Gender and American Culture

American Women and Nature

Vera Norwood

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781469617442
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The broad sweep of environmental and ecological history has until now been written and understood in predominantly male terms. In Made From This Earth, Vera Norwood explores the relationship of women to the natural environment through the work of writers, illustrators, landscape and garden designers, ornithologists, botanists, biologists, and conservationists. Norwood begins by showing that the study and promotion of botany was an activity deemed appropriate for women in the early 1800s. After highlighting the work of nineteenth-century scientific illustrators and garden designers, she focuses on nature's advocates such as Rachel Carson and Dian Fossey who differed strongly with men on both women's "nature" and the value of the natural world. These women challenged the dominant, male-controlled ideologies, often framing their critique with reference to values arising from the female experience. Norwood concludes with an analysis of the utopian solutions posed by ecofeminists, the most recent group of women to contest men over the meaning and value of nature.

1: Sources for American Women’s Nature Study

The English Tradition, Sentimental Flower Books, and Botany

It is recorded that Adam gave names to all the beasts of the field, and the fowls of the air; and Milton imagines, that to Eve was assigned the pleasant task of giving names to flowers, and numbering the tribes of plants. When our first parents, as a punishment for their disobedience, are about to leave their delightful Eden, Eve, in the language of the poet, with bitter regret, exclaims:

Must I thus leave thee, Paradise? * *
* * * * * * Oh flowers
That never will in other climate grow,
* * which I bred up with tender hand,
From the first opening bud, and gave ye names;
Who now shall rear ye to the sun, or rank
Tour tribes?
—Almira Phelps, Familiar Lectures on Botany

Almira hart lincoln phelps was one of the first American proponents of scientific education for women. In the early decades of the nineteenth century she and her sister, Emma Willard, founded female seminaries, where scientific education played an important part in the curriculum. Phelps also wrote popular textbooks on science for a largely female audience. From her, American women learned—and went on to teach their students across the country—not only how to conduct scientific study, but also how such knowledge fit into their roles as women.¹ In Familiar Lectures on Botany Phelps begins her lecture on the “History of Botany, from the Creation of the World to the Present” noting that although Botany was “nursed in the same cradle” as Natural Philosophy and Chemistry, she may be considered “the elder sister.”² Biblical history, such as Moses’ account of God’s gift of the living world to Adam, explains man’s work as shepherd of nature, but Phelps must resort to Milton’s tale of Adam and Eve’s complementary roles in naming the world to locate space for women’s connection to the green world. After this literary excursion, the narrative returns to more approved historical sources—the Bible and Homer. Phelps’s difficulty finding a historical precedent for associating botany with women encapsulates early American women’s struggles to claim their place in nature study and appreciation.

Phelps’s lament for Eve’s loss of an active role in nature uncannily mirrors radical changes taking place in a significant segment of nineteenth-century American society. In Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England, Carolyn Merchant argues that the capitalist revolution of the seventeenth century shifted Euro-American women out of work as equal producers in subsistence agriculture to “reproducers of daily life” in the home. With the arrival of large-scale industrialized agriculture, women’s contact with and assumed expertise in the plant world shrank. Merchant observes that as capitalist modes of production replaced the small farm, women lost their traditional voice in naming and molding plants. Increased emphasis on women’s duties setting up a household and socializing children and husbands compensated for such constriction. Home should serve as a refuge from the competition, amorality, and artificiality of the urban marketplace. Women’s role was to remind husbands and children of the republican virtues increasingly at risk in industrialized America. Ironically, idealized farms were offered as model households, in part because on small farms the family seemed closer to romanticized nature. Women instructed their children in the morals taught by nature study carried out in the domesticated fields and woods on the family grounds. Such duty required that nineteenth-century women become better educated, particularly in the burgeoning science of botany.³

These shifts in women’s contact with nature were, of course, more apparent in some regions of the country than in others. In the South, for example, poor white women and slaves continued to work on the land as integral contributors to the production process and identified themselves through this work. Slaveholding women had a mixed relationship with nature. They oversaw the gardens and flower beds close to home, but the actual work in these spaces was done by servants. Further, their fathers and husbands rarely consulted them in agricultural management decisions affecting the moneymaking aspects of the plantation. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese persuasively argues that southern women of the slaveholding class interpreted the meaning of true womanhood differently from their northern sisters. In their relegation to private spheres (and perhaps in the obsession with keeping a delicate, pale skin tone), however, they experienced some of the same disconnection from nature. Euro-American women along the moving frontier often maintained close ties with homestead gardens, viewing their carefully tended plots as literal hedges against the loss that Eve expresses in Milton’s tale of the first woman in strange terrain. Migrants from the East also encoded the new divisions of farm labor into their travel narratives and novels and constructed an image of the frontier Eve making a new paradise within the bounds of the domestic landscape of home, thus encouraging the constraints that Merchant describes in the New England experience.⁴

