In 1976, a little southern lady “dressed like a fairy princess”—as she later recounted the moment—stepped to the microphone at a shareholder meeting in Boston and lavishly praised the chair of W. R. Grace & Co. for his commitment to preserving her community. Rae Ely knew perfectly well this was a lie; W. R. Grace was planning to strip-mine for vermiculite in her bucolic Virginia town. In fact, the whole “southern lady” thing was a bit of a lie. But Ely, who had fought the scheme for years, was prepared to use every tool at her disposal to stop the plan, whether eye-catching outfits that captured the attention of the news cameras or entirely unearned flattery.
The crowd stood and cheered. The board chair soaked in the applause. And Ely—determined to demonstrate that W. R. Grace had more to gain from goodwill than from vermiculite—had made her point.
Many at the time dismissed the activism of women like Ely—the press, their opponents, even their own allies. That was the case for the Putnam Valley, New York, woman, who had worked for 40 years to save enough money to build a house that was suddenly threatened by highway construction. The New York Times identified her only as Mrs. Arthur Kinoy, and described her as “peppery.” Michelle Madoff was another “peppery” housewife living in the middle-class Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, who led a local movement in 1969 to improve air quality.
Behind the adjectives—peppery, feisty, hysterical—lurked a shared assumption that these were women out of place, that they didn’t belong in the realm of politics or public policy, a space still dominated by elite white men. But in the 1970s, a wave of political neophytes including Ely successfully challenged that. Although their brand of activism is today usually labeled NIMBYism—“Not in my back yard”—when these middle-class white women spoke out in defense of their communities, they expanded the space for political participation in ways that would have lasting consequences.