Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature

By Diane Flynt

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781469617442

Diane Flynt

A multiple-time James Beard Award finalist for Outstanding Wine, Spirits, or Beer Professional, Diane Flynt founded Foggy Ridge Cider in 1997 after leaving her corporate career and produced cider until 2018. She now sells cider apples from the Foggy Ridge orchards in the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains.

Book preview

Made From This Earth

Gender and American Culture

COEDITORS

Linda K. Kerber

Nell Irvin Painter

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Nancy Cott

Cathy Davidson

Thadious Davis

Jane Sherron De Hart

Sara Evans

Mary Kelley

Annette Kolodny

Wendy Martin

Janice Radway

Barbara Sicherman

Made From This Earth

American Women and Nature

Vera Norwood

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 1993 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Norwood, Vera.

    Made from this earth : American women and nature / Vera

Norwood.

        p. cm. — (Gender and American Culture)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-2062-9 (cloth: alk. paper)

    ISBN-10: 0-8078-2062-8 (cloth: alk. paper)

    ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-4396-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

    ISBN-10: 0-8078-4396-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

    1. Women naturalists — United States — History. 2. Women conservationists — United States — History. 3. Ecofeminism.

I. Title.

QH26.N67    1993        92-22562

508.73′082 — dc20        CIP

The author is grateful for permission to quote several lines from Come Into Animal Presence, by Denise Levertov. The complete poem is from Poems, 1960-1967. Copyright © 1961 by Denise Levertov Goodman. Reprinted with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

09 08 07 06 05 8 7 6 5 4

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY MANUFACTURED.

For AGATHA and MIKE

Contents

Preface

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 Feminism

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

  1 The Water Arum, from J.J. Grandville’s The Flowers Personified, 14

  2 The Periwinkle, from J. J. Grandville’s The Flowers Personified, 15

  3 Aquilegia pubescens (columbine), drawing by Roberta Cowing, 55

  4 Untitled floral painting by Fidelia Bridges, 57

  5 Unio lineolatus raf. (American mollusk), drawing by Lucy Say, 64

  6 Female Rice Bunting, engraving by Helen Lawson, 68

  7 A. dissimilis say (American mollusk), drawing by Helen Lawson, 69

  8 Pedicularis furbishiae (wildflower), watercolor by Kate Furbish, 73

  9 Six Little Chickadees, photograph by Cordelia Stanwood, 74

10 Immature Broad Winged Hawk, photograph by Cordelia Stanwood, 75

11 Cecropia Moths, photograph by Gene Stratton Porter, from her Homing with the Birds, 77

12 Lewis’ Leaf Charts: The Walnuts, educational illustration by Graceanna Lewis, 79

13 Agnes Chase, 82

14 Cenchrus tribuloides (bur grass), drawing by Agnes Chase, 84

15 Bouteloua scorpioides (grama grass), drawing by Agnes Chase, 85

16 Stayman Winesap Apple, watercolor by Bertha Heiges, 88

17 Eulalia Loquat, watercolor by Deborah Passmore, 89

18 Abies grandis (giant fir), drawing by Annie Elizabeth Hoyle, 90

19 Drawings of cacti by Leta Hughey, 91

20 "Pseudaugochloropsis graminea [bee] on Senecio Flower," drawing by Elaine R. S. Hodges, 92

21 "Japanese White-eye (Zosterops japonica) on Indian Golden Shower Tree {Cassia fistula)" drawing by Nancy Halliday, 93

22 Demonstration Block, New York World’s Fair (caterpillar), wood engraving by Grace Albee, 95

23 Watercolor Research Painting, Curly Dock (Rumex crispus), by Anne Ophelia Dowden, 96

24 Springtime in the Country—Gardening, from Harper’s Weekly, 100

25 Celia Thaxter in Her Garden, painting by Frederick Childe Hassam, 104

26 Celia Thaxter’s plan of her garden, 108

27 Gray Gardens, East Hampton, N.Y., estate of Robert C. and Anna Gilman Hill, 112

28 The Creeks, East Hampton, N.Y., estate of Albert and Adele Herter, 113

29 Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., estate of Robert and Mildred Bliss, 116

