Women’s traditional labour mirrors nature as mere enabling background to male achievement.

Evidence

Women are systematically backgrounded and instrumentalised as housewives, as nurses and secretaries (Pringle 1988), as colleagues and workmates. Their labour in traditional roles is also systematically omitted from account in the economic system (Waring 1988) and omitted from consideration when the story of what is important in human history and culture is told. Traditionally, women are ‘the environment’—they provide the environment and conditions against which male ‘achievement’ takes place, but what they do is not itself accounted as achievement (Irigaray 1985a; Le Doeuff 1977). — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 105

Categorization

• XREF: ‘Traditionally, women are the environment’ gives the eco-justice students a vivid handle on how gendering and environmental marginalisation share one structure. — connects to: Women rank lower than men because their reproductive roles are tied to nature — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 591; Female virtue is the broken form in which exploited nature enters male culture — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 256; Woman’s apparent naturalness is itself a product of history (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Women rank lower than men because their reproductive roles are tied to nature #contradicts (0.82) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 591
• Woman’s apparent naturalness is itself a product of history #expands (0.80)
• Female virtue is the broken form in which exploited nature enters male culture #expands (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 256
• Ecofeminism revalues a women-nature connection the west historically devalued to oppress women #qualifies (0.72) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 60