Women, Nature and Freedom 

Val Plumwood 

Public Lecture, University of Tasmania, Launceston, October 1992. 

"In what does man's pre-eminence over the brute creation, consist? The answer is as clear as that a half is less than a whole, in Reason. For what purpose were the passions implanted? That man by struggling with them might attain a degree of knowledge denied to the. brutes. Consequently the perfection of our nature and capability of happiness must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue and humanity that distinguish the individual and that from the exercise of reason, knowledge and virtue naturally flows." 

Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Ch. 1) 

There are plenty of good reasons for feminists to distrust the western mythology of reason as masculine and the notion of women's links with nature. That women's inclusion in the sphere of nature has been a major tool in their oppression emerges clearly from a glance at traditional sources: "Woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal" (Cato the Elder); "A woman is but an animal and an animal not of the highest order" (Edmund Burke); "I cannot conceive of you to be human creatures, but a sort of species hardly a degree above a monkey" (Jonathan Swift); "Howe'er man rules in science and in art / The sphere of women's glories is the heart" (Thomas Moore); "Women represent the interests of the family and sexual life; the work of civilisation has become more and more men's business" (Freud); "Women are certainly capable of learning, but they are not made for the higher forms of science, such as philosophy and certain types of creative activity ; these require a universal ingredient" (Hegel); "A necessary object, woman, who is needed to preserve the species or to provide food and drink" (Aquinas). Feminine "closeness to nature" has hardly been a compliment. 

There are however many traps for feminists in extracting themselves from this problematic. Both rationality and nature have a confusing array of meanings and in most of these meanings reason contrasts systematically with nature in one of its many senses. Nature as the excluded and devalued contrast of reason includes the emotions, the body, the passions, animality, the primitive or uncivilised, the non-human world, matter, physicality, and sense experience, as well as the sphere of irrationality, of faith and of madness. In other words, nature includes everything that reason excludes. It is important to note this point because some ecofeminists have endorsed the association between women and nature without critically examining how the association is produced by exclusion. On the other hand, some equality feminists, equally uncritically, have endorsed women's ascent from the sphere of nature into that of culture or reason without remarking the problematic, oppositional nature of a concept of reason defined by such exclusions. I will point to a route of escape from the problematic the traditional association between women and nature creates for feminists, show how to work towards a position which neither accepts women's exclusion from reason nor accepts the construction of the sphere. 

Now, of course, the dominant and ancient traditions connecting men with culture and women with nature are also overlain by some more recent and conflicting ones in which unchangeable "male" essence ("virility") is connected to a nature no longer viewed as reproductive and providing but as "wild", as violent, competitive and sexual (as in the ideas of Victorianism, Darwinism and recent sociobiology), and "the female" is viewed in contrasting terms as insipid, domestic, asexual and civilising. As [Australian philosopher] Genevieve Lloyd has noted too, the attitude to both women and nature resulting from the traditional identification has not aIways been a simple one, and as [historian] Carolyn Merchant notes , it has not always been purely negative. The connection has sometimes been used to provide a limited affirmation of both women and nature, for example, in the romantic tradition. But both the dominant tradition of men as reason and women as nature and the more recent conflicting one of men as forceful and wild and women as passive, tamed and domestic have had their effect of confirming male power. Either way, the connection with nature accords women a lower status (even if one that is sometimes accorded some virtue as a complement to the masculine ideal) and is used to confine them to limited and impoverished lives. 

Given these traditions, it is not surprising that many feminists regard with some suspicion the view expressed by a growing number of women who describe themselves as "ecofeminists" that there may be something to be said in favour of women's connectedness with nature, and that there are important connections between the oppression of women and the domination and destruction of the natural world which feminism cannot afford to ignore. The very idea of a feminine connection with nature seems to many to be regressive and insulting, summoning up images of women as passive, reproductive animals, contented cows immersed in the body and in unreflecting experiencing of life. 