30 Marian Cruger Coffin, 117

31 Garden of the Misses Pyrne, East Hampton, N.Y., 119

32 Home of Frances Benjamin Johnston, 120

33 Plan for a Suburban Garden, by Beatrix Farrand, 122

34 Beatrix Farrand’s watercolor of her garden plan, 125

35 The Kate O. Sessions Agave and Aloe Garden, Balboa Park, San Diego, Calif, 126

36 Kate O. Sessions, 128

37 A Shaded Walk from the Kitchen to the Vegetable Garden, from Frances Duncan’s The Joyous Art of Gardening, 131

38 Elizabeth Lawrence, 135

39 General Took’s Old Home, near Montezuma, Ga., 137

40 Mattie Davenport and Rose Braud, Boston urban gardeners, 139

41 Rachel Carson, 149

42 Martha Maxwell’s exhibit at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, 215

43 Martha Maxwell in collecting attire, 217

44 Mary Hastings Bradley and Alice Bradley on safari, 220

45 Osa [Johnson] Brings Home the Dinner, from her Four Years in Paradise, 227

46 Delia Akeley and J. T., Jr. (African monkey), 230

47 Belle Benchley with lowland gorillas, 232

48 Lois Crisler and one of her Arctic wolves, 243

49 Macho and Kweli (mountain gorillas), photograph by Dian Fossey, 248

50 Peggy Bauer, 252

51 A gray wolf, Denali, North Park, Alaska, photograph by Peggy Bauer, 253

52 A grizzly, McNeil River, Alaska, photograph by Peggy Bauer, 254

53 Dust Storm (Pied crows and zebras), by Lindsay B. Scott, 255

54 Surviving in Shadows (African elephants), by Janet N. Heaton, 256

55 Agatha of the AAs Stops and Feels and Gently Moves Her Mother Annabelle’s Skull, from Cynthia Moss’s Elephant Memories, 257

Preface

Watch this, gents. Watch the lady act like a woman. For that’s what she did. The well-behaved, quiet, pretty, serene, domestic creature peaceably yielding herself to the uses of man all of a sudden said NO. And she spat dirt and smoke and steam . . . She swore and belched and farted, threatened and shook and swelled, and then she spoke. They heard her voice two hundred miles away. Here I go, she said. I’m doing my thing now. Old Nobodaddy you better JUMP.

—Ursula Le Guin, A Very Warm Mountain

When mount saint helens blew her top, Ursula Le Guin used the occasion to meditate on the usual portrayal of nature as female, arguing that Saint Helens reminded us of the destructive but potentially cleansing meanings of such a metaphor. Le Guin also considered the divergent messages the volcanic explosion sent to men and to women, stemming from gender-based differences in conceptions of the feminine. Le Guin’s allegory raises two issues central to the concerns of this book. First, how have American women found meaning in, and ascribed meaning onto, the biophysical landscape? Do they speak of nature as mother, sister, friend, lover? If so, what do such metaphors imply? What aspects of the natural world have attracted the notice of American women—small, enclosed gardens; domesticated fields and pastures; forests; oceans; deserts—and how do they integrate such disparate landscapes? Second, what is the context for American women’s responses to nature? To what extent have gender roles influenced what women have valued in nature? How have women used gender differences to distinguish their environmental values from men’s? Further, how have education, class, ethnicity and race, and the period in which a woman lives informed the responses she might make to a phenomenon like the eruption of Mount Saint Helens?

