| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Virginia Scharff, editor. Seeing Nature Through Gender. (Development of Western Resources.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2003. Pp. xxii, 345. Cloth $45.00, paper $17.95.
This collection contains an assortment of readable and provocative essays relevant to environmental history and the history of the genders. The book's title is somewhat misleading, however, because the interlinking of the terms "gender" and "nature" signals a more abstract and theoretical approach than is found here. The environment is a material phenomenon, whereas nature refers not only to material phenomena but also to perhaps the most complex concept in the English language, particularly because it implies values—the natural. As these values are often highly gendered, a book on seeing nature through gender requires a well-developed integrative theory of the relationship between the concepts of nature and gender, in which gender is more than a particular sexual identity. This book lacks such theory. The overarching theoretical cohesion of a collection of essays is the editor's prerogative. The clearest declaration of Virginia Scharff's purpose is the statement that she is concerned to accomplish a "'tender coupling' between environmental history, women's history, and feminist analysis" (p. 3). This is a fair description of the bulk of the text, especially if one adds the male equivalent of "women's history."	1
The book is divided into four separate sections, on representation (three essays), bodies (four essays), consumption (two essays), and politics (four essays). The plethora of subthemes compounds the difficulty of identifying an over-arching nature-gender conceptual theme. The essays, however, are unified by their limitation to U.S. history, despite the broad topic's seeming call for the kind of cross-cultural comparison that is present only in Giovanna Di Chiro's "Steps to an Ecology of Justice: Women's Environmental Networks across the Santa Cruz River Watershed." This essay succeeds in integrating the history of Mexican-American women's struggle for empowerment with the environmental history of a particular watershed.	2
In most cases, the book's two foci tend to be juxtaposed more than integrated. Paige Raibmon's contribution, "Naturalizing Power: Land and Sexual Violence along William Byrd's Dividing Line," illustrates the juxtapositional approach through a comparison of two different versions of Byrd's history of a 1728 expedition to survey the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina. The "secret history," written for private consumption, contained lurid accounts of the sexual exploits of the surveying party, whereas the public version contains an account of the region's flora and fauna, thereby replacing "sex with nature" (p. 20). Byrd's roughshod approach to sex provides only circumstantial evidence, however, to suggest that his natural history was necessarily seen through gender in particular. The article remains, nevertheless, a fascinating presentation of material of relevance to environmental history, as well as to the history of sexual behavior, even if the connection is essentially implicit. The same sort of counterpoising of sexual identity, on the one hand, and nature, on the other, characterizes Catherine Kleiner's "Nature's Lovers: The Erotics of Lesbian Land Communities in Oregon, 1974–1984." It presents erotic and other texts by the "land lesbians" that document a connection between their rural lifestyle, notions of nature and their sexuality, thereby contributing both to the women's history and the environmental history of Oregon. It nevertheless remains unclear how we are to interpret the lesbians' gender identity in relationship to the concept of nature, especially given the traditional gendering of nature as both female and fertile (as in mother nature) and hence heterosexual, whereas homosexual intercourse is of necessity infertile, and hence often deemed unnatural. There is a mine of nature-gender issues to be explored here, but it has been left largely unexamined.	. . .

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