Thread by @kathlsullivan

In 1908 a woman threatened to call the police on her garbage collector. @PatriciaStrach and I found a Karen in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. We recognize her as a resource local gov't could use @DiscardStudies #Discard2020 Source @_newspapers 1/10

She peered out her window, donned her bonnet, ran to the street, invoking the police if he didn’t collect all her cans. Residents used the wrong containers, in the wrong location, on the wrong day. Sanitarian C. Chapin called this “the garbage can problem.” Karen could help 2/10

Pittsburgh had joined a nationwide wave of garbage ordinances in 1894, contracting out for horses, carts, collectors, and disposal plant. But municipal garbage collection wasn’t going to work if the cans didn’t get picked up. Source: Kingsley Assoc Records @PittArchives 3/10

The Allegheny Co. Civic Club was involved in the garbage ordinance, but the political machine rebuffed offers for further help. Club members stuck to the sidelines, collecting complaints about dumping, drainage, expectorating on street cars. Source:ACCC records @PittArchives 4/10

In the home, white middle-class women developed sanitary practices, aided by products pitched to making their homes safe and clean. Civic orgs and charity work allowed them to model their domestic habits for others. Source @goodhousemag May 1917 #Discard2020 5/10

The garbage collector was faced with a woman who knew how she wanted things done, closed off from the public sphere but with a civic capacity to surveil behavior and dispense advice. Karen leveraged her race and class privilege, doing her part toward the garbage can problem 6/10

By the 1910s, a new regime worked with civic orgs in sanitary inspection of congested housing and “the class of people we have to deal with.” It enlisted club women to aid in inspection of homes and offer advice. Source: Annual Reports Pittsburgh 1916 @HistoryCenter 7/10

Heavy-handed rules can backfire, esp when telling people what to do in their own homes. Infrastructural power allows a gov’t to induce compliance by encouraging habits and advice. It looks personal, not like compliance with an ordinance. See work by @gnrosenberg 8/10

When personal habits serve public purposes, use of racial politics by gov’ts can be obscured. We’ve seen these dynamics play out in their own way in New Orleans, Charleston, San Francisco, Louisville. Here’s Louisville, 1941. Source @ LFPL See work by @CarlZimring 9/10

@PatriciaStrach and I are political scientists completing a book, Garbage Problems: How Governments Used Dirty Politics to Clean Cities, 1890-1926 @womenalsoknow 10/10