One key to sorting out regional responses to national trends is education. Almira Phelps and her sister Emma Willard were most influential in the Northeast. This region spawned most of the amateur and professional female botanists in the nineteenth century. Teachers who had trained in Willard’s Troy Female Seminary and other women’s schools carried the new education in natural history to the South and West. Although the Northeast housed the elite institutions of scientific study, important nature study centers sprang up early in the 1800s in both the South and the West. Charleston, South Carolina, and San Francisco, California, had active naturalist organizations before the Civil War and included women in their educational programs and as plant collectors. New England and the Middle Atlantic states nurtured women’s shift into the study of natural history, but nationwide interest in nature study and women’s education buttressed the spread of such activities to other regions.⁵

Education did not automatically grant Eve equal status with Adam in nature study. As Phelps well knew, the answer to Eve’s question about who would now name and rank the plants in the world outside the garden was the scientist. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, men newly trained in European science, dedicated to exploring the wilds of the New World and to collecting, drawing, and classifying new species, controlled natural history. Although women worked as collaborators in this effort, they were almost invisible (and often sought invisibility) as namers of the New World.⁶ Yet, for women to claim the public, moral voice supposedly engendered out of their nature study, they had to develop some new rhetoric connecting botany to the domestic round. In stories like that of Eve’s anguished loss of the plants she had nurtured in Eden, Phelps and her compatriots acknowledged that many women’s contact with nature was changing in the early nineteenth century. As women struggled to find biblical and literary sources offering them a tradition for nature study, they articulated a code for women’s contribution to American nature values. The early nineteenth century, then, provided the entry point for American women’s conscious, public enunciation of their responsibilities to the plants and animals of the New World.

One model for proper female nature study was available in the journals and narratives of European women travelers. The heyday of natural history in Europe began about 1820 and peaked in the 1870s. British and European women were enthusiastic naturalists throughout this period. Their travel narratives of the journey through America reveal the rising interest in the study of flowers, ferns, mosses, shells, birds, and marine life.⁷ This surge of nature enthusiasts from across the ocean, bringing with them their scientific knowledge, romantic aesthetic, and gender-based behavior codes, provided a backdrop against which American women developed their own voices for describing, valuing, and protecting the plants and animals they discovered.⁸

By the time Phelps published Familiar Lectures on Botany in 1846, however, American women had a reputation among British and other European visitors as isolated from nature. Europeans often noted the protected lives that American women led. The seeming lack of public gardens or places suitable for taking walks reflected women’s lives in private, enclosed spaces.⁹ Fredrika Bremer, a widely known Swedish writer well-trained in Linnaeus, devoted a good deal of her 1850s’ travel narrative to exploring the meaning of seclusion. Initially, Bremer witnessed an example of female retirement that she found enthralling. Greeted on her arrival in the East by Andrew Jackson Downing, the influential landscape architect, she spent some of her first days in America in his home. Enthusiastically describing the residence as perfectly melding nature and culture, she portrayed Mrs. Downing as a bird living in a beautiful villa.¹⁰ Later, in St. Louis, she discovered a more negative aspect of such seclusion at a wedding party:

The bride … struck me like a rare hot-house plant, scarcely able to endure the free winds of the open air . . . When I left that perfumed apartment, with its hot-house atmosphere and its half-daylight, in which was carefully tended a beautiful human flower, I was met by a heaven as blue as that of spring, and by a fresh, vernal air, by sunshine and the song of birds among the whispering trees . . . Ah, said I to myself, this is a different life! After all, it is not good; no, it is not good, it has not the freshness of Nature, that life which so many ladies lead in this country; that life of twilight in comfortable rooms, rocking themselves by the fireside from one year’s end to another, that life of effeminate warmth and inactivity, by which means they exclude themselves from the fresh air, from fresh invigorating life!