In his preface to the new edition (1990) of Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt comments on the contemporary impression that American women have come only lately to nature writing: Have we lost track? What of … Anna Comstock or Gene Stratton Porter, Katharine Pinkerton or Sally Carrighar?¹ Originally published in 1969, Back to Nature included many such women, marking it as a singular history of American environmental values. Although classic studies like Hans Huth’s Nature and the American (1957), Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (1967), and Joseph Petulla’s American Environmental History (1977) mention a few women, the thrust of their narrative is carried by male voices, male agendas. More recent histories, such as Paul Brooks’s Speaking for Nature (1980), Thomas Dunlap’s Saving America’s Wildlife (1988), and Stephen Fox’s John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (1981), provide somewhat more detailed discussions of women’s work. Even in these studies, however, women appear as significant actors only sporadically, and then in roles meshing perfectly with gender stereotypes. Excepting Rachel Carson, who achieved solitary fame as one of the founders of the environmental movement, women have received most attention for their work in bird protection campaigns, city sanitation and beautification efforts, and the antivivisectionist and antihunting movements.

Women’s marginalization stems in part from men’s very real dominance in nature study. From the earliest work in natural history—the general investigation of plants, animals, and the physical environment—to its nineteenth-and twentieth-century growth and division into specialized disciplines like botany, ornithology, and geology, men have defined the subjects and methods of study. Environmental historians have reflected this structure of both subject matter and modes of inquiry. As a result, we know a great deal about the men who framed America’s environmental agenda, and we know something about how men—naturalists and historians—have viewed women’s contributions to nature study and the environmental movement. But we have very little information on the nature study and preservation work that women actually performed or the meanings such activities held for them.

This book centers around women in order to explore the question of how they perceive and act within the natural world. Obviously, American women who took part in nature study recognized that they entered terrain controlled by men. The male narrative defining the meaning of nature has formed a significant aspect of the context for their own efforts. I depart from traditional approaches to environmental history, however, in situating that male narrative as a backdrop to women’s efforts, and in questioning the extent to which women have found their nature values mirrored in those of their male colleagues. Although probing the differences between male and female visions of nature, I have chosen not to include detailed analyses of important men in American natural history. Historians of the American environmental movement have well described the nature values of the likes of William Bartram, Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Edwin Way Teale, Roger Tory Peterson, Barry Commoner, Loren Eiseley, John Hay, and Barry Lopez. I focus my attention on a large group of influential women who were key players in the study and preservation of nature. Given the masculine context in which they often worked, I am interested in the interpretations women have made of the nature values of 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.

That women have often played supporting roles in environmental history does not mean that they lack a separate tradition. Feminist revisions of the history of science demonstrate that women working in male-dominated fields do not necessarily view their work or practice their science from the same perspective as men. Margaret Rossiter, Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, and others argue that gender-role expectations have informed both women’s choice of scientific fields and the nature of their work within those fields.² And, in fact, women have been more heavily represented in botany and ornithology than in zoology and geology because, during the nineteenth century, they and their male colleagues constructed a match between the study of plants and birds and women’s social roles. Whenever a woman has committed herself to nature study, she has done so with some consideration of the propriety of the endeavor. My analysis looks at two aspects of that awareness: women’s perceptions of male/female roles within a particular field and their use of gender dichotomies to describe and analyze the natural world.

Surprisingly, feminist historians of science have given scant attention to the broader question of how men and women might hold different concepts of nature. My initial interest in this project grew in part from questions about the extent to which female scientists shared with other women a particular way of understanding nature. This book represents a first step toward delineating what I see as a significant, continuous tradition in the interactions of women with nature. My study of their experiences observing and recording nature, of their work designing and cultivating gardens and wildlife sanctuaries, and of the utopias they have imagined suggests some common ground in American women’s sense of their ethical relationship with the biophysical environment. Throughout, I analyze how gender roles have informed women’s involvement in and descriptions of the environment.

