggregated vulnerability and capacity assessments are not used. Similar gender gaps are apparent in the other four priority areas. A major report undertaken by the US Subcommittee on Disaster Reduction, which hosts the national platform of the Hyogo Framework for Action, defines six “grand challenges” for the United States. These challenges parallel the action points of the Hyogo Framework but with more emphasis on science and technology, perhaps because the report was drafted by the Committee on Environment and Natural Resources of the National Science and Technology Council (2005). The report is framed around the sobering assessment from the US Geological Survey that a major earthquake will likely affect the San Francisco Bay Area by the year 2030, with a 70 percent chance (plus or minus 10 percent) of a magnitude 6.7 or greater quake and an 80 percent chance of a magnitude 6.0– 6.6 quake. The economic damage and potential deaths that would result from such a large-magnitude earthquake are considerable, and gender disparities are

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likely for the reasons outlined in this book. Elaborating on the “grand challenges,” scientists affiliated with Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER), a leading group in resilience theory and design, write with little attention to the social dimensions of disaster risk reduction (MCEER, 2009). They briefly mention the need for effective risk communication, citing age, educational and income levels, race, ethnicity, language, and the “digital divide”—but not gender. Legislation and policy guidance promoted by FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security offer many different entry points for gender but there is little evidence of interest in this (as I also found in a review from Canada; Enarson, 2008b). Gender themes are sometimes included in academic conferences, but policy-changing steps such as those developing now around disability are not evident (see Phillips, 2011). Of course, few students of disaster would expect social change to stem primarily from Washington, D.C. I turn now to venues that carry more weight in the hard work ahead of energizing the public around a culture of safety and resilience.

From Vulnerability to Resilience? This is a book soon overtaken by events, for disasters are now as much a part of our future as the next World Series or Fourth of July parade. As I wrote this, the wetlands of the Gulf Coast were under assault by a “man-made” disaster threatening to destroy entire ecosystems and undermine cultures and livelihoods. Texas fires were building and communities around the country still reeled from a string of deadly tornadoes. Thanks to Hurricane Irene, massive evacuations took place in New York City and along the Eastern seaboard. With each successive event, the questions are more urgent: How can we act collectively to minimize damage and protect those we love? What can we do to forestall another “Katrina,” a disaster foretold (Laska, 2004)? Disaster resilience is a concept newly minted with no stable meaning or related set of practices; it is best understood at different levels of analysis, from the resilient personality or organization to resilient infrastructure systems or communities. Social vulnerability in disaster contexts, based on gender and other power structures, can be distinguished analytically from lack of resilience, but the boundaries are fuzzy. In an attempt to sharpen the “vulnerability” and “resilience” concepts, and taking into account the many diverse approaches to these two concepts, Siambabala Manyena (2006) provides an overview of the most salient distinctions. The vulnerability approach emphasizes resistance, safety, mitigation, institutional work, systems analysis, engineering, risk assessment, and a focus on outcomes and standards. In contrast, resilience-oriented efforts are seen to highlight recovery, the notion of “bouncing back,” adaptation, communitylevel work, networking, culture, capacity analysis, and process.

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Teasing apart these differences often leads to the unfortunate and mistaken inference that a continuum is in play, with vulnerability and resilience at opposite ends. Contributors to Douglas Paton and David Johnston’s reader on disaster resilience (2006) critique this (see also Cutter et al., 2008, for useful conceptual models leading to place-based assessment indicators). Though preexisting vulnerabilities may be addressed in the rebuilding phase (for example, through revised building codes), this view does little to guarantee that new vulnerabilities are not introduced; an example is the postdisaster construction of high-rent housing units that are “green” yet unaffordable to low-income mothers or others needing secure housing in disasters. Undocumented women or men can be very poor, and poorer yet following a fire or explosion, but may also live in a close-knit and multilingual community that enables them to face these losses with equanimity. When they “bounce back” to poverty and life on the margins of an oppressive social system, are they resilient to the effects of disaster? Far from it. This simplistic notion of resilience is not useful, but there are others. It was ecologists who first gave us the wonderfully elastic term “resilience,” highlighting its internal complexity, the significance of interactive systems, and the notion of positive learning, as well as loss, as outcomes of environmental change (among others, Berkes, 2007). Within the confines of their unique disciplines, others have pushed and pulled “resilience” in different directions, with greater or lesser emphasis on different sectors, levels of analysis, moments in time, cultural contexts, and of course phases of the disaster process or emergency management cycle. As is true of social vulnerability, the analysis is becoming more discrete, with a focus on urban resilience, for example, or on resilience at the organizational level or with respect to climate variability. Despite its popular appeal, many question whether such an elastic term is well suited to guiding disaster reduction, especially when it is misinterpreted as a static state contrasting sharply with “vulnerability.” A stellar analysis of strands in resilience thinking carries a felicitous title that encourages resilience thinking as, at once, a “metaphor, theory, set of capacities, and strategy for disaster readiness” (Norris et al., 2008). Arguably, an overly psychological reading of resilience unmoors individuals from the social structural context that informs and constrains human agency. Writing from a position sympathetic to disaster mental health, Fran Norris and her colleagues (2008, p. 146) share this concern: If resilience serves mainly as an inspirational concept (perhaps as a narrative in and of itself), there is something to be said for viewing it as an inevitable, inherent, universal quality of the human spirit. If resilience has utility as a scientific or strategic concept, this cannot be the case. It would not be too difficult for the concept of resilience to erode into one more way of stigmatizing suffering individuals and communities. Although the contribution of resilience

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theory is its greater emphasis on adaptive capacities, we should not lose sight of the fundamental role of the stressor. There are horrendous disasters from which even the most resourceful individuals or communities would struggle mightily to recover. No community is always vulnerable, for how would it survive, and no community is always resilient.

Their elegant discussion leads to the conclusion that community-based resilience is the linchpin of both individual and community wellness. The authors suggest five clear entry points for building community-level resilience. Their unique blend of the cultural, psychosocial, and material is a good fit with the gender perspective adopted in this book (see also Tobin, 1999, for a case study from Florida). To be resilient implies collective action for the common good. So preparedness, for example, must be a collective responsibility not falling (only) to the individual, or based on a perverse “user pays” model of social protection, or arising from costly gear or equipment. From this perspective, much of the current work of “resilience” in the United States is off-track, tilting toward the individual or, at best, a “household” about which very little is actually known in a given locale. Part of my bias to the material (readers will have their own) arises from concern that the gender and disaster community of practice has focused overly much on the psychology of gender (for example in studies of postdisaster stress), to the neglect of the all-too-real material realities arising from poverty, lack of disaster-resistant housing, inattention to women’s health and safety, and the other issues raised in this volume. Knowing that these are not, or should not be, mutually exclusive realms of knowledge or concern, I want to conclude this conversation about women’s disaster-related vulnerability and resilience by weighing in on the material side. In the end, vulnerability reduction, capacity building, positive adaptive capacity, and resilience enhancement are empty concepts subject to interpretation; they reflect a political shift in the prevailing winds of disaster reduction more than a cultural change at the grassroots. Just as funding streams in the United States were quickly diverted to homeland security following the attacks of 9/11, resilience approaches that seem to focus on the positive, in contrast to the social critique implicit in vulnerability thinking, may lead to more of the same. “Building on capacity” or “being resilient,” one woman or household at a time, may be shorthand for “do it yourself,” when many, if not most, of those most at risk have no such capacity, resource, competence, or even awareness. Just as “personal responsibility” translates so readily to “sink or swim” in our highly stratified society, increasingly a nation of yachts and pink slips, we must resist the use of “resilience” as a rhetorical device that masks this fundamental shift. Social life is predicated on organized social action, typically mediated through groups, organizations, and institutions. This is as true in the United

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States today as it has ever been, notwithstanding the many new and “virtual” forms that organized social interaction may take. For this reason, too, I am drawn to a structural approach to resilience that emphasizes human action finding expression through groups, organizations, coalitions, and networks. This, in the end, is the bedrock of what we call “community,” whether thinking of geographic communities or those of affinity, identity, or politics, or the many women’s communities of practice in the United States. From the perspective of structural engineers, who first developed a material approach to resilience (one that functions equally well at different levels of analysis), organizational resilience can be seen as the function of four driving concerns (MCEER, 2006). The first is redundancy (so systemic collapse can be avoided) and the second is rapidity (so actions are timely). Resourcefulness is the third quality (so responses are appropriate and sufficient to the need), and readiness (so action is possible due to advance planning and coordinated approaches) is the fourth. We might also want to consider a fifth (respect) for engaging in culturally sensitive and gender-aware ways with community members most at risk, and a sixth (recognition) for knowing who the actors are in the neighborhood or region who would bring specific knowledge about local vulnerabilities and capacities. A seventh (resistance) is needed, too, as opposition to systems and structures now driving disaster risk can be expected. Stretching the meaning of disaster “resistance” from its original referent (the physical hardening of structures and lifelines), at least two kinds of action are implied. First, consider action to withstand the destructive forces of hazards and disasters with minimal loss, to protect human rights in the relief and recovery process, and to resist the external agenda that is often imposed by powerful elites (see Klein, 2007, on disaster capitalism, and Luft, 2008, on disaster patriarchy). A second line of action is to engage decisionmakers in a community that understands and resists the driving forces that increase the risk of future disasters—seeing the storm on the horizon and taking steps together to avoid it (see Cottrell, 2006, on Australian women’s preparedness and resilience to weather hazards). I now return to the overarching question at the heart of this discussion: Where are the women? Taking an organizational and resource-based approach to disaster resilience highlights the need to understand what galvanizes women to action and how their efforts can be sustained. This is a question about political organizing and feminist theory too little considered in disaster contexts.