Bremer’s tour through America and her experiences with such sheltered women led her to conclude that women were shut out of public life in America, a view with which Harriet Martineau agreed.¹¹

Bremer also alleged that the physical weakness of these Americans was at base attributable to their “effeminate education.” The British explorer Isabella Bird, on her first American tour in the 1850s, concurred, noting that education was a waste among these “extremely domestic” women. In the 1820s an early English traveler, Mrs. Trollope, had reported that the schools gave women science and math but expected little beyond a superficial understanding of such subjects.¹² In judgments such as these, European women implied that American women were unfit to engage in the kind of naturalizing done by the Europeans, leading to the Americans’ unfortunate lack of familiarity with the flora and fauna of their own land.¹³

When these tourists generalized about women’s roles and their problems, they were addressing middle-class, mostly urban women.¹⁴ Of course, Europeans did not only make observations about genteel women of their own sort. They also commented on agriculturists, settlers of many classes going west, and American Indian and African American women. Yet, when they ran across women of other classes or races who did engage in outdoor activities as gardeners, field-workers, migrants, and such, they did not celebrate them for the health and knowledge they might gain by such lives. In the first place, many of the women they saw in these occupations were at the mercy of the elements. Mrs. Trollope’s (probably apocryphal) account of a woman and her children who were eaten by alligators because the husband built their cabin over a nest suggests that nature was not always kind to women who ventured forth from the cities. Second, women on the prairies and the frontier seemed to be isolated from the culture that gave context to their lives. Isabella Bird did not paint one positive picture of American women settlers in Colorado: middle-class women struggled to maintain a genteel life in rude cabins, and lower-class women lost whatever vestige of respectability they might have hoped to attain in living so close to nature but so far from civilization.¹⁵

Distanced from many of the women they encountered, Europeans relied only on what they saw in passing, or what they had read, to describe the real people they met. African American women, for example, apparently had little sensitivity to the natural world with which they often lived in close contact. In fact, one commentator had difficulty placing African American women in the environment at all. Harriet Martineau found them at odds with the beautiful surroundings in which they lived, leaving unreconciled the contradictions in her description of a plantation as a “perfect Eden”: “There were black women ploughing in the field, with their ugly, scanty, dingy dresses, their walloping gait, and vacant countenance. There were scarlet and blue birds flitting over the dark fallows. There was a persimmon sprouting in the woods.” Whereas Martineau had trouble locating African American women within nature, Fredrika Bremer could not imagine American Indian women outside nature—particularly wild nature. At one point, in describing an Indian woman who had married a white man, she noted that such women vanish from home “when the birds warble of spring and the forest . . . This wild life must assuredly have a great fascination.” In both cases, Europeans denied such women any of the reflective responses to nature experienced by white women. Obviously, visitors relied heavily on preconceived notions based on what they had read or heard prior to visiting America.¹⁶

Ironically, Martineau later corresponded briefly with an African American woman for whom contemplating nature carried great meaning. Charlotte Forten Grimké came of a free, middle-class family in Philadelphia. In the 1850s her family sent her to school in Salem, Massachusetts, where she attended classes with white students. Her education provided her much opportunity for nature study. Charlotte Forten yearned for a career as a writer. Steeped in the romantic poets of England and America, she looked to nature for inspiration. Her diaries reveal her conviction that women should take healthful exercise in natural settings, educate themselves about the flora of the country, and collect and preserve the most beautiful flowers they found on their rambles. Class and education opened the door to nature study for Forten as surely as for her white classmates.

Nature study held for Forten much more ambiguity than for white Americans or Europeans. She was separated from nature—not by some inherent defect in her race, but by a society living under slavery. Inspired by an illustrated lecture on the wonders of the Mammoth Caves, Forten lamented in her diary that she could not see the caves until slavery’s end. She felt guilty for enjoying nature’s charms in the face of the suffering of so many of her people: “How strange it is that in a world so beautiful, there can be so much wickedness.” ¹⁷ Bound by the constrictions of their class, European travelers assumed that America’s female naturalists could come solely of European stock. As Forten’s struggle to read nature appreciatively reveals, the Europeans were right in assuming that women of color might have difficulty stepping into the naturalist mode, but they had no understanding of the underlying reasons for such peoples’ silence.

Europeans came to America with the New World metaphor firmly in mind and on occasion did manage to find the perfect Eve for the garden. Trollope and Martineau saw her in the 1850s and she reappeared in the English painter Constance Gordon Cumming’s narrative in the 1870s. Significantly, Trollope did not see Eve until she found the garden, sighted in the Alleghenies during the last stage of her travels. Here she met an enchanting and enterprising young woman who “told us . . . that wild strawberries were profusely abundant, and very fine; ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Made From This Earth
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• 1: Sources for American Women’s Nature Study
• 2: Pleasures of the Country Life
• 3: The Illustrators
• 4: Designing Nature
• 5: Nature’s Advocates
• 6: Writing Animal Presence
• 7: Women and Wildlife
• 8: “She Unnames Them”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index