Kendra Smith-Howard is a UAlbany environmental historian whose latest book examines the complex histories and harmful legacies of common cleaning products we use in our homes. We spoke to her about the paradox of seeking the freshness of nature without the dirt that comes with it, who bears the toxic burden of a disposable culture, and why you might have a dynamite company to thank for your pine-fresh floors.
A common thread linking Kendra’s work on the history of milk and her exploration of the environmental hazards caused by cleaning products is that, on some level, we want it both ways.
Paraphrasing here: We hold nature up as the ideal of purity while at the same time being kind of skeeved out by the inherent messiness of it. We want our milk fresh — but not, like, straight-from-the-cow fresh.
“We are suspicious of wholly synthetic food or introducing too many chemicals into the home. And yet, there's also a limit to how natural we want these things — fresh is great, but raw milk can be risky,” Kendra says. “The forest smells good, but we don't actually want our floors to be covered in leaf litter and dirt like the forest floor.”
While this paradox might define consumer thinking about these products, it’s clear some of the companies behind them fully embraced their place in the chemical-industrial complex.
The Science History Institute has in its archives some fantastic examples of the mid-20th century Hercules Powder Company ads used to market its pine oil cleaners to companies that would then re-sell them to consumers.
Published in the likes of Chemical & Engineering News and Naval Stores Review, the ads make clear that Hercules was trying to sell both the wonder of its chemistry and the veneer of natural freshness that came with it.
One ad depicts a stately evergreen with a white chemical formula printed over it and extolls the product’s virtue as a disinfectant, insecticide and detergent.
Another declares: “creative chemistry helps the South serve industry”
“Sell the smell” implores another, noting the “piney fragrance” of Hercules’ Yarmor 302 formula “keeps customers coming back for more.”
Maybe most telling, Hercules’ own ads put the words “pine woods” in quotation marks to describe the smell of their cleaners.
Somewhere, the Lorax and Brown Bar-ba-loots are weeping.
A Dirty History of Cleaning Up will be published in February by the University of Washington Press.
Kendra’s first book, Pure and Modern Milk, was published by Oxford University Press. Listen to her talk about it.
Interview by Michael Parker
Audio production and editing by Scott Freedman
Hosted and written by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
[0:01] Host: Welcome to The Short Version, the UAlbany podcast that tackles big ideas, big questions, and big news in less time than it takes to cross the academic podium. I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist in UAlbany's Office of Communications and Marketing.
[0:18] Kendra Smith-Howard: My work as an ice cream scooper, it was hard ice cream and it was largely in a food truck that went to county fairs. And so Uncle Bob's was across the way from the tractor pull. This is how rural. And so the tractor pull would be really loud and people would have to yell the flavor that they wanted. And I had a really big bicep because of scooping all that ice cream. You're
[0:40] Host: You’re going to have to trust us for a minute that there's a throughline here — that Kendra Smith-Howard's teenage years at Uncle Bob's homemade ice cream in rural Illinois leads inexorably to this point and the publication of her next book about the nasty pasts of the cleaning products we use every day.
So, the cabinet beneath your kitchen sink contains more than just cleaning products. It holds pine forests and lemon groves. At least that's what the marketers behind the labels would have us imagine. The history of those products, and the names of those products specifically, is often much seedier. In the case of pine oil disinfectants, it begins with dynamite. The company that sold dynamite to early 20th-century farmers to blast the stumps of pine trees out of their freshly cleared land saw an opportunity to cash in twice. It began transforming the pitch-rich wood debris into solvents and pine oil. And so a product we now associate with bringing the scent of the forest indoors grew out of blowing up the remnants of actual forests. It's an origin story so subversive, it's almost too good to be true.
That sort of hidden history intrigues Kendra, an associate professor of history at U Albany. And her latest book, A Dirty History of Cleaning Up: The environmental hazards of household work in modern America, explores how our pursuit of convenience and tidier homes impacted the natural world. In her book, Kendra also shines a light on who we ask to shoulder the hazards of all that dirty work. In hospitals, nursing homes and cleaning businesses, it's often the lowest-paid workers, including many immigrants and other marginalized groups.
