Midweek Musings: Pinchot - Women Taking Hold of The Problem

Our mission is public education as it relates to all things forestry. Your support ensures we can provide the quality of content you have come to expect from Evergreen. Monthly donations and subscriptions keep Evergreen alive.
If you appreciate our work, let us know
by subscribing or donating.
Much gratitude to those of you who already support our work.

I received a note from a colleague of ours after my last post - Women and the Work of Stewardship: Restoring Balance.

It was simply a quote on the role of women in conservation - by Gifford Pinchot in 1910 - before women could vote. It still rings true.

The ladies were busy back then. They effectively organized through "clubs" to address the issues of suffrage, women's rights, child labor, conservation, water protection, and treatment of the land for future generations - to name a few.

The General Federation of Women's Clubs had 800,000 members in 1905 and its own magazine. Pinchot attributed the creation of the Minnesota Forest Reserve to the Federation of Women's Clubs for Forest Conservation, resulting to the the first reserve by direct congressional action rather than presidential proclamation in 1902.

Mary Eno Pinchot— mother of Gifford Pinchot—headed the 100-member conservation committee of the 77,000-member Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). Some of the committee's causes included protecting Niagara Falls and watersheds in the Appalachian Mountains. It was told by a former member that a frequent reply to women's letters asking State governors what they might do for conservation was to "mind the children." This they did by promoting conservation education to school children.

Care, Continuity, and Community

The Fight for Conservation, 1910, pp. 104–105.

“It seems to me that of all the movements which have been inaugurated to give power to the Conservation idea—the foresight idea—there is none more helpful than that the women of the United States are taking hold of the problem.

They realize, as men often do not, that the home depends upon the wise use of the resources upon which the home must rest. They realize that the welfare of the children and of the children’s children depends upon the way in which we handle our forests, our waters, our lands, and our minerals. They realize that the question of Conservation is not merely a question of the present, but of the future, and that the duty we owe to the coming generations is one which we cannot shirk without shame.

Pinchot’s worldview was grounded in the belief of stewardship — that public resources must be managed “for the greatest good, for the greatest number, for the longest time.”

Gifford Pinchot believed women were natural allies to this principle because of their social and moral orientation toward care, continuity, and community — the same values that sustain the conservation movement to this day.

Reforestation, Rural electrification, and Resource efficiency

Pinchot's wife, Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, was herself a national advocate for women’s rights and social reform. Cornelia was active in suffrage, labor reform, and forest conservation, and she often spoke alongside Gifford. They viewed conservation as part of a broader moral and democratic reform movement. She supported civic education campaigns that involved women’s clubs in promoting reforestation, rural electrification, and resource efficiency.

Together, Gifford and Cornelia Pinchot embodied a marriage of conservation and social justice — seeing both as rooted in fairness, foresight, and democratic responsibility.

On October 15, 1949, five years after her husband’s death, Cornelia Pinchot, Gifford Pinchot’s widow, delivered a remarkable speech on the re-naming of the Columbia National Forest to the Gifford Pinchot National Forest...

About her husband she said...

Conservation was never a vague, fuzzy aspiration. It was concrete, exact, dynamic. The application of science and technology to our material economy for the purpose of enhancing the life of the individual. The very stuff of which democracy is made.

Beyond preservation stands the philosophy of conservation...The conservation he preached dealt not only with trees but with the wise use of the land with research, with programs of improvement of country life, with equality of opportunity, with control of monopoly.

When conservation and forestry are exclusively technical practices - enhancement of factors far beyond the present forest are excluded. It is mastery without soul. Statistically, a woman's voice may not always be the technical voice in the field - but every woman's voice is the voice of the soul, for future generations, for the greatest good.

I think Gifford and Cornelia Pinchot understood.