The Awakening? From Response to Prevention in Women’s Movements Previous chapters have provided ample evidence of women as disaster responders and residents with an ear to the ground and inclination toward self-

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protective action. Women in the United States are also actively engaged in reducing the hazardous conditions and social injustices that put the nation at increasing risk, though their work may be described in a different voice. Each new disaster forces difficult questions—and women do persist in asking them. Advocates for low-income families in Grand Forks, North Dakota, were clearly frustrated by inattention after the 1997 Red River flood to the acute needs of single mothers for affordable housing, full-time jobs with benefits, child care, transportation, and protection from violence. These flooded-out women spoke out for a new recovery agenda: And then when we bring petitions to City Hall, [he] tables it. He tables it because “people need to calm down.” You know. And the kinds of concerns that I brought forward have been typical women’s concerns. . . . I see maledominated kinds of committees that aren’t necessarily responsive to the kinds of concerns I have. Neighborhood concerns, kid concerns, school concerns, playground concerns. . . . But no one that’s been intensely involved in developing any kind of flood response would understand probably what it’s like for a welfare mom and two kids to cart around town trying to get services. (Enarson, 2001, p. 14)

Women caught up in the Gulf Coast storms of 2005 articulated critiques of business-as-usual recovery efforts (David and Enarson, 2011). Women’s lower tolerance for risk and historic sensitivity to gender-, race-, and class-based environmental injustices (among many, see Taylor, 1997; Stein, 2004) are both social facts inspiring confidence that US women can and will come to disaster risk reduction. Some of this work will be global in scope. One such instance was evident in the Women’s Neighborhood Network Project, a two-year international partnership involving mutual exchanges between women in Ukraine and Oregon (Weidner, 2004). Illustrating the potential for transnational learning, Ukrainian women traveled to the United States to study practical first-aid skills, share the principles of community preparedness and strategies for increasing local awareness, and undertake training to effectively interview their friends and neighbors in the process of conducting participatory needs assessments. This resulted in the formation of personal networks useful in subsequent floods and in the production of such resources as emergency telephone stickers and calendars with hazard-specific preparedness information. US women then traveled as a team to the home town of their Ukrainian visitors for similar knowledge exchange, training, and networking. In the United States, applying the international women’s resilience model developed by Grassroots Organizations Operating Together in Sisterhood (GROOTS) is a logical next step (www.disasterwatch.net). Building on strengths and knowledge exchange, it invites border-crossing of all kinds to reduce risk. Many, if not all, of the US women’s groups discussed here seem ready for a broad approach based on women’s empowerment and leadership across

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borders. US-based Women of Color United, with their strong and growing focus on climate justice, already stretches across national and political boundaries (for example, through the Climate Justice Road Tour and participation in global climate and social justice gatherings; see www.womenofcolorunited.org). It is difficult to imagine fundamental shifts in either community or government approaches to disaster without a critical consciousness as sensitive to gender as it is to poverty or race, age or disability. The willful neglect of people’s fundamental human rights, including those accorded women through such international treaties as the Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), was not an abstract oppression but shockingly personal for those caught in the chaos of Katrina. This willful neglect remains ongoing for many thousands of still-displaced women (Ross, 2005; Enarson, 2009a). Wellknown black feminist activist Shana Griffin of New Orleans speaks for many when she says: “I’m less interested in talking now about hurricanes and more about disasters. The disaster is the government response. It has to do with government policy and population control; with disenfranchisement, forced assimilation, reproduction” (Luft, 2009, p. 509).

Political Will for Change: Cautionary Notes Disasters can inspire movements toward social justice and democratic action (but see case studies of the inverse on the website of Disaster Diplomacy, www.disasterdiplomacy.org). Women’s radicalization “by fire” is a powerful force, a possibility if not an inevitable outcome of disasters that unite women around perceived threats to health, safety, and well-being. But conflicting interests among women in diverse social positions and environmental contexts complicate the challenge of mobilization. The increasingly privatized and militarized administration of risk by government, military, and new media forces does not bode well. Increased policing of women’s bodies and barriers to the exercise of women’s reproductive rights, especially among low-income women of color, cannot be minimized here at home. The rights of all women and girls must be actively protected, not least in the face of wide-ranging changes wrought by global warming and associated climate hazards and disasters. For these reasons and more, women’s involvement is essential. Without it, the country’s dialogue will be short-changed just when all viewpoints are needed on reorganizing how we use our land, water, and air, and organize our society. Radical women of color call out most clearly the spaces for both increased repression and increased liberation (e.g., Griffin and Woods, 2009). In contrast, mainstream women’s organizations in the United States have not taken up the mantle of disaster reduction, but this is surely not for want of passion. American women are indeed passionate about protecting their homes, neighborhoods, and communities and always have been, whether with a conservative bent or a

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radical one. It is not for want of creativity (see Code Pink’s work on the oil spill), or lack of political clout. Many national women’s organizations are wellendowed at the grassroots level, where most on-the-ground disaster reduction takes place; some are sufficiently resourced to mount successful national lobbying (Banaszak, 2005, 2010). Nor is the entrepreneurial spirit of women in the United States in question, as evidenced most recently by women marketing emergency plans privately to well-heeled clients, just as other “family” tasks have been outsourced. Coming to the gender politics of disaster one woman at a time is not a step toward structural change, however. What will put disaster prevention on the radar of women’s movements? It may be the effects of global climate change here at home (see Dankleman, 2010), or an especially egregious transgression such as the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India, and subsequent lack of redress, against which women activists still speak out. Will another hurricane be the clarion call, or a “dirty bomb,” an earthquake in a major metropolitan area, or a season of horrific extreme heat and wildfires? Such triggering events can and do motivate collective action, but this is less likely when no alternative worldview is at hand to help people recast disasters as preventable social events. The notoriously short public attention span is no help, nor the nonstop media world that so eagerly offers up fear and so rarely lingers for analysis.

Three Lines of Action Entrenched power structures are readily reinforced when disasters “wipe the slate clean” for private corporations and elites to act in their own interests (among other US case studies, see Rozario, 2001). Responding to disasters without reproducing or increasing social vulnerabilities can counterbalance this momentum from the top, but not without women. Gender equality is a pillar of disaster resilience and justifiably part of women’s collective political work in the United States. I see three pathways toward this end. None is straightforward or certain, but each is promising. Guiding a US Women’s Movement for Disaster Resilience Theoretically The diverse strands of feminist thought in US political life suggest many guides to action, none without limitations for disaster reduction. The default position of most Americans on gender issues is liberal feminism, a spirited defense of women’s right to their fair share of existing resources and modest state support for those who “fall through the cracks.” These efforts can be supported, but liberal feminism is limited by its focus on existing systems of

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power and privilege—a poor fit with the collective good that hazard mitigation and disaster reduction demand. Radical feminism may simply ask too much (the radical revising of gender itself) and focus overly much on gender violence in disasters. Ecofeminist ideas rooted in this worldview merge too often into an essentialism or spiritualism not supported by a broad public; it is also doubtful that the radical critique of male dominion over the animal and natural world will move women to action that reduces disaster risk. Postmodern feminism also seems unlikely to bring women to the place-based and material work of hazards and disaster reduction; queer theory and critical men’s studies seem removed from the issues that might galvanize women and men around disaster risk reduction. When racism and poverty are the defining features of women’s lives, lowincome women of color step up. Uniting around a broader vision of social and gender justice, they voice a more radical and structural critique that is distinctly uninterested in “competing oppressions,” but keenly concerned with gender justice in the broader constellation of social justice. Their language of exploitation and injustice aligns with the politics of global feminism and human rights movements around the world—and with the rising mobilization of civil society around disaster risk reduction and climate change mitigation and adaptation. Though least in evidence to date in the United States, socialist feminist thought insists on both economic and gender justice, challenging equally the values and practices of racialized patriarchy and global corporate capitalism. The US women’s labor movement has a long and proud history that can be brought to bear. Making the connections between global economic dynamics that produce and distribute disaster risk so unfairly and contemporary threats to a living wage, to union rights, and to immigrant communities is one way women in the labor movement could address disaster resilience. In the current political climate, though, the space for women’s leadership in the labor movement toward this end seems small. Gender and development theory, along with global feminism, seem more promising guides to change. Both highlight the deeply racialized and classed divisions between women; both take up masculinity and make space for men’s action; and both also position the United States geopolitically with emphasis on the cross-border flow of ideas, people, and goods— along with emphasis on degraded air, despoiled waters, hazardous materials, violence, and contamination tied to weapon production. However, my personal view is that the core ideas and values of feminist political ecology are the most fertile ground for the theoretical guide to action we need. The long-dominant natural hazard paradigm of risk has shifted decisively toward a more nuanced causal framework, one that sees disaster risk as part of a larger system of meaning and the ecology of place, people, and time (Peacock, Morrow, and Gladwin, 1997). Mainstream political ecology does not do justice to gender as a central organizing principle in all human societies, but is

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not in opposition to gender analysis. Women who defend the resource base of their communities come readily to the work of disaster risk management and climate change adaptation, as described in the many global projects highlighted in United Nations “good practice” reviews as well as in academic case studies (Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangarai, 1996; see also Wekerle, 2005, on women’s organizing around urban food security in Canada). This is the natural home for a gender analysis of climate change, which is perhaps the defining concern of our age, and clearly one that energizes a great many women in local contexts and at the policy tables (Dankleman, 2010; Röhr, Hemmati, and Lambrou, 2009; UNISDR, 2008; Terry, 2009). Women in the United States, as elsewhere, are managers and users of natural resources as well as primary agents of consumption, and hence in a position to effect change. As noted earlier with respect to climate, women are supportive of concrete action steps that may mitigate harmful emissions at the household and local level. They are also clearly instrumental in campaigns for corporate responsibility, legislative reform, and environmental stewardship to reduce emissions here at home and respond creatively to the effects of global climate change. Despite the attempted silencing of gender as a concern in climate change work, this is a promising development. Pressure will only grow (internally and externally) for the United States to confront the implications of its neoliberal governing philosophy and oil-based and consumption-driven economy. I expect we will move beyond the cumbersome language of the day that collapses “gender and disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation” and arrive at an integrated theory and practice to address both. So closely tied to the most compelling issues of our day, climate change seems certain to be a catalyst for women’s future environmental work in the United States. It may also be the issue that galvanizes young women to action in the way that campaigns around reproductive rights did an earlier generation. Centering Gender, Race, and Class for Transformative Organizing Currently, most of women’s political organizing around disaster is response work undertaken at the individual or community level. But social hierarchies of power and privilege are systemic and have regional, national, and global contexts (see Connell, 2005, on the rising power of male global elite). US feminists working on disaster issues must integrate gender into the larger “matrix of domination” (Collins, 1990) to develop a unified approach to disaster reduction. For this work to be effective, attention must be given to structurally embedded male, economic, and racial power. This means rejecting a gender-blind political economy of disaster risk that cannot explain the assertion of male interest in crises or the social fact of gender-based resistance to it. It also means centering or recentering the life experiences and political analysis of radical

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women of color. Writing on the need for women’s antiviolence work to be grounded in accountability to local communities, rather than depend upon law enforcement, post-Katrina New Orleans activists saw that crises can “open up opportunities not just for ending sexual and domestic violence but for nurturing more organized communities in which people are better able to take care of one another in the face of all kinds of disasters” (Bierra, Liebenthal, and Incite!, 2007, p. 39). As noted in Chapter 10, the Incite! Women of Color Against Violence collective has been pushing against the tide to build a popular movement that connects the dots of disaster risk and centers the life experience and knowledge of women of color. Importantly, they do this internationally as well, exemplified by their statement on the 2010 Haiti earthquake (Incite! 2010). In this same spirit, black feminist activist Loretta Ross articulates a vision of women’s work in disasters that fundamentally shifts the status quo from local to global, and from disaster assistance to human rights. In an early piece written for a feminist publication, Ross (2005) turned to women outside the United States to speak to women at home: Our sisters from other countries advise us that disasters can wipe out the past and create an opportunity to better include people to reshape the future. We can use this moment to force bureaucracies to become more flexible, like changing normal admissions procedures to get our kids back in schools or demanding that quality public housing be provided instead of permanent refugee camps. We need schools, voter registration, immigrant services, drivers’ licenses, housing, medical care, and public assistance put on the fast track, not bottle-necked services mired down in the typical bureaucratic snarls that characterize government assistance programs. . . . We have to claim our human right to sustainable development and insist on the enforcement of economic and social rights in re-development strategies.