Kendra's interest in the relationship between people in the natural world, as understood through the lens of environmental history, began in the rural Midwest where her grandfather was a dairy farmer and, yes, where she scooped ice cream at Uncle Bob's.
It gave her a front-row seat to how industrialization and evolving social views on purity and cleanliness have warped that relationship over time. It also inspired her earlier work exploring how milk became a staple of the American breakfast table, despite being something that could make us both healthier and sick.
For this week's episode, Kendra spoke to my colleague Michael Parker about how cleaning one place can create environmental mess in another; what disposable diapers reveal about labor, caregiving and the cost of convenience; and the dissonance, or maybe it's delusion, in believing we can find a fragrant mountain meadow inside a plastic bottle next to the drain cleaner.
Here's their conversation.
[3:13] Michael Parker: Maybe if you could talk about where you grew up and then, following that journey, eventually to becoming a professor of history and coming here to UAlbany.
[3:20] KSH: Sure. So I am from the rural Midwest originally. I grew up in a small town called Eureka, and both of my parents grew up on farms, both had left the farms, but my dad had this massive vegetable garden and sold harvest door silos — if you've ever seen the blue silos. And my mom was a school teacher and also had at one point taught home economics. And so as a kid, I was interested in a lot of different things. As I went to college, I had really broad interests and I was always interested in biology and the natural world, but I was also deeply interested in history and cultural attitudes and all those sorts of things. So as an undergraduate, I actually majored in American studies. I went to St. Olaf College in Minnesota, where you could design your own major. And so I designed a major called Nature and Culture.
So I was really interested in that interplay between people's attitudes and understandings in the natural world and their material consequences of human life. And so in some ways, I've been doing environmental history since I was an undergraduate student.
[4:28] MP: You have an upcoming book, The Dirty History of Cleaning Up: The environmental hazards of household work in modern America. First, you tackled what's on the kitchen table with milk, and now you're tackling everything under the kitchen sink. So what brought you to this topic?
[4:44] KSH: Yeah, there's a couple pathways that led me to this topic. When I was an undergraduate, I was at that time, as I am now, interested in the history of environmental changes over time. And as a project, I was particularly interested in learning more about the history of pollution. And so I compiled a list of all the EPA Superfund sites in the county where I lived, and I expected that many of them would be large industrial sites or landfills. And when I compiled the list of EPA Superfund sites, and those are toxic sites that the federal government has prioritized for environmental remediation, a lot of them were small dry cleaning facilities. And that was really surprising to me. I had never really thought about the ways in which cleaning up creates an environmental mess, but that list of EPA Superfund sites tied to dry cleaners got me thinking about that question.
Many years later, as I was sort of examining and thinking more about new research projects with the mind of an environmental historian and just a curious person engaging the world, a lot of the same kinds of themes that you see on food labels that trumpet their natural origins are also on cleaning products — things like walking through the pine scented forest or outdoor fresh-scented dryer sheets. And I thought, “Well, that's kind of strange. Why is it that these companies are trying to project this sort of idea of natural spaces when it's very apparent even to the user that when they open a disinfectant bottle or put materials in the dryer that it's not being dried outdoors?” And so it seemed like this was a great way to think more about what are the environmental consequences and what are the environmental pathways involved in cleaning up, and how have they changed over time and why do we still pine for these sorts of environmental connections even as we surely recognize that our cleaning activities are less and less tied to the natural world?
And so yes, it brought me from the kitchen table to under the kitchen sink.
[6:50] MP: People know that if you look at the list of chemicals obviously these things cannot possibly be good for people. They're good at cleaning. What overrides it is the smell. It's like our first scent. I don't know if that is something that you looked at about the way in which either they're marketed or the way that manufacturers kind of skirt around the known inherent dangers of the products that they have so that they become so popular that you think you're in the outdoors when it's really just a fabric sheet and some chemicals that are put together.
