| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.2

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Nature's Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism. By Susan R. Schrepfer. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. xii + 316 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $35.00.)

With Nature's Altars, Susan Schrepfer climbs to new heights in environmental historiography. Focusing on the gendered meanings that women and men assigned their encounters with mountains, she offers a fresh interpretation of the intertwined histories of mountaineering and wilderness preservation. The analysis of gender has become commonplace in most fields of history, and yet most of those who study the history of ecological change and environmental politics have regarded it as irrelevant. Just as frustrating, those few who have examined gender seem to essentialize feminine and masculine ideas about nature. Schrepfer avoids this trap, taking care to embed both women and men in their historical matrix, reveal change over time, and acknowledge those like John Muir who defy categorization. In doing so, she proves that the analysis of gender is crucial to our understanding of environmental history.

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