|
|
|
Reviews
Seeing Nature through Gender
|
Edited by Virginia J. Scharff
|
University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2003. Photographs, maps, notes, index. 367 pages. $17.95 paper.
|
Reviewed by Linda Nash
University of Washington, Seattle
|
|
|
| An ongoing preoccupation within environmental history has been the field's relationship — or, perhaps more accurately, its lack of relationship — to social history. Since the late 1960s, social historians have come to dominate the larger discipline, producing ever more sophisticated studies of the construction and maintenance of social difference in the United States. Environmental history, on the other hand, remains a subfield that has focused principally on tracing and explaining ecological change using insights from ecology and other sciences. Whereas social history has focused on the divisions within the American social order, environmental history has often treated that same society holistically, as a kind of unified human species. In recent years, several excellent works have bridged the two fields, but of the social history trinity — race, class, and gender — class has received the most sophisticated treatment from environmental historians. The literature on gender and race, with a few notable exceptions, remains thin. |
1
|
|
Consequently, Seeing Nature through Gender is a much needed and welcome addition to the field. Comprising thirteen diverse essays, many by younger scholars and drawn from works in progress, this volume demonstrates some of the possibilities that emerge when the critical study of gender is brought together with the concerns of environmental history. Virginia Scharff opens the volume with a powerful argument for the relevance of gender to studies of the environment, arguing that the connections are both cultural and material and ultimately unavoidable. As she argues, we cannot separate our knowledge of the environment from the categories through which we perceive it. More often than not, those categories have been shaped by gender. Some readers will no doubt take this point as a statement of postmodern solipsism. But that would be to miss completely the careful arguments of Scharff and many others. Like all good environmental historians, Scharff recognizes the power and independence of the non-human world, but she is unwilling to place human knowledge — including scientific knowledge — outside of history. |
2
|
|
A recurring theme in these essays is how assumptions about gender interact with constructions of nature. In itself, this is not a new idea. It was central to Carolyn Merchant's classic study, The Death of Nature (1980), which examined how ideologies emerging from the scientific revolution constructed women and nature in similar ways that ultimately underwrote the domination of both. Merchant's work, in turn, became a critical reference for ecofeminist work that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s. The essays here, however, avoid the essentialism and ahistoricism that has plagued much ecofeminist writing. Instead, the authors carefully place ideas of nature and gender in specific historical contexts. Paige Raibmon, for instance, offers a sophisticated reading of William Byrd's two well-known works on colonial Virginia: History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina— a natural historical account of his survey along the colonial frontier — and its originally unpublished companion volume, The Secret History of the Dividing Line, which chronicles the survey party's sexual assaults on local women. Raibmon plays these works against each other to argue that the process of colonization involved the subjugation of women as well as the subjugation of land and that the two were inextricably related in the minds of Byrd and his fellow elites. |
3
|
|
Ideas of nature have sometimes underwritten marginal as well as dominant gender ideologies. Amy Green looks at the career of writer and conservationist Gene Stratton-Porter (1863–1924), whose interest in nature study and outdoor life allowed her to fashion an identity of "muscular womanhood" that fell outside the era's typical notions of femininity (p. 221). Similarly, Catherine Kleiner's essay on the lesbian back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s explores how a particular group of women invoked a loving Mother Nature to support an identity that was both female and homosexual. Tracing postwar concerns about the health effects of organic chemicals, Maril Hazlett argues that the emergence of an ecological discourse challenged dominant assumptions about masculinity that had helped underwrite lax pesticide policies. |
4
|
|
Taking these essays by themselves, a reader might surmise that the most compelling connections between gender and nature are discursive. But there are other, more material, ways in which the histories of gender and nature intersect. In her own essay, Scharff points to the gendered division of labor, arguing that environmental historians have neglected the impact of specifically women's work on the environment. While none of the other authors address class or labor, Annie Gilbert Coleman takes up the gendering of consumption. Analyzing the phenomena of "Ski Bunnies" and "Shred Betties," she shows how the twentieth-century ski industry used assumptions of gender to sell itself, and how, in turn, the industry responded to the rise of a feminist gender ideology within the new sport of snowboarding. Although her analysis is focused on advertising and marketing, Coleman suggests that gendered consumption had material impacts on the mountain landscape — through the construction of routes and resorts that appealed specifically to women. |
5
|
|
Nancy Langston's essay offers the most decidedly materialist analysis of the collection. Langston lays out the evidence for an under-recognized environmental problem — the increasing prevalence of chemicals known as endocrine disruptors, which have been shown to impair sexual function and generate sexual ambiguity in several animal species. Because these chemicals affect the reproductive system, their effects manifest themselves differently in males and females. In fact, this particular form of environmental pollution threatens to undermine the biological differences that supposedly ground gender in the first place. |
6
|
|
All the pieces collected here focus explicitly on gender, but skeptics may ask whether they are really about the environment. What different authors mean by "nature" ranges widely in this volume — from land as property to the human body, food, urban fires, ski resorts, and Mount Rushmore. Some will argue that undue attention to gender along with such an expansive definition of nature runs the risk of sidelining environmental history as a distinctive project or, at least, of foregoing the field's unique strengths. Yet, the most exciting and important works in history have rarely come from scholars intent on staying within the established confines of their subfield. While not all methodological innovations pay off, this volume indicates that conversations between environmental and gender history are likely to produce some ground-breaking work. |
7
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|