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Book Review
| Seeing Nature through Gender. Edited by Virginia J. Scharff. Development of Western Resources series. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. 344 pp. Photographs, map. Cloth $45.00.
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| Collections are rarely groundbreaking. Yet Seeing Nature through Gender advances our knowledge of its field in two important ways: first, within its deliberately limited field, it has impressive scope. (It was produced for a series, Development of Western Resources, that deliberately confines its interests to the American West.) In addition, it pays careful attention to gender, not just a gender. Its essays are widely varied but well integrated, written by both men and women about both women and men, and they extend to families and the larger culture as well. In her introduction, editor Virginia J. Scharff reveals a deliberate intent to show how "gender conditions historical relations between humans and nature" (p. xv). Her essayists do a fine job of this, and her own editing sets off the essays in clear, if sometimes overlapping, categories. |
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The book is divided into four sections: representation, bodies, consumption, and politics. Within each division there are two to four essays. Something rare in collections these days, a commendable index, follows these, and both the index and author's introduction ably unify the book. Essays themselves range from a cultural reading of gender as related to the Mount Rushmore monument to studies of how our endocrine systems disrupt the environment, and from William Byrd's expeditions in the 1700s to lesbian land communities in the 1970s and 80s. There are two biographical essays, one on writer Gene Stratton-Porter and another on a woman named Rose Maria Augustine who is cleverly discussed in relation to women's environmental networks and concern over the Santa Cruz watershed in Arizona. All of the essays are sound, some of them especially enlightening. |
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Because it is impossible to review all thirteen essays in this short compass, I have chosen a few that particularly impressed this reviewer and have deliberately omitted three works that have appeared elsewhere and are reprinted here, two of which are fine examples of masculinity studies, one on firemen and the urban environment and one on the CCC. The essay, "Thinking like Mount Rushmore: Sexuality and Gender in the Republican Landscape" is especially fresh. It zeros in on the choices of figures to be carved in stone and concludes with a fascinating reading of the film North by Northwest. Also a study in masculinity, this essay by Peter Boag examines how heterosexuality and maleness are encoded in the Mount Rushmore monument and how the lives of some of those involved in its representation, even the presidents themselves, in part belie those designations. Equally informative, though of another sort entirely, are two essays on health. Maril Hazlett looks at Silent Spring with new eyes, discussing ways in which human bodies are fragile ecological entities; while Nancy Langston brilliantly explains how the levels of sex hormones excreted in urine have altered both the natural environment and human coming of age, at least in the case of women who now mature younger. Her "Gender Transformed: Endocrine Disruptors in the Environment" is alarming and important in that it reminds us how gender is not only culturally constructed but "profoundly biological" (p. 133). |
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There is, then, something here for almost anyone interested in nature and gender—everything from snow bunnies and shred Betties on the ski slopes to the food we eat. One flaw in the book might be Scharff's choice of an older 1999 essay of her own to lead off the collection. In the light of subsequent scholarship, "Man and Nature! Sex Secrets of Environmental History," available elsewhere, seems to protest too loudly what has become a truism: that environmental history is not only the history of man but of both woman and man. Perhaps this observation still applies best to study of American culture and environment, but the selections Scharff makes and this very book itself, with its range and depth, indicate that this assumption may now be dated. But this is to quibble. There is freshness aplenty for readers of Seeing Nature through Gender. |
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Barbara T. Gates is professor emerita at the University of Delaware and author of Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton, 1988), Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago, 1998), and editor of several books including Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science (ed. with Ann B. Shteir, Wisconsin, 1997), and In Nature's Name (Chicago, 2002). |
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