On American Women and Nature Notes from Vera Norwood, Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill, 1993), taken by A. Woodlief. The book also includes extensive notes and bibliography and is a great place for beginning any study of women nature writers.
Introduction
1. Sources for American Women's Nature Study: The English Tradition, Sentimental Flower Books, and Botany
2.Pleasures of the Country Life: Susan Fenimore Cooper and the Seasonal Tradition
3. The Illustrators: Women's Drawings of Nature's Artifacts
4. Designing Nature: Gardeners and Their Gardens
5. Nature's Advocates: Rachel Carson and Her Colleagues
6. Writing Animal Presence: Nature in Euro-American, African American, and American Indian Fiction
7. Women and Wildlife
8. "She Unnames Them": The Utopian Vision of Ecological FeminismIntroduction: Using Ursula Le Guin's "A Very Warm Mountain" as allegorical base, this book asks "How have American women found meaning in, and ascribed meaning onto, the biophysical landscape?" and "What is the context for American women's responses to nature?" In particular, how have gender roles influenced what they have valued in nature, and class, ethnicity & race, and period informed their responses to nature?
Women have been marginalized as students of nature for many reasons--subjects and methods of natural history have been defined by men, especially with the rise of science, but women are often token or ignored as being more "domestic" than "academic" in their interests. Indeed, the values of nature for women are often not mirrored by their male colleagues; "In American women's comments on the similarities and differences between their view of nature and men's lie many clues suggesting that there is a distinctly female tradition in American nature study." (xv) There does seem to be a separate tradition related to gender-role expectations, and women doing nature study have generally considered feminine propriety and their sense of ethical relationship to the biophysical environment.
This book highlights women naturalists who have located specifically gendered meaning in their work. It sees them less as key individuals as engaged in a communal tradition, sometimes integrating their interests in nature with broad-based gender-role expectations (as in the first four chapters) to departing from those expectations in a kind of quiet revolt against the dominant culture.
This chapter surveys the heritage of female nature writers, focusing primarily on Almira Phelps, early proponent of scientific education for women. European authors often failed to see this and critiqued American women for leading such "indoor" lives. Sentimental flower books and botanical study in schools, did offer many women the opportunity to study nature, especially as teachers adopted the Pestalozzi methods.
This chapter focuses on Susan Fenimore Cooper's 1850 book, Rural Hours, based on her explorations around her father's home (which she never left) in Otsego, NY and her wide reading of natural history. She "properly" disclaims scientific knowledge and focuses on nature as her home and the study of one's natural environment to educate children and nurture moral character. This image "conjoining women's roles as domesticator and the American landscape's new image as home" (not wilderness) set a model for many American women. She disliked the Latinate system of names and used nature as a "springboard for religious meditation and moral instruction." She liked a mixture of wild and tame plants, advocating the native growth but seeing nature as a place of democratic harmony, yet she lamented the losses that she saw, especially in the forests. She anthropomorphized the birds she loved, appreciating domestic arrangements of all animals and finding models there for the "proper female virtues of modesty, constancy, and sisterhood."
She inspired writers like Mary Treat, who was more scientific in her approach though also very domestically oriented, bringing spiders into her house for study. Also, there were many women active in bird preservation movements, such as Olive Thorne Miller and Florence Merriam, who saw a new age of bird study, built on observation and not the violence of dissecting, etc. Nesting was a favorite subject; mating was not mentioned, however. Like male writers such as Thoreau and Burroughs, they "shared a preference for the rural life, an anti-materialist bias, a strong sense of the respect due to all life, and more interest in the ecological system than in tales of struggle and dominance." Though their voices were different, women were considered capable nature writers and were often active in conservation efforts and naturalist groups like the Audubon Society. That would change with the development of scientific professionalism, however.
Other writers such as Mary Austin, Helen Hoover, Josephine Johnson, and Ann Zwinger continued this kind of writing, especially emphasizing "ways of living holistically in keeping with nature, seeking a way back into the endangered wild landscape." These twentieth century writers don't have to demonstrate proprietry and domesticity, but their voices are clearly female. They are more likely to see constraints in domestic expectations and cherish wildness, but they too "continued to find models of their own female lives in the other animals with whom they live."
Chapter 3.