In recent disasters, US women have worked mainly in the theoretical backroom and on different pieces of the disaster story, most prominently focusing on local volunteerism, home-based preparedness, and postdisaster relief assistance. Framing women’s challenge more broadly around global feminist principles, as these play out in a particular ecological time and place, is now essential. Indigenous women stand ready, both for their self-organization and for the degree of risk to which they are exposed, as do Latina and Asian American women with different cultural roots and class positions. Women young and old who have endured disasters are ready, as are the legions of women who devote their lives to humanitarian relief. For women focused on antiracist work, the forces that connect social and environmental racism, disaster, and climate change have never been more apparent. The leadership of those in the eye of the metaphorical storm, predominantly poor women of color, is the essential building block of a new women’s movement for social justice based on sustainability, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and the prevention of social disasters. We are not yet there, but there are grounds for optimism.

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Strengthening Will and Capacity in Women’s Organizations A third condition for a women-led and community-based culture of prevention is sustained support for the grassroots organizations that do the work of disaster resilience. My review of women’s collective disaster work in the preceding chapter suggested the need to track and analyze these initiatives over time. Mitigating known hazards, attending planning meetings, organizing local sustainability projects, practicing emergency plans, and lobbying municipal authorities and corporate leaders about avoidable risk—these are among the inglorious tasks at hand. Few Americans, male or female, give up time to act solely on the premise of preventing disasters. This is certainly true of US women’s organizations, which are generally single-issue or identity-based groups unlikely to see disaster as a core concern. Where, then, is the momentum for change? Certainly, no new metaorganization is called for. Instead, gender and disaster concerns must take their place among the other concerns of organized women in public life, acting separately and acting jointly with men. Just as the risk of disaster arises from everyday practice, the reduction of risk must be embedded in daily work rather than being an “add on” to women’s already hectic lives. Institutionalized spaces, not ad hoc events, are needed to bring women together virtually and physically for mutual exchange of ideas and skills around crosscutting issues. These are rare or nonexistent at present, but potential organizing platforms exist. Women in emergency management and women organized in professional caucuses related to hazards and disasters are potential partners, as are their male mentors and allies. Some women’s groups emerging after disasters will step up too, such as those reviewed in Chapter 10. Global women’s organizations that currently partner with the global network Grassroots Organizations Operating Together in Sisterhood are natural allies for US-based women’s groups; their on-the-ground experience and capacity-building work is impressive (see www.huairou.org /resilience). The network of women’s and community organizations supported by the Ms. Foundation’s Katrina Response Fund is a powerful organizing base, as are those comprising the US-based Gender and Disaster Resilience Alliance and similar networks. Women’s environmental justice and antiracist campaigns can bring women to this work who might not otherwise consider disaster risk their issue. None of these initiatives can stand alone. But together they can be a catalyst for unifying women and men in the United States around disaster prevention, bringing together the strands of common concern that have united Americans in the past around smart growth, economic democracy, environmentalism, racial justice, fair immigration practices, affordable and secure housing, and human security. These are all issues that can mitigate the eminently avoidable harm brought about by disasters; in turn, disasters cut across each of these areas of social action. Women’s groups, community action networks, and

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professionals charged with emergency preparedness and risk reduction in the United States have more in common than they may realize, so practical partnerships are very feasible (see Figure 11.1). Is this a pipedream? It takes money to build resilience. It may take more money to build gender-based resilience by building capacity in women’s grassroots and mainstream women’s organizations active in disasters, including the many branches of women’s activism in the private and public sectors. Again, Loretta Ross (2005) makes the case for the Gulf Coast: Of the billions of dollars that have been poured into the region, we must demand increased funding for domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, abused children’s services, reproductive health programs, and services for the elderly, immigrants, and people who are disabled. We must demand that those doing assessments of what is needed not use gender-blind methods that fail to

Figure 11.1 Potential Risk-Reducing Partnerships In addition to mainstream women’s groups, women emergency managers, and those in elected or appointed office, the following are potentially strong partners. Where are the women in your jurisdiction? • Indigenous women’s groups and immigrant women’s services • Community women’s centers and environmental groups in which women are active • Women’s antiviolence programs and those working with homeless women • Senior centers and organizations working with the frail elderly • Advocacy groups for domestic workers, migrant workers, and women of color • Women’s disability rights groups and rural women’s associations • Child care services and coalitions • Youth groups working with girls and single-mother support groups or networks • Neighborhood associations and disaster preparedness teams in which women are active • Clinics working with HIV-positive women and home health worker associations • Women’s rights groups and coalitions, including those advocating for sex workers, lesbians, and the transgendered • Women’s bureaus and departments in local governments • Women’s educational, professional, and service groups • Labor union coalitions and business associations developed by women • Crisis lines and other community mental health services • Women’s faith groups and networks • Associations of women’s health, housing, and labor experts • Women farmers and technical experts in agriculture • Women’s professional networks on sustainability and resource management

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see the differences between the conditions of women and men, and fail to meet our need to be free from all forms of violence but especially sexual violence. . . . We need to demand support for local women’s organizations which are arguably the best way to get information to women and obtain information about women’s needs.

Support for women’s organizations active in disasters is needed from emergency management agencies and local jurisdictions, but so is bridgework between those women working on justice issues or climate change. Women in elected or appointed office who are sensitive to gender, environmental, and development issues are potentially important allies of grassroots women’s organizations, as are women’s labor unions and cooperatives. And now, more than ever, the talents of young women on the cutting edge of new media are needed to bring the message home. Imagine the new “disaster flicks” they will make, and how they will tell their stories. Finally, the values motivating any women’s campaign for disaster resilience must be those of family and place, justice and faith, good governance and environmental stewardship. Safety, protection, and interdependence are not the “female” end of an imagined risk-taking continuum but the lodestones of family and neighborhood life for generations, and the values that will bring this issue to life for women.

Conclusion Women’s organizations have enormous promise as catalysts for disaster resilience, a mission much larger than gender mainstreaming or integrating women into emergency management roles. When they are strong and united, with a keen awareness of what is at stake and what can be done, communitybased and mainstream women’s organizations will serve as subject experts and communication conduits for reaching marginalized populations with life-saving information. There is no single “community” or “household” and no single “women’s perspective” either, so emergency managers and planners must reach as broad a range of women and women’s groups as possible, looking first in their own backyards. Emergency managers can consult with women leaders in government and academia to inventory all women’s and community groups, associations, and networks that are knowledgeable about housing, livelihood, health, the environment, conflict, and other areas of life through which residents are exposed to hazards and disaster risk. Naturally, these groups and networks then become partners in all mitigation and preparedness programs, in tabletop and community exercises, and in training and scenario-based planning. Preparedness initiatives supported with government funds must include gender-specific

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evaluation indicators and provide for women’s active and equal participation. Finally, because women’s grassroots work knits a people together through the “critical social infrastructure” of community life, the facilities housing women’s services must be high on the list for retrofitting and related forms of structural and nonstructural mitigation.

12 Fighting for the Future

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t is difficult to bring this narrative to an end. A unique feature of disaster social science is that the Ferris wheel never stops—a new and potentially even more deadly disaster always looms on the horizon. Hurricane Katrina was the main storyline of this book, but others will remember instead the nearly seamless series of damaging tornadoes, wildfires, droughts, chemical releases, and heat waves of recent years. Inspired by Katrina, hard on the heels of 9/11, and facing enormous uncertainty environmentally, politically, and economically, an increasingly concerned public calls for smarter (and cheaper) approaches to disaster. It is past time to stop going to the same old (disaster) movie and to write a different script. As an academic, I hope we start—but don’t stop—at the library. Feminism in the streets brought women’s studies into the curriculum with courses offered in such areas as women and the family, the psychology of women, women and politics, women’s grassroots activism, women and communication, women and health, violence against women, women and urban life, women and international relations, women and development—and, more recently, women and the environment, women and climate change, and (very occasionally) women and disasters. Concurrently, women were gaining elected office, especially at the local level, where disaster prevention and response begins, and caucusing as new professionals in engineering, architecture, planning, and other disasterrelated fields, including emergency management. Soon, women’s studies became “women and gender studies,” with burgeoning scholarship by and about women and gender in the family, at work and play, in business and leadership positions, and of course in disasters. This remarkably creative period in US gender studies was complemented by studies and mobilization in the areas of conflict, migration, epidemics (HIV/AIDS), Holocaust studies, and, most recently, work on women, gender, 195

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and terrorism, including gender-focused post-9/11 work. International humanitarian relief experts in the US State Department now sponsor gender and disaster meetings and promote gender-sensitive emergency relief abroad. Increasingly, women activists and scholars urge that women’s choices and realities be reflected in climate change negotiations and in the range of new and familiar hazards captured in the rubric of “national security.” Correspondingly, important changes are under way in thinking and acting toward hazards and disasters. If only haltingly, “disaster risk reduction” may cease to be a discrete set of actions in the good hands of experts, and become embedded instead in our daily lives, reinforced by participatory democracy when critical decisions must be made about land use, energy, foreign policy, and the state. Thinking about women, gender, and disasters, I remember the kaleidoscope. Turn the lens just a bit, and an entirely different world is revealed—as brilliant, complicated, colorful (and short-lived) as the one before. In just the same way, seeing disasters through a gender lens does not reveal a single pattern but multiple visions; nothing is ever settled, and there is no one way of seeing a world in constant motion. I love this about the kaleidoscope, and offer it as a metaphor for gender analysis. In contrast, the popular “zero-sum” approach is simply wrong: nothing about gender analysis devalues any other social dynamic contributing to the social production of disaster vulnerability or resilience. The same is true of men and gender in disaster. I have not made many observations about the global context of this book. This is not for lack of concern, as evidenced by my past work on gender and disaster in the global South. Truly, the futures of North and South are mutually contingent. With this in mind, I have given some space to the ideas and actions that global women have brought to the world stage with respect to disaster prevention, survival, and reconstruction. Are the issues facing women in poor countries qualitatively different from those in the United States? It may seem so, based on what the mainstream media bring us—images of desperately poor women and children left bereft, starved mothers walking for help, and women and girls crowded into overflowing refugee camps. We hear of widows deprived of the most basic aid, girl children forced into early marriage, sex-for-food scandals, rapists on relief teams, and wives cheated of inheritance and land by their male relatives. Conversely, the “resilient spirit” of the poor is celebrated. Is there, indeed, an exceptional quality of resilience or capacity for concerted action that we in the United States do not share? The answer is no, but this is a complicated debate that takes us too far afield. Here I point out only the obvious: Gender relations and the conditions and rights of women are inevitably shaped by culture, place, and history, so what women face and how they respond in a disaster are context-specific and to some degree unique. In this limited sense, what women have in common in disasters may, in fact, be less important than the differences.

