| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.2

Book Review

Nature's Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism. By Susan R. Schrepfer. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005. xii+316 pp. Map, illustrations, notes, index. $35.
For over a decade there has been a lot of talk about the need to combine gender and environmental history, but the talk too seldom has been matched by the production of substantive works. At last that is beginning to change.	1
With Nature's Altars, Susan Schrepfer has given us an outstanding example of how to use the techniques of gender history to illuminate traditional environmental history topics—in this case, mountain climbing and wilderness preservation. Schrepfer's approach is at once social and cultural: social, in that she shows us how the experience of mountains and climbing differed along lines of gender; cultural, because she illuminates how tropes of gender shaped both sexes' understanding of rugged, western landscapes.	2
Schrepfer's singular contribution here is her rescue of feminine perspectives on mountains from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on early climbing narratives and the archives of the Sierra Club, Mazamas, and Mountaineers, Schrepfer concludes that both men and women gendered the mountains female and sought spiritual transcendence through climbing. But there the similarity ends. Men typically visualized peaks as sexual antagonists and sought mastery, whereas women constructed the mountains as home and looked for intimacy. Men went to the mountains to test and reinforce their masculinity; women went seeking freedom from the conventions of Victorian femininity. Men were attracted to the heroic science of geology; women engaged in botany.	3
Schrepfer convincingly links this social and cultural history to politics. The idea of the mountains as feminine enabled both sexes to argue for their protection, although they did so in somewhat different ways. In the early twentieth-century, male-dominated organizations sought the preservation of rugged and inaccessible landscapes invoking metaphors of the frontier and the battlefield. Women did not reject those constructions, but they also argued for the protection of wildflowers and animals, often invoking the scientific precepts of ecology and the rhetoric of domesticity. These feminine perspectives would be largely erased in post-World War II America, however, as men came to dominate climbing and conservation organizations, and the culture more generally rejected women's participation in public life. Thus, Schrepfer reads the passage of the Wilderness Act as the institutionalization of a particularly masculinist vision and a statement about the anxieties of middle-class men in post-war America. By 1964, the masculine trope of the frontier had pushed feminine perspectives on conservation to the margins.	4
Finally, Schrepfer argues for the importance of mountaineering and wilderness organizations to modern environmentalism, labeling these groups a "vanguard" of this new political movement (p. 209). She chronicles the critical role of the Sierra Club and its charismatic leader David Brower in raising public concern over land-use issues, rooting this activism in the longstanding American fascination with mountains. What Schrepfer leaves unexplored is how the racialized frontier rhetoric and gender conservatism that these groups embraced also limited their ability to influence a younger generation of activists. To what extent did wilderness advocates find themselves pulled into a wide-ranging protest movement that they could neither control nor ignore? To label them vanguards effectively highlights the connection between postwar environmentalism and the concerns of earlier eras, but at the expense of detaching it from the broader history of the 1960s and 1970s.	5
More important, however, is that Schrepfer has shown us the indis-pensability of gender to answering these questions. Good books are those that offer new insights into the past and provide grist for ongoing debates. Nature's Altars gives us both, and no environmental or social historian should miss it.	6
Linda Nash is assistant professor of history at the University of Washington. Her book, The Nature of Health: Epidemics and Environments in the History of California, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.

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