[7:08] KSH: Removing odors has long been one of the functions of cleaning up. You don't want your house to smell like something that's rotting or funky or been closed up too long, stale air. And certainly in the 19th century, concerns about ventilation were all over household manuals. Cleaning up was in part letting the outdoors in. And so over time, although that is still somewhat a part of what we do when cleaning, imparting a fresh odor is also important. And that was increasingly important also in the 19th century as the outdoor air became polluted. In the 19th century, one of my historian friends Melanie Kiechle has written about how the window boxes and a lot of the kinds of things that people grew in their yards, things like lilacs or mignonette, that have a really strong odor — they would plant them close to the front of their house because that was to introduce fresh smells into the household.
And so although in the past that might've been done with plantings with intention or bringing a bouquet of flowers into the entryway, today we might seek those same kinds of scents by the kinds of cleaning products that we use. Pine-Sol or other kinds of pine oil products have this imagery and their odor invokes this natural place of forest. But actually the manufacturer of pine oil disinfectants really took off in the 19-teens and 1920s because in the U.S. south there had been deforestation of pines and the stumps of the longleaf pine were especially tenacious, and they were hard to remove and they had all this rich pitch in them. And so a dynamite company, Hercules, was selling dynamite to farmers to try to clear the land of their stumps and they wanted to help recoup some of the expense of taking the stumps out.
And so they were looking for ways to use this wood. And so when you see it, it's all about the forest and invoking this odor of the forest and the healthfulness of pine, but really it's how can we make this stump wood into some sort of profit? And so they developed these plants, steam and solvent plants, to extract the pine oil. And pine oil disinfectants were one of the many ways that you could use that pine oil and generate some money as you were doing so to offset the cost of stump removal. A lot of products have these kind of arcane and strange histories that you don't expect from the label and yet the deeper you look, the more intriguing the actual backstory of how these products came into being becomes.
[10:02] MP: If you had to say what one big takeaway would be for readers, what are you hoping that when they read your book, what is it that you hope they take away?
[10:09] KSH: Yeah, there's kind of a few key messages. I think one of the most important things is just helping to document what are the environmental messes that are created by the things that we clean with, and especially by the introduction of the three technologies or products that I examine more deeply. And they are, on the one hand, disinfectants, as I've already alluded to, dry cleaning and then disposable products — especially disposable diapers. So where do those products come from? Why are they adopted? What are the environmental consequences of their use? But the other part of the story that I want them to understand is that although the adoption of those products is very much about environmental decision-making and our priorities in terms of thinking about the environment and the natural world, they're also very much tied to our social and political decisions. Caregiving and cleaning work has often been shunted to those that don't have a lot of power.
And so the exposures to chemicals or the ways that we redistribute or do not redistribute labor have a huge influence over the kinds of ways in which those products were introduced. It's not by coincidence that although disposable diapers were around from the 1930s, they were only occasionally used. Between 1970 and 80 is when they take off. That's also the decade in which women with children that are under five begin to enter the paid workforce in greater numbers. So in so far as we didn't prioritize valuing caregiving and cleaning work or redistributing how the tasks of the household were borne, many of the choices that we make are not simply individual choices, but social and political choices about who does the work of cleaning up. And so they reflect our environmental values, but they also reflect our social and political values. And so I try to tell those stories in tandem with one another. Together, those two messages and the ways in which they're intertwined is really at the book's heart.
[12:04] MP: You mentioned something about the distribution of labor. So in a hospital, you have the doctors come in, everything is basically prepped for them. The nurses will sometimes be responsible for either cleaning patients or making sure the patients are cleaned, but the people that do the majority of that work are your patient care associates. These are the people at the very base level of the pay grade within the hospital environment. Many of them are immigrants, many of them this is like their main job. They're using these products that you're talking about to make sure that whatever was in the room is destroyed so that the next patient coming in doesn't get an illness.
[12:40] KSH: Yeah, so one of the elements that my book examines is not simply, I know the household is in the title, but many of the decisions and the influences in adopting these products, especially disposable products, are institutions. So hospitals are a great example of this — both the normalization of disposable diapers because disposable diapers are introduced and in some ways valorized by the fact that they're used in the hospital, so therefore they must be the right thing to do to a new baby, but also in nursing homes. So today the biggest market for growth, especially in aging nations like the United States or Japan, is the use of disposables for elder care and for incontinent patients as they're older. The demands on time are such that the use of disposables permits longer between changes and undermines some of the labor-intensive parts of caring for someone who is either very young or very old. Same thing with daycare workers. So I do look some at institutions, but certainly in a country that has a lot of aging individuals thinking about maintaining quality of life but also being considerate of what are the environmental implications of those choices about caregiving is part of what I want to explore a bit.