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Yet there is a more compelling response that acknowledges difference while seeking common ground. I have argued here that women’s participation and leadership are bedrock principles for any semblance of sustained disaster reduction. Toward that end, crossing boundaries of all kinds is essential and strategic. Women in the United States must share what they have—and what they have learned. In the same spirit, we can and must reach out to the women dismissed as “vulnerable,” learning alongside them new pathways toward a just, sustainable, and disaster-resilient future. This book is a cautionary tale for a nation still inclined toward the “protection” of women and still bent on creating the very conditions that endanger everyone and everything Americans hold dear. Without paying attention to gender relations, as one of the defining characteristics of private and public life, we will not build an inclusive and gender-responsive approach to emergency management and disaster risk reduction. For those who hope that the resources of the United States can be brought to bear in regions of extreme risk—I agree. But disaster reduction is not a zero-sum game. Women in the United States can and, I hope, will continue to be active abroad while focusing on what must be done at home. Understanding more about how women in the United States anticipate, prepare for, cope with, resist, and recover from disasters does not detract from our capacity for positive action on the global stage, but amplifies it. We have everything to gain from taking on board how women elsewhere have worked effectively with local governments, national institutes of emergency management, nonprofits, humanitarian agencies, and disaster responders of all kinds to reduce risk. How to get there from here? Putting together a proactive approach that covers us all cannot be done piecemeal, one “special population” at a time. Instead, a transformative and inclusive politic is necessary—one I believe that American women are ready and able to lead. Having come to the end of this story, it could not be more clear that reducing the risk of disaster is a feminist project. I do not imply by this any one definition of feminism, or the notion that women are mainly or only responsible for the corporate and governmental policies that lead us so decisively in the wrong direction. Nor do I mean that lower levels of exposure to hazardous conditions will follow, like day follows night, from women’s empowerment, for there is no causal chain here. But disasters are as much a “women’s issue” as any other, and American women are poised to lead. As ever, feminist politics are a fabulous blend of the visionary and prosaic written on a large and colorful canvas. But the irreducible principle at the heart of the feminist impulse that has driven so much positive change in the United States is this: The rights of women cannot be won in the abstract, or in isolation from other rights-based campaigns. The structures of oppression and exploitation that penalize and hurt women also grant some women more than others enormous privilege. Unlike more narrowly framed social movements, the fem-

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inist project has never been about formal legal equality or women’s rights alone, but about bringing women to the larger struggle of challenging and transforming these root structures of inequality. This is the precondition for envisioning fundamentally new ways of pulling back from the brink. Getting to the root of everything that puts us at increased risk is a tall order. An extended conversation with men about gender power and privilege in their lives is long overdue, as is dialogue between communities of color, disability, age, and sexuality. Connections must be forged between women who have wildly different ideas about what constitutes “avoidable harm” or “risk” or “disaster,” within the United States and in our immediate geopolitical neighborhood. Linkages must be clarified between the global capitalism that enriches us at home and the production of risk along our borders and in countries where both women and men lack viable choices. Convergence must be sought between the interests of women in the affluent global North, women whose lives in the United States parallel those in the impoverished global South, and women worldwide. The capacity of women to effect deep structural and cultural change is amply demonstrated in the history of the United States, and the sources of resistance are just as clearly etched. It is vital that our national discussion reflects this history and engages with women’s movements across the nation and globally—the stakes of not doing so are too high. I leave my intrepid readers with the optimistic reminder that no progressive movement for change in the United States has succeeded without women. In this perilous time when fundamental change is both urgent and possible, we must search all the harder for common ground. Disasters are not “natural” to the human experience, but mitigating them requires the full and equal participation and leadership of women and men to move us toward more just, sustainable, and disaster resilient ways of living on the planet. The future may challenge us in ways difficult to imagine. But we have been here before and risen to the occasion—we can do it again. There is a future worth fighting for, women and men together. May it come soon.

Appendix: A Guide to Online Resources

General Policy Frameworks and Practice Guides Gender Considerations in Disaster Assessment. World Health Organization. 2005. www.who.int/gender/other_health/en/gwhdisasterassessment.pdf. Gender Equality and Humanitarian Assistance: A Guide to the Issues. Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). 2003. www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/INET/IMAGES .NSF/vLUImages/Africa/$file/Guide-Gender.pdf. Gender Equality in Disasters: Six Principles for Engendered Relief and Reconstruction. Gender and Disaster Network. 2005. Planning principles for gender-sensitive approaches. www.unisdr.org/wcdr/preparatory-process/inputs/gender-broadsheet.pdf. Gender Sensitive Practice Checklist for Organizations. E. Enarson. 1999. Guide to organizational self-assessment for gender-sensitive emergency management. www.gdnonline.org/resources/gender_sensitive_practice_checklist.doc. Making Disaster Risk Reduction Gender-Sensitive: Policy and Practical Guidelines. UNISDR, UN Development Program, and International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Geneva, Switzerland. 2009. www.unisdr.org/files/9922_Making DisasterRiskReductionGenderSe.pdf. Prairie Women Prepared for Disaster: An Emergency Planning Guide for Women’s Community Organizations. 2009. E. Enarson for the Prairie Women’s Health Centre of Excellence with support from Public Health Agency of Canada, Manitoba and Saskatchewan Region. www.pwhce.ca/program_gender_disaster_I.htm. Women, Girls, Boys, and Men: Different Needs, Equal Opportunities—Gender Handbook in Humanitarian Action. UN InterAgency Standing Committee. December 2006. www.humanitarianinfo.org/iasc/content/documents/subsidi/tf_gender/IASC %20Gender%20Handbook%20(Feb%202007).pdf. Working with Women at Risk: Practical Guidelines for Assessing Local Disaster Risk. E. Enarson et al. 2003. Available in English and Spanish. www.gdnonline.org /resources/WorkingwithWomenEnglish.pdf.

Issue-Specific Planning and Policy Guides Battered Women in Disaster: Case Study of Gendered Vulnerability. E. Enarson. 1998. Transcript and materials from online EmForum discussion, with planning guidelines for shelters, programs, and emergency management agencies. www.emforum.org /vlibrary/980603.htm.

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Critical Needs in Caring for Pregnant Women During Times of Disaster for NonObstetric Health Care Providers. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2007. www.bt.cdc .gov/disasters/pregnantdisasterhcp.asp. Emergency Preparedness and Response Publications and Materials. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Office of Women’s Health. 2006. Short, practical guides on public health emergencies with attention to women’s health conditions and concerns. www.cdc.gov/women/pubs/epr.htm#2006. Gender Note #1: Women, Gender, and the Hyogo Platform for Action. E. Enarson. 2009. Prepared for the Gender and Disaster Network. www.gdnonline.org/resources /GDN_GenderNotes1.pdf. Gender Note #2: Women, Gender, and Disaster—Hazards and Hazard Mitigation. E. Enarson. 2009. Prepared for the Gender and Disaster Network. www.gdnonline.org /resources/GDN_GenderNote2_Mitigation.pdf. Gender Note #3: Women, Gender, and Disaster—Men and Masculinities. E. Enarson. 2009. Prepared for the Gender and Disaster Network. www.gdnonline.org/ resources/GDN_GenderNote3_MenandMasculinities.pdf. Gender Note #4: Women, Gender, and Disaster—Abilities and Disabilities. E. Enarson. 2009. Prepared for the Gender and Disaster Network. www.gdnonline.org/ resources/GDN_GenderNote4_Abilities.pdf. Gender Note #5: Women, Gender, and Disaster—Risk Communication. E. Enarson. 2009. Prepared for the Gender and Disaster Network. www.gdnonline.org/resources /GDN_GenderNote5_RiskCommunication.pdf. Gender Sensitive Programming by Sector: A Synthesis. E. Enarson. 2005. Compilation of widely available practice guidelines by sector for disaster risk management. www.gdnonline.org/resources/gender_sensitive_programming.doc. Giving Birth “In Place”: A Guide to Emergency Preparedness for Childbirth. American College of Nurse-Midwives. 2003. www.midwife.org/siteFiles/about/giving birthinplacerevised.pdf. Guidelines for Gender-Based Violence Interventions in Humanitarian Settings. InterAgency Standing Committee (IASC), Task Force on Gender and Humanitarian Assistance. 2005. www.humanitarianinfo.org/iasc/new/content/subsidi/tf_gender /gbv.asp?bodydetail=Gender%20and%20Humanitarian%20Assistanceandpublish=0. It Could Happen to Your Agency! Tools for Change: Emergency Management for Women. Ending Violence Association of British Columbia. 2001. Workbook to help agencies develop emergency responses plan. www.endingviolence.org/node/382. Meeting the Special Needs of Pregnant Women and Infants: Six Key Elements of Every Disaster Plan. March of Dimes. 2006. www.marchofdimes.com/files/DPRP _Section__2a_6_Key_Elements_for_Every_Disaster_Plan_FINAL_10-01-06.pdf. Promoting Social Justice in Disaster Reconstruction: Guidelines for Gender-Sensitive and Community-Based Planning. E. Enarson. 2001. Practice note prepared for the Disaster Mitigation Institute, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in the aftermath of the 2001 earthquake. http://gdnonline.org/resources/gender-sensitive-planning.doc. Recommendations for Contraceptive Care in Emergencies. World Health Organization. No date. www.paho.org/english/ped/te_snant.htm. Reproductive Health Assessment After Disasters: A Toolkit for US Health Departments. University of North Carolina, Center for Public Health/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2011. http://cphp.sph.unc.edu/reproductivehealth/index.html. Resources for Breastfeeding During Emergencies. La Leche League International. 2006. www.llli.org/emergency.html. Sexual Violence in Disasters: A Planning Guide for Prevention and Response. Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault (LaFASA) and the National Sexual Violence

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Resource Center (NSVRC). 2008. Post-Katrina guide for planning and community collaboration. Available in English and Spanish. www.nsvrc.org/.../sexual-violencedisasters-planning-guide-prevention-and-response. Women, Work, and Family in the 1997 Red River Valley Flood: Ten Lessons Learned. E. Enarson. 1998. Community report from a qualitative study, with guidelines for practice. www.crid.or.cr/digitalizacion/pdf/eng/doc13585/doc13585.pdf.

Training Materials Gender Mainstreaming in Emergency Management: A Training Module for Emergency Planners. E. Enarson. 2009. Developed for the Women and Health Care Reform and the Prairie Women’s Health Centre of Excellence, Winnipeg MB. General information and specific exercises and tools for incorporating gender into emergency planning. www.womenandhealthcarereform.ca/publications/GEM_MainFINAL .pdf. Gender Sensitive Disaster Management: A Tool Kit for Practitioners. C. Pincha for Oxfam America. 2008. www.eldis.org/vfile/upload/1/document/0812/Gnder%20 sensitive%20disaster%20management%20Toolkit.pdf. International Training Materials for Gender Mainstreaming in Disaster Risk Reduction. M. Fordham, Gender and Disaster Network, UN Development Programme. 2007. Designed primarily for use in developing nations, though some materials are readily adapted to the United States. www.gdnonline.org/wot_keyresources.php.

