Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: health activism, anti-toxics, environmental activism, grassroots, public health

About Me: Amy M. Hay grew up outside Omaha, Nebraska. She received her B.S. in Pharmacy from Creighton University. After practicing pharmacy for a few years she decided to return to school and study something completely different.

Her areas of research and teaching specialization include 20^th-century American history, American women’s and gender history, and medical and environmental history. She spent a summer in Philadelphia on a Chemical Heritage Foundation fellowship, and a year in Germany as a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. She has published on Love Canal in the Journal of Women’s History and Environmental History. Her next research project examines health disparities in the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas.

Recent Publications: The Defoliation of America: Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests (Univ Alabama Press, 2021)

In The Defoliation of America: Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests, Amy M. Hay profiles the attitudes, understandings, and motivations of grassroots activists who rose to fight the use of phenoxy herbicides, or Agent Orange chemicals as they are commonly known, in various aspects of American life during the post-WWII era. Hay focuses her analysis on citizen responses to illuminate how regulatory policies were understood, challenged, and negotiated, contributing to a growing body of research on chemical regulatory policies, risk society, and hazardous chemicals. This volume uncovers new understandings about the authority of the state and its obligation to society, the role of scientific authority and expertise, and the protests made by various groups of citizens.