Associate Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences; Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies

(Fall 2024)

 Thousands of people gather each year in Springdale, Pennsylvania, Rachel Carson’s birthplace just outside of Pittsburgh, to attempt the Rachel Carson Trail’s hiking challenge. Not everyone who makes it to “The Challenge” on the Saturday closest to the summer solstice manages to complete the rugged 36 miles and nearly 7,000 feet of elevation gain. But everyone encounters information about Rachel Carson in training for a hike that memorializes her legacy. And most people who care about the environment—not to mention literature and science—know about Carson. Best known for her 1962 publication of Silent Spring, she is often credited for the emergence of the modern environmental movement. Still, few people I have spoken to on the Rachel Carson Trail have heard of Dorothy Freeman.  

Although Carson’s literary accomplishments and rhetorical contributions to environmentalism are well established, her same-sex romantic and erotic relationship with Dorothy Freeman is often ignored or downplayed as irrelevant to these public achievements. Stepping away from the most well-traveled accounts of Carson, I tell another story. This queer story emphasizes the side trails, the slant version of Carson’s life, relationships, and writing with respect to gender, sexuality, race, and disability. I take these metaphoric trails while reflecting on my regular hikes on the Rachel Carson Trail. My queer paths through Carson’s letters and the archives that hold them recovers the importance of her relationships with Dorothy Freeman as well as Dorothy’s husband Stanley Freeman and Rachel’s African American housekeeper Ida Sprow. I show the significance of these relationships not only to Rachel’s private life but to her public-facing rhetoric—and to developing a queer public memory of Carson that may serve intersectional environmentalism into the future.