Industries discredited Rachel Carson by attacking her gender and emotional stability

Evidence

One of the nastiest assaults on a bearer of unwelcome empirical evidence was directed at biologist Rachel Carson, on the publication of Silent Spring (Beyl, 1991). Recall the earlier analysis of the great lengths to which the chemical and agricultural industries went to discredit Carson’s credibility as a scientist. She was portrayed as a “hysterical” woman who cared more about the deaths of cats than about the “10,000 people throughout the world who die from malnutrition and starvation every day” (Diamond, 1963). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2781

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the moral disengagement mechanisms (euphemistic labeling, displacement of responsibility) and to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s pattern of gendered attacks on women’s credibility. — connects to: Carson’s scientific authority was attacked as unpatriotic female hysteria by male establishment figures — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 408
• ADDENDUM: Reinforces the gendered-discrediting pattern from the immodesty article: a woman’s authority attacked through accusations of hysteria rather than substance.