One feminist historian of science has served as a pioneer in raising some of these issues. In The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980), Carolyn Merchant probes the consequences of the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for women’s relationship to nature. In Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (1989), she extends her analysis to consider the impact of European ideas about nature on American Indians and the land they inhabited. Merchant documents the horticultural knowledge and skills of precolonial southern New England Indian women and outlines the collapse of native agricultural practices with the arrival of Europeans. She also argues that early European farming communities evidenced a knowledge of nature that in some ways was similar to the understanding of agricultural American Indians. Rural Euro-American women of the eighteenth century themselves knew a good deal about the plants and animals that were key to subsistence agriculture. Their knowledge and skills also were reduced and limited with the emergence of the market economy and industrialized farming. Although she briefly discusses Euro-American women’s shift into nature study and preservation by the mid-nineteenth century, Merchant does not address the new roles women would play over the next century as Americans expanded their knowledge of the natural landscapes of North America.³

The study of nature by American women began in the eighteenth century with scattered accounts by botanists, agriculturists, and travelers. It blossomed in the nineteenth century as women educated the public about nature and worked to preserve and conserve plants and animals. In the twentieth century it came to fruition when women became major voices in nature writing and artistic depiction, in gardening and landscape design, in wildlife conservation, and in the development of environmental philosophy. This study, therefore, concentrates on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the course of the nineteenth century, natural history became a popular hobby as well as a scientific endeavor in America, succeeding a similar rage in England. The nineteenth century, of course, also witnessed many changes in women’s roles as America industrialized. Reflecting broad societal concern with defining women’s place, specific arenas of nature study and conservation became identified as peculiarly suited to women’s domestic responsibilities.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mainly well-educated, urban, middle-class, Euro-American men and women have engaged in interests commonly thought of as nature appreciation. Poorer residents of urban areas have had little access to the parks and wilderness areas that figure so heavily in both nature study and conservation circles, while rural farming communities have often been dismissed as blights on an otherwise beautiful view.⁴ Further, stereotypes among the Euro-American middle class have depicted most racial and ethnic minorities and lower-class peoples as insensitive to nature. Intellectual elites, defining privileged American flora and fauna, have displayed little interest in other groups’ folklore, gardens, or material arts. While my study concentrates on the values expressed by middle- and upper-class Euro-Americans, I recognize the diversity in women’s appreciation of nature.

Not all Euro-American women who tended gardens and sketched plants were wealthy; many found nature study a way to make a living as well as to serve a passion. The chapters on illustration and gardening consider some of the class issues reflected in women’s work in these areas. Although I briefly cover African American women’s gardening preferences, very few minority women have participated in environmental history as nature writers, illustrators, or wildlife observers. I found that the bounds of natural history, the fields in which the traditions of naturism and environmentalism have developed, made integrating the experiences of women of color throughout the book problematic. In designing this study, however, I thought it was critical to consider the reasons for the exclusion of women of color from elite activities and to explore their depictions of plants and animals. I found rich documentation forcefully revealed in fiction and poetry. The chapter on nature imagery in American women’s fiction unfolds from stories written by American Indian, African American, and Euro-American women. Here, as women of color name the sources of their isolation from Euro-American environmental traditions and give voice to their own nature lore, I consider in detail race and ethnicity as major determinants of difference in women’s responses to nature.

The book falls into two parts. The first four chapters deal with women who located their nature appreciation and work within approved gender codes. The next four chapters chronicle women who experienced tension between their efforts and the social expectations of proper female behavior. Although the chapters flow in a roughly chronological sequence, my goal was not an exhaustive history of all aspects of women’s nature study and work. I chose to highlight arenas in which women have created a niche for themselves and located specifically gendered meaning in the work they have done. When I first began to study women naturalists, it seemed to me that their history was made up of singular, individual heros. The more I probed, however, the more I discovered that these individuals reflected the history of many women who dedicated their lives to the study and protection of nature. While considering the contributions made by key individuals, each chapter surveys the efforts and traditions of a set of women engaged in a similar endeavor. The intent of this strategy is to shift singular women away from their subordination within the male-dominated stream of environmental history and situate women’s group achievements within female culture.

