2014/01/30 by Maureen A. Flanagan · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #History of Science and Natural History #American Environmental and Regional History #Australian Indigenous Culture and History
paper · doi:10.1093/ahr/119.1.167
openalex publication_date 2014/01/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
In Beyond Nature's Housekeepers, Nancy C. Unger offers a sweeping original analysis of American women's environmentalism from the pre-Columbian era to the present. Unger challenges us to envision environmentalism as the totality of the interaction of human nature with non-human nature by understanding how the social constructions of “gender, sex, and sexuality shaped the social relationships between men and women” and “influenced the way nonhuman nature was viewed, used, abused, protected, or preserved” (p. 7). She argues that we must see “how the internalization of prescribed gender traits colored people's reactions to the world around them.” This internalization has both influenced our professional understanding of what constitutes environmental history and resulted in men's and women's markedly different responses to the environment (p. 7). Unger rightly acknowledges that gender traits apply to all humans, but because environmental historians have focused much of their attention on men, her task in this book is to demonstrate that “the uniqueness and importance of women's roles cannot be fully appreciated unless placed in an appropriately gendered context” (p. 8).