Women in The National Park Service: The Legacy of the Patriarchy

The United States Federal Government takes responsibility for protecting women when they are citizens, but when the government serves as an employer for the National Park Service (NPS), the government is not protecting female employees from mistreatment. Over the last century, the government has granted women the right to vote, pay equality, and civil rights, but women's experiences with the NPS did not merit the same efforts of inclusion. Women associated with the NPS faced issues of not having the right to work, job inequality, as well as sexual assault, discrimination, and harassment. The relationship between the protections given to all female citizens and the experiences of women in the NPS is a contradiction. The federal government created protections and systematic change, but the NPS, a federal agency, did not fully implement the change. This thesis analyzes the NPS to understand how the oppressions are the result of patriarchy. At the beginning of the 20th century, Park Ranger's wives aided in establishing national parks as a white male sphere. By the 1960s, more NPS employees were women, yet to become a Park Ranger, the NPS’s female employees had to overcome discriminatory job titles and uniforms allotted only for men. All of the NPS's history had sexual harassment, but in 2014, women at the Grand Canyon unified to demand an investigation into sexual harassment in the workplace.Bachelor of Art