For a good many women, teaching children about butterflies, botanizing and birding on leisurely Sundays, sketching wildflowers collected in local terrain, and making an old-fashioned flower bed exemplify appropriate female behavior. Focusing on the environment, making it one’s familiar and home, has been key to woman’s appreciation of nature. During the early nineteenth century, influential European and American women encouraged botanical study as a particularly suitable endeavor for women. Chapter i examines this history, arguing that the blend of sentimental and scientific approaches espoused by these tastemakers provided a significant entry point for middle-class American women’s domestication of the natural landscapes of home and neighborhood. Chapter z documents women’s earliest efforts at nature writing, showing how Susan Fenimore Cooper’s 1850 seasonal journal, Rural Hours, established a tradition carried on by botanists, entomologists, birders, and other nature lovers throughout the nineteenth century. That tradition culminated in the twentieth century with the work of such contemporary essayists as Ann Zwinger and Josephine Johnson.

As well as writing natural history, women have represented the flora and fauna of America in drawing, painting, and photography. Chapter 3 considers why women came to dominate the field of scientific illustration in the late twentieth century. I construct a history of their artistic endeavors, beginning with the little-known shell illustrators working in the 1830s in Philadelphia, then moving to botanical artists who worked later in the century for the federal government and to bird photographers who turned a home-based hobby to the service of science. An enclosed flower garden filled with beautiful women at their ease remains a classic image of woman’s proper role in nature. In Chapter 4, I move beyond this passive image to explore how early garden writers like Celia Thaxter and landscape designers like Beatrix Farrand managed to maintain societal expectations about women’s relegation to the enclosed gardens of home while encouraging women’s expansion into the public arenas of city beautification and urban landscape design. Women’s preferences in selecting ornamental plants often crossed class boundaries. Indeed, I found a surprising amount of consensus among nineteenth- and twentieth-century American women on the subject of a beautiful flower bed.

For the most part, in each of the areas considered in the first four chapters, women smoothly integrated their own developing interests in nature with broad-based gender-role expectations. The next four chapters study women whose activities and values part company with the dominant expectations of proper female relationships to nature. Some of these women—biologist Rachel Carson and anthropologist Dian Fossey—were surprised to discover themselves at odds with the conservation establishment. Others, such as contemporary American Indian writer Leslie Marmon Silko and eco-feminist Ynestra King, clearly expect tension and, in fact, emphasize in their relationship with nature their differences with the dominant culture. Chapter 5 is a study of the network of women conservationists supporting Rachel Carson’s battle in the 1950s and 1960s with chemical companies, government agencies, and entomologists to stem the flood of pesticides poisoning the environment. Male critics of Carson’s Silent Spring used her gender to discredit her ecological warnings. This period provided some of the most public signs that women’s sense of their responsibilities to nature could differ from men’s.

Women novelists and poets have plumbed the ideologies of Western patriarchal culture, which treat women and the rest of nature as objects of both male domination and exploitation. Women of color have long been aware of racist images of themselves as more animalistic than human; contemporary writers use fiction to bring such stereotypes to wider consciousness and to move beyond them. Chapter 6 analyzes literature by American Indian, African American, and Euro-American women to reveal the symbols underlying the increased tensions between men and women that surfaced in the public arena in the 1950s and 1960s. American Indian, African American, and Euro-American women also have different histories of life on the land. As well as gender splits, this chapter considers the differences among cultural groups as they have articulated their nature lore.

Following this study of women’s fiction, Chapter 7 reviews women’s actual work with wildlife. I trace the historical tensions in their partnerships with early trophy hunters and scientific collectors and their own tradition as intimates of wild animals studied in the field. Dian Fossey was a principal contemporary representative of these women. I argue, however, that her work was part of a continuum, including early twentieth-century zoologist Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher and mid-century field observers Sally Carrighar and Lois Crisler.