Conference Proceedings Gender Equality and Disaster Risk Reduction Workshop. Summer 2004. Honolulu. www.ssri.hawaii.edu/research/GDWwebsite/pages/proceeding.html. Gender Equality, Environmental Management, and Natural Disaster Mitigation. 2001. United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women, Expert Working Group meeting. Ankara, Turkey. www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/env_manage /documents.html. Reaching Women and Children in Disasters. Summer 2000. Miami. www.online .northumbria.ac.uk/geography_research/gdn. Women in Disasters: Exploring the Issues. Spring 1998. Vancouver. www.ssri.hawaii .edu/research/GDWwebsite/pdf/VancouverConf.pdf.

Networks and Websites Disaster Watch. Initiative of the Huariou Commission and Grassroots Organizations Operating Together in Sisterhood (GROOTS). Supports growth and development of women-centered, community-based, postdisaster response. www.disasterwatch.net. Emergency Management Professional Organization for Women’s Enrichment (EMPOWER). Mentoring and advocacy forum to strengthen women’s presence and excellence in the field of emergency management. www.empowerwomen.com/mc/page.do;jsession id=2DAC8701DBD5C16EF512DD31B04769CB.mc0?sitePageId=46823. GenaNet. Based in Germany. Global leader in gender and climate change work, with

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focus on policy interventions and gender dimensions in the developed world. www.genanet.de/home.html?andL=1. Gender and Disaster Network. An international network of academics, practitioners, and policymakers in support of gender equality in disaster risk reduction. Online publications and reports, member information, and listserv. www.gdnonline.org. Gender and Disaster Sourcebook. International searchable compilation, finalized 2005. www.gdnonline.org/sourcebook. International Network of Women in Emergency Management. Unites women professionals in emergency management fields. http://inwem.org/welcometo. Mahila Partnership. Grassroots nonprofit promoting disaster risk reduction and gender equality. Global disaster outreach and Southeastern United States. www.mahila partnership.org/about.php. US Gender and Disaster Resilience Alliance. No-cost membership organization that promotes disaster resilience through leadership of grassroots women to build safer, just, and disaster-resilient communities. www.usgdra.org.

Audiovisuals Hope to Action: Women for Climate Protection. 2008. www.youtube.com/watch?v =Bbeiy-pUAe0. Sisters on the Planet: Sharon’s Story. Oxfam America. 2009. www.youtube.com /watch?v=pHLBXeaOJjc. Still Waiting: Life After Katrina. K. Browne. 2007. www.stillwaiting.colostate.edu. Trouble the Water. Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. 2008. www.troublethewaterfilm.com/content /pages/the_story. Tsunami/Katrina Exchange. Coastal Women for Change. 2007. www.youtube.com /watch?v=IuLqONLQmA0&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL. Women in New Orleans Post-Katrina. Ms. Foundation. 2007. www.youtube.com /watch?v=bdPVSRSYgeU.

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Index

Abortion, 62, 63, 64, 159 American Academy of Pediatrics, 135 American Jewish World Service (AJWS), 149 American Public Health Association, 135 American Red Cross, 16 Association for Women in Development, 147 Berkeley/Oakland fires (1991), 15 Black Women’s Health Network, 56 Blanco, Kathleen, 145 BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill (2010), 4, 16, 127, 151–152, 176 Brown, Michael, 10 Bush, George H. W., 158 Business and Professional Women (BPW), 147 California earthquake (1989): domestic abuse services disrupted in, 74 Canadian blizzards (1997), 14 Canadian Network for Women in Emergency Management, 169 Capital, cultural, 43 Capitalism, 12; disaster, 184; global, 25 Catholic Charities, 118 Centers for Disease Control, 110 Chef Menteur landfill, 151 Children: anchor babies, 101; birth

weights, 64; in care facilities, 87; care in urban centers, 134; custody of, 82, 97; in emergency shelters, 95; entitlements constrained by male privilege, 50; fetal health in disasters, 63–64; health and safety issues, 98; lacking insurance, 50; loss of, 66; mothering of during disasters, 96–100; need for care services after disasters, 132–135; postdisaster neglect of, 73; in poverty, 50; as predictor of evacuation behavior, 111; in recovery environments, 98; schooling concerns during disasters, 99; special needs, 98; strong emotional reactions to disaster, 99; women’s organizations and, 155–157 Children’s Defense Fund, 156 Children’s Disaster Services, 148 Church of the Brethren, 148 Climate change: effect on women’s traditional livelihoods, 128; efforts to gender discourse on, 148; gendered exposure to, 49; gender issues in, 22, 189; mitigation of, 22 Climate Justice Road Tour, 186 Climate Wise Women tour, 161 Coastal Women for Change, 161, 163 Code Pink, 152, 153, 186 Communication: disaster risk, 23, 107–110, 172; family, 113

231

232

Index

Communities: challenges to solidarity in, 42; decimation of low-income, 118; differing “publics” in, 19; efforts by women to recover health clinics and public housing, 150; of emergency practice, 168; information sources in, 54–56; longing to re-create, 117; morale raising by women volunteers in, 145; need for affordable housing in recovery of, 105, 106; organizing around disaster vulnerability, 18; planning for emergencies in, 28; reinforcement of, 15; resource-dependent, 127–129; statistical data on, 53; undermined by loss of place, 98; vulnerable vs. resilient, 45, 46; women’s organizations efforts to save, 150 Community Emergency Response Team program, 147 Contraceptives, 63 Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 186 Cooper, Anderson, 10 Crescent House, 155 Cultural: artifacts, 18; celebrations, 145; diversity, 169; norms, 168, 171; practices, 7; stereotypes, 47; survival, 149; texts, 7 Culture: disaster, 7; domestic, 119; dominant, 33; gendered, 28; “good old boy,” 168; minority, 33; popular, 7–15 A Day in the Life of a Firefighter and Emergency Responders (film), 170–171 Decisionmaking: consensus, 159; contested, 176; in disaster planning, 29; on evacuations, 110–114; family, 2, 110, 126; gender patterns in, 30, 126, 176; men’s role in, 110; political, 28; power over, 50; in racial, lowincome, single women after Katrina, 110; women and, 2, 29, 30, 50, 228 Department of Homeland Security, 168; policy guidance by, 181; symbolism of female head of, 174 Development: gender-responsive, 178; international, 51; social, 60; sustainable, 37; theory, 188

Dillard University: Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, 152 Disabilities: in elderly, 156; emergency shelter and, 115; levels of preparedness and, 109; susceptibility to exposure to hazards and, 42; vulnerability and, 44; women’s organizations and, 156 Disaster analysis and planning: excluded perspective of women in, 22; gender and, 22; minimizing antisocial behavior in, 71; women and decisionmaking in, 29 Disaster reduction: centering gender, race, and class in, 189–190; feminist political ecology and, 187–189; grassroots organizations and, 187; Hyogo Framework for Action in, 178–181; limitations for, 187; need to engage mainstream women’s organizations in, 186; potential partnerships for, 192fig; radical feminism and, 186, 187; transformative organizing of, 189–190; uniting men and women around, 191; vulnerability and resilience in, 181–184; women’s challenges to, 186–187; women’s leadership in, 167–194 Disaster resilience, 167–194; challenges to male power and, 175–178; different levels of analysis in, 181; empowerment thesis and, 175–178; grassroots organization strengthening and, 191–193; Hyogo Framework for Action, 178–181; intent and implementation of mainstreaming, 171–175; mainstreaming gender in, 168–171; significance of women’s social movements on, 5; from vulnerability to, 181–184; women’s movements and, 184–186, 187–189; women united for change and, 186–187 Disaster risk: assessed as function of hazard and social vulnerability, 43; communication in, 8, 23, 107–110, 172; distribution of, 1; distribution reflecting social trends and divisions, 42; gendered division of labor and, 29; gender mainstreaming to reduce, 167, 168–171; hazards of place in,

Index

43; Hyogo Framework for Action and, 178–181; increased for women, 28; natural hazard paradigm, 188; part of larger system of meaning, 188; race/class relations and, 33; reduction essential to sustainable development, 42; reduction in, 8, 178–181; reduction through grassroots women’s leadership, 173; “spin” on, 8; unfair distribution of, 188; women’s contributions to, 5 Disaster(s): barriers to women’s recovery from, 129–135; Berkeley/Oakland fires (1991), 15; BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill (2010), 4, 16, 127, 151–152, 176; “by design, 41; California earthquake (1989), 74; Canadian blizzards (1997), 14; challenges to male power in, 175–178; as collective social processes culminating in a crisis, 41; complications for women’s domestic labor and care work from, 129–132; cultural view of, 1; defining, 8, 26; in developing nations, 23; differential impact on gendered labor, 50; disparate impacts of, 44, 45; earthquakes, 67; economic costs to women, 122–129; effect of lack of child care on recovery, 132–135, 139–140; effect on traditional livelihoods, 127–129; effects on those outside immediate area, 44; as empowering happenings for women, 167–168; Exxon Valdez oil spill (1989), 16, 67, 72, 73–74, 128, 176; family life in, 87–103; feminist frameworks for understanding, 27fig; films, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15; food insecurity and, 99, 100; gender and, 1, 21–40; gender in popular culture of, 9–13; gender patterns in suddenimpact events, 60; gender relations in, 4, 110–114; Haiti earthquake (2010), 92, 177, 178; health and wellbeing in, 59–71; heat waves, 44, 61–62; history and future, 43; Hurricane Andrew (1992), 4, 64, 67, 74, 92, 98, 114, 146, 158–159; Hurricane Gilbert (1988), 64; Hurricane Katrina (2005), 4, 9, 60,

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65, 71, 72, 73, 76–79, 111, 112, 115, 127, 178, 185; Hurricane Rita (2005), 76–79; imagery of, 36, 37; impacts on earnings and working conditions, 123–125; Indian Ocean tsunami (2004), 10, 73, 127, 178; Johnstown flood (1889), 9; “masculinity,” 78; maternal and fetal health in, 63–64; Mount St. Helens explosion, 73; occupational roles of women in, 135–141; “paper flood” after, 132; popular culture of, 13–15; production by economic and social patterns, 42; psychosocial effects on women’s livelihoods, 2; representation of women in, 7–19; resettlement in, 117; responses to warnings of, 5; September 11 attacks (2001), 4, 13, 16, 76, 100, 157–158, 170; sexuality and reproductive health in, 62–63; as “social levelers,” 42; social production of, 8; social vulnerability approach to, 22, 41–57; stress levels during, 64; support from employers during, 132; technological, 78, 88, 98; testing limits of state support in, 100–102; theoretical framing of, 1; Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown (1979), 98; through popular culture, 7–9; Titanic sinking, 11, 12; Upper Midwest floods (1997), 4, 14, 65, 75, 175, 185; willful neglect of people’s rights in, 186; women and (See Women); women’s backstage work, 135–141; women’s care work in, 92–102; women’s leadership in, 167; women’s occupational roles in, 138–141 Disaster sociology: barriers to women’s participation in, 28; myths about human behavior and, 12; notion of women as disaster “victims,” 36; social production of, 1; sociology of gender and, 23–26; views on disaster films, 12; women’s subjectivity in, 36 Discrimination: liberal feminism and, 28 Diversity: analysis of, 27 Ecofeminism, 12, 17, 37, 188; women’s connection to natural cycles and, 31

