Before Lois Gibbs led the fight to relocate her community from a toxic landfill, before she got her own made-for-TV movie and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, she was so terrified to speak in public that she hid behind a tree. “I didn’t want to talk to anybody because I had nothing to say,” Gibbs says, thinking back to the day in early August 1978 when her neighbors wanted her to comment on the latest official message from their state capital in Albany, New York. “I was really shy and quiet,” Gibbs remembered 45 years later. “I'd literally never been a leader of anything except for little toddlers that I used to babysit.”

Gibbs was a resident of Love Canal, a Niagara Falls neighborhood whose community learned, via reporting in the Niagara Gazette, that their idyllic-looking home had been built atop 22,000 tons of chemical waste. For a decade beginning in the 1940s, Hooker Chemical Company, one of the titans of Niagara Falls industry, had buried its industrial byproducts in the abandoned canal at the center of the neighborhood. Now the people who lived there were reporting mysterious health issues, from epileptic seizures to a range of cancers. 

Gibbs came across the same Niagara Gazette coverage just as she was trying to figure out why her son was so ill. It turned out, she read with horror, that Michael’s elementary school was located directly atop the landfill. Gibbs put together a petition to have the school closed. She got dressed in her Sunday best to go door-to-door for signatures, and practiced delivering her intro speech to the family dog. On her first outing, though, she got scared and ran home before anyone could even answer her knock.

A week later, though, Gibbs had what she called a “come to Jesus moment. Michael got really sick and he was in the hospital and he had pneumonia and they had this little plastic tent over the top of his bed. And I’m looking at him and thinking, ‘you know why you’re here? Because I’m not doing anything—because I’m more scared of whoever’s on the other side of that door than I am willing to protect you.’”

Resolute, Gibbs went back to knocking on her neighbors’ doors. She quickly learned she wasn’t the only one suffering. “Everybody else had a story to tell. I mean, people would take me down to their basements and they'd show me the black ooze coming through the wall. They would take me down to their sump pump and say, ‘smell it, smells like chemicals.’ And it did. Women would talk to me about miscarriages and stillborns and babies with birth defects.” 

The next several years transformed Gibbs into a household name, as she did everything possible to keep the Love Canal story in the news and on the public’s mind. The Love Canal Homeowners Association, of which she had been elected president, held press conferences, gave neighborhood tours to journalists and delivered a coffin to the state governor’s office. At one point, they even held two EPA officials captive for several hours to get President Jimmy Carter to address their plight directly (he did). 

Gibbs was only the most famous face of a battalion of women—the mothers of Love Canal—who were determined to get their families out of an environment that was killing them. Another one of those mothers was Luella Kenny, whose seven-year-old son died of kidney disease after playing in his own backyard. Kenny was a scientist, and began to research his illness. “I found all of these articles that said that minimal lesion nephrosis could be caused by exposure to chemicals, which everybody was pooh-poohing,” Kenny told American Experience. Like Gibbs, she also had never thought of herself as an activist up to that point. Jon’s death, however, galvanized her. “I really didn't have the proper time to grieve because when I saw what was happening—and I had two other children that could be affected plus a husband that was sick—I couldn't afford not to get involved.”

Kenny, Gibbs and the other women of Love Canal entered into a pitched battle with state officials who sought to minimize their findings. Gender dynamics played a large part in the struggle. “They were trying to sweep it under the carpet and they just didn't know who they were dealing with,” said Patti Grenzy, a former Love Canal resident who was pregnant when she first learned of the contamination. Her husband Ernie Grenzy agreed. “The government felt that the men were going to be too boisterous and put up too much of a fight against them,” he recalled. “So they decided to release all their press releases and have meetings in the middle of the day, while the men are at work. That was a mistake, because hell hath no fury like a woman guarding her children.” 

An extensive health survey the residents conducted was dismissed by New York’s Department of Health as “useless housewife data.” Not long after, however, a study by the EPA confirmed the same effects of toxicity that those housewives had found. “The mothers were absolutely underestimated in the earliest days of this fight,” said Keith O’Brien, who wrote a book about Love Canal. “Almost every person in power was a man, and a white man. And almost everyone fighting to escape was a woman.” 

Not all of those women were treated equally. Also located within the neighborhood was a public housing project whose residents rented; many were low income and Black. This other group of non-homeowners received less attention and support. Carol Jones grew up in one of the Love Canal renters’ communities; her mother Agnes was an outspoken activist on their behalf. “From my memory,” Jones told American Experience, “my mother should have been on the news every day because she was always out there talking to reporters, answering questions, offering information just as Lois Gibbs was.” Gibbs concurred. “ You look at every one of those news clips, you'll never see them because they're Black,” she said. “I'm being elevated because I'm pretty and I'm white and a homeowner and I have little children, where in Griffin Manor, where you have moms with children who are wonderful human beings, but happen to be Black and renters as opposed to homeowners—are treated entirely different. And in part sometimes intentionally.” 

Ultimately, it was the combined pressure of all of Love Canal’s activists that brought about change. More than 900 families were moved out of the area, and their fight culminated in the landmark Superfund legislation, which oversees the remediation of hazardous waste sites across the country. Some inhabitants, including the Kenny and Grenzy families, reached settlements with Occidental Chemical Company, which purchased Hooker in the 1960s. But all of them were irrevocably changed by the experience. As Gibbs put it, “I was a totally different person by the time Love Canal ended, and many of the other women were.” Luella Kenny, now in her eighties, still speaks out about the trial she endured. “It's 45 years later now, but I still feel it. I talk about it because I think it's important. My mantra is that no other child will die because of corporate irresponsibility. I can't face that and it’s what keeps me going, and I think John keeps me going.”