This chapter looks at the women illustrators who made important contributions in shell, insect, and bird documentation, beginning with Jane Colden in the 18th century, then Lucy Say, the Peale Sisters, Roberta Cowing and others. These have been fairly invisible, working at home or more recently, in government offices with specimen brought from the field by men. Their work on government publications and for handbooks were crucial in educating the public and for science, and are now important in the area of nature art.This chapter deals with women who wrote about gardening (as opposed to male "landscape architects"), an interest which meshed with domestic roles. This literature is heavily class-coded, yet many ties were made among women of all classes. She focuses on Celia Thaxter, the famed Maine gardener and writer (An Island Garden) and Beatrix Jones Farrand, a landscape designer of upper-class homes. An extensive gardening network developing, often centered on garden clubs (who could become quite activist, although often ridiculed or unnoticed by men.) More recently they have taken leading roles in urban planning and the environmental movement.
This chapter focuses on Rachel Carson and other women such as Lady Bird Johnson who used the domestic as a basis for public leadership for conservation and protection of nature. Both had to fight gender stereotypes to be heard, though they relief heavily on traditional domestic and nurturing images. Carson in particular found much support within a women's network in her battle to be taken seriously. For these women ecologists, nature is home, a web of life, not a place to be "conquered" by chemicals and technology. This connection between home and environment is in her sea books, but especially in Silent Spring. Her success in arguing her case was aided, to some degree, by her gender because of this female tradition, though she had to fight many in the scientific and chemical establishment. Like many other women in mid-century, they found that the metaphor of nature as home was a base for their environmental goals, one which could aid their moral and political commitment to "assuring that male professional incorporated their values into environmental policy."
This chapter deals with expressive writings or literature and how women struggle with the perception that their linkage to nature (non-rational "animality" ) justifies restricting them to the domestic sphere, protecting them from the wildness in themselves and nature. In particular women of color have felt these restrictions, often blocking African Americans from an appreciation of nature. Racial stereotypes have put Euro-American women outside nature as observers, with "wild" sexuality controlled by domesticity and women of color embodying that wild "otherness." Thus women of color have been barred from classic nature writing; "for many women of color, the specific choice to write about their feelings for familiar animals brings to the surface problematic visions of uncontrolled sexuality….Such women's invisibility in the canon of nature lore and nature conservation reflects the dominant culture's resistance to the alternative nature values expressed by women of color." But now all have come together: "The expressive literature of each group ultimately returns women to the sacred heart of animal presence, both in themselves and in other beings."
Norwood examines the work of Pauline Johnson (Mohawk) and Leslie Silko's Yellow Woman stories to show how women find power in their animal identification. Alice Walker and Paule Marshall find sources in African American traditions for identifying spirit in nature. Toni Morrison's Beloved shows well gender issues and dispossession that arise from the equating of slaves with animals, as does Harriet Jacobs. Zora Neale Hurston shows a positive sexuality beyond animalistic stereotypes; Morrison's treatment of Sethe shows connections between spirit and the natural world. Morrison and Silko, then, redefine the animal by pulling in white folks and "suggesting that abuse of women of color reflects as well the lack of respect for and destruction of the natural world."
Susan Griffin in Woman and Nature argues that scientific culture has limited women, and Euro-American women have had their sexual nature perverted by participating in "intellectual traditions splitting nature from culture." Sarah Orne Jewett reflects this mocking of women's spheres in The Country of the Pointed Firs. The men come to nature for plunder, not refuge; Sylvie chooses the bird but gives up her own future as a wife [?]. Another book examined is Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion. Margaret Atwoood's Surfacing is particularly significant; it "lays open the contradictions in overcivilizing women because of their perceived biological closeness to nature and tries to create a white woman choosing to live outside the bounds of culture, within the terms of nature." She realizes she has given herself up to the forces of technology; the abortion has separated her head from her body, and love is seen as a ter of ownership. Sexuality is not a source of freedom. At the end she shatters the glass jar that has controlled nature and becomes wild, as does her lover. Women must find a route back into sacred animal presence; Atwood discovers "that kinship with nonhuman animals potentially empowered both women and nature."
So there are two very different ways that white women and women of color deal with their identification with gendered stereotypes of their relationship to nature which explain why their responses to the conservation and environmental movements have been so different. Women of color must "grapple with white projections of their people as representatives of a lower order of human consciousness, more in touch with the intuitive animal than the rational human," rejecting "white folks' self-image as rational outsiders to the exigencies of the environment: and "privilege less dualistic readings of nature." Thus they establish their own frame of reference, one in which they appeal to the spirit informing all life. White women have lost touch with stories connecting them with nature through their nature as humans. They have been visible, but Carson "unveiled the split between men's and women's environmental values that had been building since the nineteenth century." As Griffin asserts, "women's attunement to the "roaring inside her" poses a threat as well as a fulfillment."