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Ecosystem, feminist analysis of, 39tab Edelman, Marian Wright, 156 Education, women’s postdisaster work in, 139–140 Elder community: abuse in, 73; data sets to inform in emergency planning, 53; in disaster planning, 87; heat wave mortality, 62; home ownership in, 106, 107; need for postdisaster economic assistance, 132; poverty in, 106; social vulnerability of, 45; stress and, 66; vulnerability to disaster/hazards in, 66 Emergency management: anticipating needs in, 56fig; awareness of gender concerns in, 167; barriers to women’s recovery from disasters and, 129–135; child care as critical part of, 132–135, 139–140; communitybased problem-solving approaches in, 168; community information sources, 54–56; consideration of home-based work in business recovery planning, 30, 125–127; cultural diversity in, 169; declaration of mandatory evacuation in, 14; disaster child care in, 132–135, 139–140; diversification of workplaces, 29; empowerment thesis of gender mainstreaming in, 175–178; gender structure in, 25, 55; government agencies, 168; knowledge of friends and family in, 87; mainstreaming gender in, 5, 168–171; mentoring in, 169; nontraditional roles of women in, 23; overlooking gender in, 8; popular culture in, 8; professionalization of, 22, 168, 169, 172; resistance to gender in, 26; response-oriented, 168; special needs groups and, 155–157; training for, 169; “tyranny of urgency” in, 168; use of structural change and national trends in, 53; vulnerability assessment in, 51–52; women not identified or supported in work in, 139; work-family conflicts in, 129–132 Emergency Management Professional Organization for Women’s Enrichment (EMPOWER), 169, 170 Emergency planning: anticipating needs in, 56fig, 105, 172; for assistance to

most vulnerable groups, 172–173; for child care, 132–135, 139–140; defining situation in, 22; economic status of different groups in, 121, 122; effect of changing nature of family on, 169; feminist political ecology in, 37–40; gender-sensitive, 172; global feminism and, 32–34; health issues in, 4; home-based work in business recovery, 30, 125–127; housing needs in, 105; identification of subpopulations at risk in, 172; liberal feminism and, 28–29; need for inclusion in predicate risk mapping for future compensation, 44; need for understanding “publics” in local communities, 19; need to consider gender violence in, 84; need to know household structures in, 87; postmodern feminism and, 36–37; poverty in, 50; pre and postdisaster, 30; preparedness in, 8; public participation in, 172; radical feminism and, 31–32; relevant to all social groups, 172; risk assessment in, 121, 122; risk communication in, 107–110; service continuity plans in, 172; sex-specific census data for, 55fig; socialist feminism and, 29–31; staff shortages in, 172; supply stockpiling, 172 Emergency response: exclusion of women in male-dominated societies, 31, 32; undermining male dominance in, 35; women’s visibility in, 30 Employment. See also Work, relief and recovery: business failures and, 126, 127; class availability, 122; company closure due to damage, 123; contingent, 30; in crisis work, 139; disaster impact on self-employed women, 125–127; disaster-relief, 122; early/postponed retirement by seniors, 123, 125; earnings and working conditions postdisaster, 123–125; effect of disasters on, 121–141; effect on remittances of immigrants, 126; in health care, 138–139; home-based, 30, 123, 125–127; inability to return to because of child/dependent care obligations, 132–135; lack of postdisaster contracts to women-owned

Index

businesses, 129; lost through free services available to survivors, 123; overrepresentation of women in sectors affected by disasters, 123; reduction in schedules, 123; required overtime, 131; sex-segregated, 30; transportation/commutation difficulties, 130; underpaid, 30 Ensler, Eve, 143, 162, 176 Environment(al): degradation, 37; protection by women’s organizations, 151–152; thinking, 37 Evacuation: bonds of obligation and, 95, 113; capacity for, 112; decisions on, 110–114; finding pleasure in, 114; funding for, 122; gender patterns in, 22, 110–114; gender violence and, 82, 83; hinging on material assets, 112; home-based work and, 126; influences on, 111; mandatory, 14; “mother hen effect” in, 111; to safe sites, 172 Exxon Valdez oil spill (1989), 16, 176; cultural analysis of, 36; domestic violence after, 72, 73–74; effect on traditional livelihoods, 128; erosion of native women’s status after, 67 Falwell, Jerry, 9 Family: blended, 88; communication, 113; conflicts in, 89, 90; conflicts with work obligations, 129–132; creation of dependencies during crises, 91–92; cultural expectations and, 90; disaster decisionmaking in, 87; disproportionate economic power of men and, 90; divergent priorities in, 89; effect of need for government support on, 90, 91; effect of unemployment on, 90; emotional distancing in, 89; intimacy issues in, 88–92; life during crises, 87–103; material and emotional obligations of, 119; need for coordination and supervision, 93; precedence in disasters, 130; reestablishment of rituals, 119; relational divisions and strains in, 88–92; renegotiation of gender roles in, 90; same-sex, 88; as social production, 87; underdeveloped national policies, 101

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Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 168; disability awareness in, 156; emergency shelter and, 115; employment opportunities in, 122; household head policy, 91; in Hurricane Katrina, 10; inflexibility in use of funds from, 102; policy guidance by, 181; Project Impact, 178; unhealthy trailers from, 65, 116 Feminism, 195; applications, 39tab; approaches to social phenomena, 26; being beyond, 2; discrimination and, 28; ecosystem analysis ad, 39tab; global, 188; liberal, 27fig, 28–29, 39tab, 187; matrix of domination in, 32; multicultural, 33; multiracial, 39tab; multiracial/global, 27fig, 32–34; political ecology and, 37–40; postmodern, 27fig, 36–37, 39tab, 188; racial privilege and power and, 33; radical, 27fig, 31–32, 39tab, 187, 188; socialist, 27fig, 29–31, 39tab, 188; social justice and, 39tab; sustainability and, 39tab Feminist: black leadership, 153–155; criticism of militarization of homeland security, 153; development theory, 35; differing uses of term, 26; environmentalism, 17; political ecology, 27fig; political economy, 34; theories in disaster work, 26–40 Films, disaster, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Food justice movement, 38 From Chaos to Creativity (film), 13 Gender: as accomplishment, 24; bias, 29; blinders, 41, 44, 46–49; centrality of, 37; climate change issues and, 22; complexities mistaken for variable of sex, 53; coping strategies and, 68–69; decisionmaking patterns and, 30; development and, 27fig; development theory and, 34–36; differences, 48; differences in stress levels, 66–68; different recovery needs, 50; differing views of disaster and, 8; disadvantaging of men by, 48, 49; disasters and, 1, 21–40; disparities in wages and benefits, 120; disregard for in disasters, 2; distortions, 7; distribution of differential/unequal life chances and,

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25; as distributive factor in society, 25; division of labor, 23, 25, 29, 49, 50, 60, 179; division of power, 37; equality, 28, 37, 47, 124, 149, 174, 175, 178; equality and life span, 60; evacuation patterns and, 22, 110–114; exposure to climate change and, 49; fairness, 171–172; family decisionmaking and, 2; health patterns in disaster survival, 59–71; heat wave mortality and, 61–62; hierarchies, 25, 178; identity, 23, 24; as ideological and material force shaping environmental thinking, 37; institutionalization of, 25; intersection with other power structures, 24; jeopardizing qualities of, 48; justice, 188; livelihood and, 50; lopsided portrayal of roles in disasters, 10, 11, 12; mainstreaming of risk reduction, 167, 168–171; as marker of difference, 23; meaning in, 24; myths of masculinity, 11; neutrality, 154; norms, 49, 73, 107, 174; order, 11; overlooked in emergency management, 8; Oz theory, 21; patterns in sudden-impact events, 60; as pivotal power structure, 50; politics, 25, 145; in postcolonial societies, 34; power, 2; as predictor of evacuation behavior, 111; as primary organizing principle in social life, 25; relational nature of, 24; relations, 2, 4, 21–40, 49; as root cause of vulnerability, 1, 2, 41; segregation, 29, 121; shifting terrain of, 25, 26; silence surrounding, 2; social divisions and, 48; socialization, 25; as social production, 1, 24; social relations of, 34; sociology of, 23–26; stereotypes, 11, 12; stratification systems and, 25, 29; studies, 195; use of critical thinking in data analysis of, 53, 54; vulnerability measurement through female-specific indicators, 53 Gender and Disaster Network (GDN), 173, 177, 180 Gender and Disaster Resilience Alliance (GDRA), 173, 191 Gender Equality Index, 52 Gender Justice and Global Climate Change (G2C2), 148

General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 147 Geographic information systems (GIS), 52 Girl Scouts USA, 147 Global Gender Gap Report (World Economic Forum), 47 Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction, 179 Goldman, Emma, 11 Grand Forks floods. See Upper Midwest floods (1997) Grassroots Organizations Operating Together in Sisterhood (GROOTS), 191 Gulf Coast Civic Works Project (GCCWP), 147 Haiti earthquake (2010), 177; gender disparity at, 178; relief efforts toward women first in, 92 Hazards: decisions about, 2; factors increasing exposure to, 42; feminist frameworks for understanding, 27fig; mitigation of, 172, 187–188; women’s exposure to, 47 “Healing Quilt,” 16 Health care issues: in disaster survival, 59–71; mental, 4; physical, 4; poverty and, 50; provision by women, 4; women’s offstage work in, 138–139; women’s organizations and, 151 Heat waves, 44; men at risk in, 61–62; racial/ethnic mortality rates, 61 Heterosexuality: compulsory, 31 HIV/AIDS issues, 62, 63, 195 Homelessness: “couch surfing” in, 107; disproportionate impact on women, 81; domestic violence in, 107; gender and, 49; postdisaster, 105; racial issues, 106; social invisibility in, 107; susceptibility to exposure to hazards and, 42; vulnerability to disaster/hazards and, 49 Housing, 105–120; access to, 117; affordable, 105, 117; alternate, 139; anticipating damages to, 105; building codes, 107; costly new construction, 116; culturally appropriate, 105; decline into disrepair, 117; destroyed

