Women-nature identifications are historical constructions, not biological essences

Evidence

Yet these celebrations of the connection between women and nature contain an inherent contradiction. If women overtly identify with nature and both are devalued in modern Western culture, don’t such efforts work against women’s prospects for their own liberation? Is not the conflation of woman and nature a form of essentialism? Are not women admitting that by virtue of their own reproductive biology they are in fact closer to nature than men and that indeed their social role is that of caretaker? Such actions seem to cement existing forms of oppression against both women and nature, rather than liberating either. … But concepts of nature and women are historical and social constructions. There are no unchanging “essential” characteristics of sex, gender, or nature. Individuals form concepts about nature and their own relationships to it that draw on the ideas and norms of the society into which they are born, socialized, and educated. People living in a given period construct nature in ways that give meaning to their own lives as elites or ordinary people, men or women, Westerners or Easterners. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 49

Categorization

• DEFINE: Resolves the book’s central question of whether woman-nature conflation is essentialist by relocating both terms to social construction.
• XREF: connects to: Rejecting nature-culture dualism improves feminist accounts of reproduction — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 162; Women’s closeness to nature is neither purely conventional nor biologically determined — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 754; Woman’s apparent naturalness is itself a product of history (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Woman’s apparent naturalness is itself a product of history #corroborates (0.92)
• Woman is a historical situation, not an immutable essence #corroborates (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 675
• Assimilating woman to mere nature is a prejudice, not a truth #corroborates (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 656
• Woman’s traits stem from her situation, not biology #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1740
• Femininity is an artificial, inculcated product rather than a natural instinct #corroborates (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1037
• Woman is made by civilization, not nature or biology #expands (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1976
• Nature’s qualities are historical, not fixed, under human mastery #expands (0.75) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 825