Norwood focuses first here on the work of Dian Fossey and her study of the mountain gorillas--but the popular film suggests she was a wild woman, plunging downward toward death after refusing to marry. Her discoveries were radical because she asked different questions about animal behavior. Her work actually was based on "the history of American women's struggles to create a niche within wildlife study and to have their feelings change the way the dominant culture viewed other animals." Women's trophies are not the dead animal or even the photograph, but "the moment of mutual recognition between human and wild creature." Women have tried to develop ethical rules for human-animal interaction.
Martha Maxwell was a 19th century taxidermist putting animals in naturalistic habitats, requiring much wilderness hunting; her sister wrote a book about her, seeing it as acts of domestic preservation and as a way of showing Western wildlife threatened with extinction by descruction of habitat. Delia Ackely, Mary Bradley, and Osa Johnson were other museum hunters and writers who justified their actions as preservation and for education about conservation, but not for dominance. They often found themselves caring for wild young animals, as did Belle Benchley, yet they recognized that this too was interfering and that caged animals were different from wild, free ones. These women who have lived with wild animals have done much to change conceptions of wildlife, promote wildlife conservation, and advocate the rights of animals.
Other important writers include Sally Carrighar, a prolific animal writer, and Lois Crisler, who worked with wolves (Arctic Wild), both of which are discussed in some detail, as is Dian Fossey, who encountered much resistance from the scientific establishment and her own ambiguity when gorillas died from human closeness. In her case as in the others, women seem to be serving as mediating links between white men and the "dark continent."
Today more women are trophy collecting in the sense of interacting with animals on their own grounds and recording with photography. Often they are torn between their personal ties and the need for nonintrusive study. Ethics and morality seem to be crucial considerations, even when they have to hunt. Gender codes are still important in defining approaches to the wild, because they have more difficulties not getting very personally involved. But they have done much to refocus issues and to highlight female roles in animal society.
"Ecological feminists, or ecofeminists, identify disturbing connections between the domination of women and the domination of nature, and they argue that these associations explain the violent attitudes toward both nature and women pervading Western culture….[it] works to cross boundaries by injecting ecological goals into the women's movement and by including the feminists critique of patriarchy in the environmental movement. Ecofeminists hope to change society; their concern is for the future; their goal is a new mode of interaction between humans and nature."
An important early work was Rosemary Radford Ruether's New Woman/New Earth (1975) which argues the identification of women with nature and nature as a "field for the exercise of male power and control." She calls for "communalized family and work arrangements, equal distribution of decision making between men and women and among all levels of society, and an 'ecological technology' focused on the development of nonpolluting and renewable energy sources." Later writers have expanded on these ideas of male domination of women, "primitive" peoples and the poor and nature, a mixture of sexism, racism, and classism.
Ursula Le Guin uses science fiction to consider what the ecofeminist agenda might mean, as do her stories about human relations with animals (Buffalo Gals). She sees the problems not in women's connection with the green world but with men's false separation from it. Yet she and Ruether (and others) see problems in making women "earth mothers." How does one balance biological differences against socially constructed gender roles? Does the solution lie in emphasizing values arising from women's connection with nature? With revitalizing ancient goddess mythologies? Or does such a myth (of women connected with nature) serve to reinforce gender socialization and the resulting separations, domination, and imbalance? There's a constant struggle "to chart a course denying romantic images of woman as passive earth mother while affirming women's particular contribution to improving human relations with nonhuman nature." (she looks at Le Guin's "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" here.)
Ecofeminists have often criticized radical environmental groups, including deep ecologists who focus on problems with human mastery and not patriarchal domination. They worry over animal rights philosophies based on anthropomorphizing, though they often support animal rights activism. Quantum physics, questioning the positivist, hierarchical world image is also appealing. There has been little attention paid to the tradition of women's nature study, however, including a failure to recognize the importance of gender socialization in defining women's vision of nature. But these women HAVE been significant voices; though their domestic perspective may have been coopted by the dominant culture, women have "attempted to set themselves off from marketplace materialism and scientific manipulation of nature resources." Ecofeminists are carrying on the tradition, though their political goals may be different. However, they seem to be envisioning a utopia, and not recognizing the struggle these women have experienced within themselves, especially more recently, as they "grapple with the moral conflicts raised by field studies, or how women should deal with the responsibility when their own efforts--even when motivated by the best intentions--go awry." They also need to consider more the different approaches of non-white women. Knowing our history is crucial!
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