Index

by disaster, 116; destruction of leading to secondary unemployment, 126; in developing nations, 106; difficulties in obtaining ownership, 106; emergency, 114–116; with extended family in crises, 81; foreclosures, 106; hazards in, 105; importance to women, 105; insecure, 4; lack of, 107; limited, 116; migrant workers’, 107; mobile homes, 60, 106; out-ofreach, 117; permanent, 2; policies, 102, 117; poverty issues in, 106; protecting, 106; public, 22, 117, 118, 150; racial and class disparities in capacity to return to, 105–106; racial/ethnic issues in, 106; rental, 106; safety of low-income, 106–107; scarcity of, 117; Section 8, 102; secure, 5, 107, 114, 117; shared, 102; “sick house syndrome,” 65; subsidized, 117, 118; substandard, 42, 49, 60; temporary, 105, 114; unhealthy, 65 Hurricane Andrew (1992), 4; domestic violence after, 74; emergency shelters in, 114; family issues following, 92; feminist coalition following, 32; fetal distress in, 64; physically difficult recovery environment, 98; relief efforts toward women first in, 92; stress issues in, 67; women’s organizations and, 146; “Women Will Rebuild” organization and, 158–159 Hurricane Gilbert (1988), 64 Hurricane Katrina (2005), 4, 185; domestic violence after, 72, 73, 76–79, 154; effect of poverty on recovery from, 48; effect on traditional livelihoods, 127; emergency shelters in, 115; evacuation behavior in, 111, 112; gender disparity in, 178; gendered dimensions of ignored by media, 9; gender patterns in mortality in, 60; interpersonal violence during, 71; “Katrina Krew” and, 159–161; long-distance displacements from, 99, 101, 102; opportunities for transformation from, 155; public health care system during, 65; return of women to places of residence after, 119; visibility of inequalities in, 9; “Women of the Storm” and,

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159–161; women’s networks of care after, 101 Hurricane Mitch (1998), 60 Hurricane Rita (2005): domestic violence after, 76–79 Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), 178–181 Immigrant Justice Project: “Esperanza” initiative, 124 Immigrants: anchor babies and, 101; in care and domestic work, 126; nongovernmental organization advocacy for, 155; rebuilding family and community among, 119; secondary unemployment for, 126; social vulnerability effects on, 45; state support and, 101; susceptibility to exposure to hazards, 42 Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, 154, 190 Indian Ocean tsunami (2004), 10; disaster fathering in, 100; domestic violence after, 73; effect on traditional livelihoods, 127; gender disparity at, 178; gender survival rates, 60 Inheritance, 50, 106 Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), 147–148 International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM), 169 International Association of Women in Fire and Emergency Services, 170 International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, 42 International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 29, 31, 50 International Network of Women in Emergency Management (inWEM), 169, 170 Jersey Girls, 157–158, 163 Johnstown flood (1889), 9 Journalism, disaster, 8, 10 Katrina Krew, 159–161 Katrina Warriors, 162–163 Katrina Women’s Response Fund, 155 Labor: community, 30; contingent, 129; contract, 118; domestic, 92–102, 113,

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129, 131; of emergency preparedness, response, recovery, 95; formal/informal movements, 30; gendered division of, 23, 25, 29, 179; “kin keeping,” 95; productive, 30; reproductive, 29; unions, 193; wage levels, 124 Landrieu, Mary, 145 League of Women Voters, 159 Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered community: disaster survival and, 52; domestic violence in, 72; oppression of, 154–155; social vulnerability of, 44, 45; women’s organizations and, 156 Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 78 Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault, 77 Lutheran World Relief, 16 Mainstreaming, gender, 5, 167, 168–171; antifeminist reactions to, 177; critiques of dominant approaches to, 174; of disaster risk reduction, 174; disaster work and, 168–171; in emergency management, 168–171; empowerment thesis, 175–178; intent and implementation, 171–175; opposition to, 177; as process, 175 Maloney, Carolyn, 129 Marginalization: ethnic, 4, 152, 153; racial, 4; of women, 36 Meaning: as social production, 8; women making, 15 Media: disaster journalism, 8; fictional disaster film/stories, 11, 12; mass, 8; role in disaster portrayal, 11; social, 18; women’s use of in storytelling, 15 Men. See also Gender: absence during recovery phase, 97; as agents of change, 174; benefits of recovery/rebuilding monies and, 124; cultural norms and stress levels, 67; disaster fathering and, 100; division of labor and risk situations, 60; dominance in hazardous occupations and risk behavior by, 60; “double day” work during crises, 94; effect of unemployment of family relation-

ships, 90; family responsibilities of, 168; higher exposure to key risk factors, 52; increased annual earnings postdisaster, 124; nontraditional skills and, 168; organization power accruing to, 174; public preparedness of, 109; risk communication and, 108; role in evacuation decisions, 110–114; visibility in emergency work, 135; working identities and, 90 Mennonite Women USA, 148 Menstrual issues, 62, 63 Mental health issues, 64–69; coping strategies for, 68–69; stress, 64–69; substance abuse, 68; suicide, 67–68 Migrant workers: housing destroyed by disaster, 128; poor housing of, 107; vulnerability to disaster/hazards, 31, 61 Millennium Development Goals, 52 Mount St. Helens explosion: domestic violence after, 73 Movements: antiviolence, 84; food justice, 38; human rights, 188; labor, 30; social, 5; women’s, 5; women’s labor, 188 Ms. Foundation for Women, 148, 155, 161; Katrina Women’s Response Fund, 13, 191 Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER), 180 Nagin, Ray, 145 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 129 National Association of Colored Women (NACW), 147 National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO), 146, 147 National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence, 84 National Coalition for the Homeless, 107 National Congress of Black Women, 147 Nationalism, 9 National Mitigation Act (2000), 51 National Organization of Women: Legal and Education Fund, 13

Index

National Resource Center for Health and Safety in Child Care, 135 National Science and Technology Council: Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, 180 National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 77 “National Tribute” quilt, 16 Native Houma Nation, 155 Natural Hazards Workshops, 173 Neocolonialism, 33 Newcomb College Center for Research on Women, 147 New Orleans Women’s Health and Justice Initiative, 154 9/11 Families Group, 158 O’Brien, Soledad, 10 Oppression(s): competing, 188; knowledge production and, 22; radical feminism and, 31 Organization(s): antiviolence, 22; business, 147; community, 18; cultural practices of, 18; emergency management, 168–171; emergency response, 29; emergent, 2; grassroots, 143–166; humanitarian relief, 92; limitations to women’s career potential in, 28; needs assessments by, 54; relief and recovery through, 143–166; social, 8; value-driven, 163 Organizations, nongovernmental (NGOs): activities in disasters, 10; advocates for immigrant women, 155; needs assessments by, 54; Oxfam, 35, 161; Pattan, 35 Organizations, women’s, 2; business, 146, 147; coalitions of, 159; “Coastal Women for Change,” 161; collective action by, 162–163; college-based activities and, 147; concerns about staying power of, 163; conservative, 177; direct service, 158; in disaster reduction, 186; disaster resources, 173; educational, 146–148; emergent postdisaster, 157–163; for environmental protection, 151–152; faithbased, 148–149; feminism and, 152–157, 159; funding networks, 148, 155; global, 191; for health and autonomy, 151; for history and sus-

239

tainability, 150–151; human rights approach for disabled, 156; leadership roles in, 143–166; local activism and, 150–152; in postdisaster domestic violence service, 155; professional, 146–148; promotion of “special population” rights through, 155–157; public positions against racism and violence by, 154; to reduce disaster risk, 165tab; service, 146–148; social justice and, 152–157; social networks and clubs, 147, 148; strengthening will and capacity in, 191–193; in support of women outside United States, 149; think tanks, 148; youth groups and, 147 Our Life, Our Film (film), 13 Owens, Pat, 145 “Patchworks of Remembrance and Hope” quilt, 16 Patriarchy, 29; increase in women’s risk and, 30 Planned Parenthood, 62, 63 Political: decisionmaking, 28; ecology, 37–40, 38, 188; economy, 33, 34 Politics: gender, 145; of tourism, 33; of urban renewal, 117 Posttraumatic stress disorder, 28, 66, 68 Poverty: child, 50; discretionary rules applied against, 118; gendered and racialized nature of, 30, 49; and Hurricane Katrina recovery, 48; lost employment and, 123; marginalized racial and ethnic groups and, 49; maternal, 49; minority women and, 123, 124; mistaken for social vulnerability, 44; predisaster rates of, 30; in preparedness campaigns, 50; risk of for women, 47; substandard housing and, 49 Power: based on class/racial differences, 30; corporate, 29; division of, 37; intersecting relations of, 38; male, 25; over decisionmaking, 50; racial, 33; relations, 34, 46; social, 167; between women, 30; women’s representation of in popular culture, 13–15 Quilting, disaster, 7, 15–18; “Healing Quilt,” 16; Mennonite Women USA

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project, 148; “National Tribute,” 16; “Patchworks of Remembrance and Hope,” 16; political narrative in, 17; “The River Ran Through Us,” 17; “Slice of Life,” 16; Upper Midwest floods in, 17–18 Race, 9; and class relations in disaster risk, 33; feminism and, 39tab; gender violence and, 78; heat waves and, 61; identity and, 33; marginalization and, 4; poverty and, 30, 49; privilege and, 25, 33; relations, 25; segregation by, 121 Rachel Carson Award, 144 Resilience. See also Disaster resilience: collective vs. individual, 183; community-based, 183; elasticity of term, 182; enhancement, 183; entry points for, 183; material approach to, 184; organizational, 184; rapidity and, 184; redundancy and, 184; resourcefulness and, 184; role of stressor in, 183; theory, 182 Resilient Women (film), 13 Rights: citizenship, 28; human, 146, 149, 155, 186, 188; immigrant, 146; land, 30, 50, 51, 106; legal, 124; of migrant workers, 146; natural, 28; sexual minority, 156; special population, 155–157; union, 188; of women, 28, 84, 149; workers’, 146 Risk. See also Vulnerability to disaster/hazards: distribution of, 1; gender patterns in, 47; geographic information system tools in, 52; of income insecurity, 47; mapping, 51–52; perception, 108; of personal violence, 47; willingness to take protective action and, 108; for women in disasters, 4 Risk communication, 107–110; gendersensitive, 108; “white male effect,” 108 “The River Ran Through Us” quilt, 17 Schooling, 99 Sector, formal, 129 Sector, informal, 2; difficulty in recognition of value of work in, 129; homebased work in, 30, 123, 125–127;

women in, 29, 121; workplace vulnerability to disaster, 123 September 11 attacks (2001), 4, 16; disaster fathering in, 100; domestic violence after, 76; effect on birth weights, 64; gender survival patterns, 59; “Jersey Girls” organization, 157–158; 9/11 Families Group, 158; stress issues and, 67; women responders to, 13, 170 Shelter(s). See also Housing: accessibility of, 173; case management model in, 155; complications of trailer living for women and children, 115–116; conditions in, 10; cultural availability, 114; designed for needs of residents, 173; emergency, 114–116, 155; eviction from, 116; during Hurricane Katrina, 10; inaccessibility of, 112; postdisaster, 2; proper organization, 114; secure, 114; temporary, 2, 114, 173; tent cities, 114–116; women’s organizations and, 155 Sierra Club, 151 Sisters of the Planet campaign, 161 Sister Song (journal), 153 “Slice of Life” quilt, 16 Small Business Administration, 100 Social: action, 28; “autopsy,” 44, 61; change, 181; connections, 87; crises, 11, 143; development, 60; institutions, 1, 28; isolation, 49, 73; justice, 39tab, 152–157, 185, 186, 188; media, 7, 18; movements, 5; networks, 35, 37, 55, 113, 143, 147, 156, 157; order, 9; organization, 8; power, 167; productions, 1, 8, 24; protection, 50, 120; psychology, 25; relations, 27, 38; reproductive labor, 29; services, 50, 107, 122, 135; structure, 8; theory, 27; visibility, 135; vulnerability, 2, 21, 22, 30, 41–49, 154, 167, 181, 182 Socialism, 12 Soroptimist International of the Americas, 56, 148 State support: dependence upon, 102; emergency shelter, 114–116; gender and race relations in, 101; limits of, 100–102; reductions in, 120; struc-