[14:01] MP: I first became aware of your work through the work that you did on milk and how it became a staple of the kitchen table. So can you talk a little bit about how that actually happened and then what was it in your own history perhaps that led you to want to study the actual history of milk?
[14:19] KSH: I had a really influential mentor as an undergraduate, Jim Farrell, who when I was a junior or senior said, "You're applying to grad school, right?" And I hadn't really even thought about it until that moment. And so I applied to work with some of the people who did environmental history and ended up at University of Wisconsin. And so it's probably not surprising that as a UW-Madison student, I knew there were really great documents about dairy and dairy farming. Not every UW-Madison history student obviously writes about milk, but it was kind of a strategic choice and also linked to my own family history and was a way to explore these sort of ideas about nature and technology. One thing that I was really curious about, and you can kind of see as a throughline here with the second project as well, on the one hand, milk is a product that is really vulnerable to spoilage. It can carry bacterial contaminants and in later times could carry residues of pesticides or other environmental hazards, and yet it's also valorized as being a pure product of nature. And so that tension in milk's history about on the one hand being the kind of emblem of purity and all natural and on the other needing a lot of manipulation in order to reach its market safely, whether that be cooling or pasteurization or ensuring that there's no antibiotic residues within it. How is it that the same product is on the one hand thought of as needing all of this intervention in order to get to the consumer safely and is also thought of as pure product of nature?
It seemed like that had a lot of stories to tell about how humans related to their environment. My grandfather was a dairy farmer, and so I also wanted to make sure I told the farm part of this story, not just how consumers encountered milk, but also what were the implications of these changing attitudes and ideas about milk for the people that were in charge of getting milk to market? Why did they want antibiotics and what were the challenges in terms of sending milk that didn't have antibiotics or didn't have pesticide residues to market? So I was trying to integrate sort of urban and rural history as I told that story.
[16:31] MP: We talked about the environmental impact of the cleaning products and the production of materials and how it changes from the farm to eventually getting to your table or from the manufacturer to the kitchen sink. Do you have any advice to consumers about what they should be thinking about if they're going to use disposable materials, if they should use other types of materials, is there an environmental lesson to take away from the book, too?
[16:54] KSH: The second half of the book looks at the ways in which regulators and policymakers have tried to address some of the environmental and public health hazards. And I guess the thing that I would take away is not necessarily what you ought to buy or not buy or use or not use, but that you should make clear to your elected officials that you care about the environment and you care about what kinds of chemical hazards both people that are living, but also people who are working with these materials, have. A lot of the individuals, as we spoke of earlier, that are having to engage with these products on a day-to-day basis don't have a lot of political clout. And so if you can think about what would it be like to be in proximity to the plant that manufactures the gel for diapers, or what would it be like to be the person whose work is not compensated enough and you're also exposed to these hazards, I think the message, if there is one, is less about your own cleaning practices and more about advocating for the folks who are in the shadows of the pollution that's caused, or of the labor exposures that they might have to those products.
[18:10] Host: That was Kendra Smith-Howard, associate professor and environmental historian at UAlbany.
Kendra's forthcoming book, A Dirty History of Cleaning Up: The environmental hazards of household work in modern America, will be published in February.
For a link to Kendra's book and to learn more about how and why she believes we valorize the purity of nature, whether in a glass of milk or a mist of cleaning spray, be sure to check out The Longer Version in our show notes.
The Short Version would not be possible without contributions from many people, including our interview this week by Michael Parker. And as always, editing and production by our audio ice cream scooper, Scott Freedman in UAlbany's Digital Media Studio, deep inside the Podium tunnels.
We'll be back next week with another conversation about something interesting. I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist here at the University at Albany, and this has been The Short Version.