Finally, Chapter 8 examines the emerging philosophy of ecological feminism and places this newest expression of women’s collective environmental effort within female traditions in nature appreciation and protection. Directly confronting the Euro-American biases of traditional environmentalism, eco-feminists hope to forge a coalition among women of various classes and races. The literature of the movement portrays American Indian, African American, and Euro-American women engaged in collective political struggle. Rejecting the patriarchal meanings placed upon a female nature, ecofeminists assert their own ability to change the future in much the same way as the explosion of Mount Saint Helens changed the landscape. While acknowledging the potential contributions of the ecofeminist movement to contemporary environmental problems, I show that its Utopian focus has at times masked the heritage of women naturalists, conservationists, and environmentalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Failing to recognize their debt to these forebears, ecofeminists also lose the opportunity to call on women’s longstanding traditions in their own movement for change.

In writing this book, I had to choose between many equally important individual women, areas of endeavor, and aspects of nature. For example, there is a chapter on gardening but not on farming. The selection here was informed by my sense that, by the mid-nineteenth century, women’s work in landscape architecture and ornamental gardening offered more information on the values driving popular ideas about nature than did the lives of farm women. To get at my broad interest in women’s perceptions about nature, I also included activities somewhat less obviously connected to nature study. This is the case especially in the chapter on fiction, but women’s imaginative narratives of heros’ adventures in the wilderness offer rich information on their symbolic connections to animals and plants. Finally, my choice of chapter topics was fueled by my own interests in nature and reflects personal favorites among many deserving women. These essays are only a beginning; a good deal remains to be done—by environmental historians, in particular—in considering the nature perceptions of women not included within the Euro-American, urban middle class. I hope my initial attempt spurs the discovery of more unsung heros and engenders critical analysis of the pluralistic strands of, and the continuity in, Americans’ responses to nature.

My introduction to the depth of women’s commitment to the study and preservation of nature came as I sifted through boxes of Rachel Carson’s correspondence in the rare book and manuscript collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Library. This book could not have been written without the assistance of knowledgeable staffs of the Beinecke and other libraries and archival collections. I am particularly indebted to Carol Spawn at the American Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and James White at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation of Carnegie Mellon University. Also, the interlibrary loan staff at the University of New Mexico helped immeasurably in locating sources for even the most arcane material. Research for this book was supported by a summer fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and by several Research Allocation awards from the University of New Mexico. These grants were critical to the background research of the book; I am deeply grateful to the funding sources.

Many individuals generously gave of their time to critique portions of the manuscript. Patricia Clark Smith and M. Jane Young, my friends and colleagues at the University of New Mexico, provided good conversation about the issues, as well as support and encouragement through the lengthy process of seeing a research project of this scope to completion. I also am indebted to Minrose Gwin, Jane Lancaster, Ruth Salvaggio, Pat Turner, and Blanche Linden Ward for helpful readings of specific chapters. Finally, I want to thank my editors at the University of North Carolina Press for their support of this project. Iris Tillman Hill encouraged my first efforts at outlining a broad, interdisciplinary study of American women’s perceptions about nature. Kate Torrey’s firm but generous guidance helped me throughout the writing process. Kate read several drafts of the manuscript and gave me excellent advice (and a good bit of courage) as I moved through the revisions.

There really is no sufficient way to express my gratitude to my husband and daughter. Mike has been my best friend, my intellectual sounding board, and my emotional mainstay for over twenty-five years. He encouraged my early enthusiasm for this project, took on parenting and housekeeping duties while I was on research expeditions, and sympathized with my struggles to finish the manuscript. Agatha traipsed endlessly through the library with me, wrote off-limits signs for the study door to protect my writing time, and occasionally served as an editorial assistant. My family is most happy that the book is finished, because now we can get back to exploring our favorite rivers, forests, mountains, and deserts together. To them this book is lovingly dedicated.

Made From This Earth

And she wrote, when I let this bird fly to her own purpose, when this bird flies in the path of his own will, the light from this bird enters my body, and when I see the beautiful arc of her flight, I love this bird, when I see, the arc of her flight, I fly with her, enter her with my mind, leave myself, die for an instant, live in the body of this bird whom I cannot live without, as part of the body of the bird will enter my daughter’s body, because I know I am made from this earth, as my mother’s hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth and I long to tell you, you who are earth too, and listen as we speak to each other of what we know: the light is in us.

—Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her

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