Index

tural gaps in, 101; tenuous nature of, 101; “welfare queens” and, 101 Still Waiting: Life After Katrina (film), 14, 95, 113 Stress. See also Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: coping strategies and, 68–69; in disaster situations, 64–69; gender differences in, 66–68; marriage as factor in, 66; postdisaster, 66; psychosocial effects of, 66 Substance abuse, 68 Suicide, 67–68 Swimming Upstream: A Testimony, a Prayer, a Hallelujah, an Incantation (play), 143, 162, 176 Theories: conflict, 25; cultural studies, 7; development, 34–36, 37, 188; ecofeminist, 17, 37; feminist, 26–40; gender role, 175; queer, 188; sex role, 25 Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown (1979), 98 Tourism: industry employment losses, 124, 125 Trouble the Water (film), 14 Turkey Creek project, 150–151 United Methodist Women: Women in Disaster Situations initiative, 149 United Nations: Commission on the Status of Women, 149; Division for the Advancement of Women (UNDAW), 180; International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR), 42, 178, 179; Millennium Development Goals, 149; Stop Disasters (publication), 167 United States: implementation of Hyogo Framework in, 180–181; myth of exceptionalism, 64, 65; public health care in, 65; unhealthy living conditions in, 65 United States Health and Human Services Administration: Office of Child Care, 134 University of Colorado: Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center, 41 Upper Midwest floods (1997), 4, 175,

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185; coping strategies in, 68–69; destructive fires from, 14; difficulties with children after, 99; disaster quilts from, 17–18; domestic violence after, 73, 75–76; emotional responses to, 68–69; evacuation behavior in, 112; “sick house syndrome” in, 65; use of media by women to tell stories of, 15 US Agency for International Development (USAID), 178, 180 US Subcommittee on Disaster Reduction, 180 Violence, gender/domestic, 4; amplification of vulnerability to, 82–85; in BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill, 78; bureaucratization of battered women’s movement and, 155; in California earthquake, 74; closure of agencies for, 139; death of women by, 153; difficulty of evacuation in cases of, 82, 83; against disaster volunteers, 82; against displaced women, 77; explanations for, 79–82; exposure to, 65; in Exxon Valdez oil spill, 73–74; factors keeping women in, 82, 83; homelessness and, 107; in Hurricane Andrew, 74; during Hurricane Katrina, 71, 76–79; increased during disasters, 76; in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered community, 72; male-dominated relief systems and, 82; mental health outcomes in, 83; need for consideration of in emergency planning, 84; need for social support systems and, 80, 81, 82; organizational sensitivity to, 84; postdisaster, 72–79, 73, 75, 76–79, 107; race/class issues in, 77, 78; in September 11 attacks, 76; stereotypes involving, 79–82; unknown whereabouts of sex offenders during crises, 77; unreported, 84; in Upper Midwest floods, 75–76; women’s organizations and, 155 Violence, interpersonal, 13, 71–85; disaster-related, 2, 4; gender-based, 31; during Hurricane Katrina, 71 Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters (VOAD), 168 Vulnerability analysis: anticipating needs

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Index

in, 56fig; Capacity and Vulnerability Analysis approach, 51; community information sources, 54–56; errors in, 45–46; gendered, 47, 48, 49–56; geographic information system tools in, 52; identification of interventions in, 46; indicators in, 54fig; intersectional approach, 47; limitations, 46, 47; limitations of gender data in, 52–53; mapping tools in, 52; population-based, 45; power relations in, 46; psychosocial research in, 52; public health research, 52; resilience and, 53; resources possessed by people, 49; sex-specific census data for, 55fig; “silo” approach, 45; single-head households in, 53; special populations approach, 46; trumping of gender by other social categories in, 48 Vulnerability to disaster/hazards: amplification of, 82–85; attitudinal/motivational, 51; capability/resilience measurements in, 53; communities organizing around, 18; differing levels of exposure in same or nearby neighborhoods, 45; difficulty in reaching stigmatized groups and, 44; economic, 30; gendered, 41, 49–56; gender inequality and, 37; groups least likely to have access to assets for, 43; “hidden in plain sight,” 44, 53; high need groups living below the radar and, 44; household size and structure and, 44; housing issues, 106–107; lack of attention to lessening, 42; mapping, 41; measuring, 41–57; of migrant workers, 31; in migration policies, 34, 35; of new immigrants, 31; outside patriarchal control, 31; physical, 43; physical/material, 51; reduction of, 21, 54–56; resources reducing, 43; single parenting and, 49; situational causes of, 43; social, 21, 22, 30; social relations of gender and, 34; structural inequality and, 43; variability of conditions promoting, 43; women’s, 2 When the Levees Broke (film), 14 Women. See also Gender: backstage disaster work, 135–141; backstage pre-

paredness efforts by, 109; barriers to disaster recovery, 129–135; blamed for disasters, 9, 10; business failures and, 126, 127; care work traditions, 92–102; challenges compared to men, 3tab; changes in domestic labor during disasters, 88–103; collective organizing by, 145–157; constructing “new normal” for families, 119; coping strategies of, 35, 143; in crisis work, 139; culturally variable meanings of womanhood and, 47; cultural stereotypes of, 47; differences within groups of, 2; disaster health planning and, 69, 70; disaster housing and, 105–120; disaster preparedness and, 107–110; disasters and, 1–5; earning opportunities for, 124; economic costs of disasters to, 122–129; economic vulnerability to disaster, 30; in educational work, 139–140; as effective disaster responders, 135–137; effect of disasters on employment, 121–141; effects of lost income on, 50; elite, 2, 33; in emergency shelters, 95; emotional work in crises, 94–96; entitlements constrained by male privilege, 50; equality rankings of, 47, 48; evacuation behavior of, 110–114; expansion of responsibilities during disasters, 92–102; exploitation and, 29; in first-response roles, 168–171; first to notice environmental degradation, 37, 38; food insecurity and, 99, 100; friendship/kin networks of, 32; greater effects of disasters on, 120; groups promoting activism of, 145–157; in health care, 138–139; housing vulnerability of, 105, 106–107; inability to return to work because of child/dependent care obligations, 132–135; increasing opportunities for, 28; kinwork of, 113; lack of benefit from “recovery” funds, 118; lack of economic resources for resettlement, 120; leadership in relief and recovery work, 143–166; in leadership roles, 145–157; in liberal feminist theory, 28–29; making meaning out of disaster, 15; maternal authority

Index

figures, 113; men’s efforts to control sexuality of, 31; mothering in disasters, 96–100; networks of care by, 101; occupational roles offstage, 137–140; as “other,” 36; paid/unpaid disaster work by, 121; physical/mental health in disasters, 64–69; portrayed as passive in disaster, 10, 11, 144; posttraumatic stress disorder in, 28; preparation of workplaces for emergencies, 135, 136; presumption of collective subordination of, 36; privileging of, 2; proactive response to environmental degradation, 35; public invisibility of, 9; racial factors in earnings, 124; reduced effectiveness in male-dominated emergency organizations, 29; relevancy in disaster journalism, 10; representations of in disasters, 7–19; reproductive health issues, 59–64; resilience of, 47; resistance to those who break gender rules, 163; responses to warnings of disaster, 5; risk communication and, 107–110; sensitivity of through primary use of resources supporting families, 37; sexuality in crisis situations, 62–63; socialization as caregivers, 28; social networks of, 101, 113; socioeconomic status of, 30; stereotypes of, 11; subordination of, 31; support from employers during disasters, 132; survival in countries with low gender equality, 60; sustainable development and, 35; upper-class activism, 22; use of popular media to speak out, 13–15; use of science to control, 27; violence against, 71–85; volunteerism of, 108, 144; vulnerabilities, 47; will for change and, 186–187; work-family care dilemmas for, 129–132 Women, minority: activism of, 152–153; challenges to, 3tab; chronic disease among, 65; earning opportunities for, 124; as “forced movers,” 117; invisibility of, 9; leadership of black femi-

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nists, 153–155; lost employment in disasters, 123; marginalization of, 152, 153; mobility rates among, 117; poverty levels of, 123, 124; unhealthy living conditions and, 65 Women, senior: challenges to (See Elder community) Women in Disaster Situations initiative, 149 Women of Color United, 185 Women of the Storm, 159–161, 163 Women’s care work, 92–102; disaster state and, 100–102; emotional, 94–96; expansion of during disasters, 93–94; mothering in disasters, 96–100 Women’s Funding Network, 148 Women’s Health Protective Association, 160 Women’s Neighborhood Network Project, 185 Women Will Rebuild organization, 96, 158–159, 163 Work, relief and recovery. See also Employment: care, 126, 129–141; collective disaster, 164tab; conflict with family responsibilities, 129–132; crisis, 139; disaster, 122, 135–141; domestic, 125; in education, 139–140; emergency, 135–137; emotional demands of, 139; feminist theories and, 26–40; in health care, 138–139; inability of care centers for elders, children and disabled to reopen for lack of caregivers, 132–135; interdependency of men’s and women’s, 127–135; live-in, 126; resource-based, 127–129; women’s leadership in, 143–145; workplace conditions in, 124 World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (2005), 178 World Food Programme, 92, 177 World Meteorological Organization (WMO), 171 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), 147, 159

About the Book

N

atural disasters push ordinary gender disparities to the extreme—leaving women not only to deal with a catastrophe’s aftermath, but also at risk for greater levels of domestic violence, displacement, and other threats to their security and well-being. Elaine Enarson presents a comprehensive assessment, encompassing both theory and practice, of how gender shapes disaster vulnerability and resilience.

Elaine Enarson is an independent scholar based in Colorado and cofounder of the Gender and Disaster Network.

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