It is both tempting and common therefore for liberal and humanist feminists to view the traditional connection between women and nature as no more than an instrument of oppression, a relic of patriarchy which should simply be allowed to wither away now that its roots in an oppressive tradition are exposed. It seems obvious enough that women must now claim full and equal participation the sphere of humanity and rationality from which they have been excluded, and to which their traditional sphere of nature has been opposed. Freed of traditional prejudice and of the traditionally enforced tie to the natural, women can at last take their place simply as equal human beings. The connection with nature is best forgotten. Women (especially modern women) have no more real connection with nature than men. 

But there are many reasons why this widespread, "common-sense" approach to the issue is unsatisfactory, why the question of a woman-nature connection cannot just be set aside, but must be seen as a central issue for feminism. First, understanding the connection is essential because it is still the dynamic behind much of the treatment of both women and nature in contemporary society. Second, it is essential for feminism to consider the issue because has an important bearing on the model of humanity into which women will be fitted. In fact, not only should feminism engage with the issue but, I shall argue, a thoroughgoing development of feminism leads in the direction of a critical ecofeminism where women consciously position themselves with nature rather than against it. And thirdly, working through the issue of ecofeminism can throw valuable light also on questions at the heart of feminism itself, questions about the masculinity of culture and about the nature of male/female domination and routes of escape from it. 

The connection between women and nature and their mutual inferiorisation is by no means a thing of the past, and continues to drive, for example, the denial of, or treatment as background, nature and of women's activity and indeed of the whole sphere of reproduction. This backgrounding is deeply embedded in the rationality of the economic system and in the structures of contemporary society. What is involved in the case of nature is the denial of dependence on biospheric processes, and a view of humans as apart, outside of nature, which is treated as a limitless provider without needs of its own. Dominant western culture has systematically inferiorised, backgrounded, and denied the whole sphere of reproduction. The inferiorisation and denial of this sphere of reproduction also involves the denial of dependency on women and the failure to recognise the area of women's labour, including reproductive labour. This denial of the sphere of reproduction is pervasive in patriarchal culture and is a major factor in the perpetuation of the non-sustainable modes of using nature which loom as such a threat to the future of western society. It is, I shall argue, the product of an alienated account of human identity as exclusive of the feminine and of the sphere of nature, necessity and life. 

The denial, backgrounding and instrumentalisation of nature and that of women run closely parallel. For women, their backgrounded and instrumental status as nature does not usually need to be explicit, for it structures their major roles in both public and private spheres. Women are systematically backgrounded and instrumentalised as housewives, as nurses and secretaries, as colleagues and as workmates. Their labour in traditional roles is also systematically 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. Women are vulnerable to backgrounding even when they step outside their traditional roles, as the history of areas such as DNA research makes plain, but are most strongly backgrounded in their traditional roles and especially in their roles as mothers. 

The patriarchal treatment of nature as mother/provider and that of human mothers share the conception of the mother as one who provides without cease; whose own needs, if they exist at all, always come second; whose value is determined by the child she produces; whose work is both expected, devalued and invisible, its real skill, importance and difficulty underestimated and defined into nature. (This is the conception of motherhood which 

also underlies many arguments against abortion.) The immensely important physical, personal and social skills she teaches the child are merely the background to real learning, which is defined as part of the male sphere of reason and knowledge. The mother herself is background and is defined in relation to her child and its father, just as nature is defined in relation to the human as "the environment". And just as human identity in the West is defined in opposition to and through denial of nature, so the mother's product – paradigmatically the male child – defines his masculine identity in opposition to the mother's being, and especially her nurturance, expelling it from his own makeup and substituting domination and the reduction of others to instrumental status. He resists recognition of dependence but continues to conceptually order his world in terms of a male (and truly human) sphere of free activity taking place against a female (and natural) background of necessity. Culturally the continued inferiorisation of human qualities and aspects of life associated with necessity, nature and women – of nature-as-body, nature-as-passion or emotion, of nature as the pre-symbolic, of nature-as-primitive, nature-as-animal, and of nature as the feminine – continue to operate to the disadvantage of women, nature and the quality of human life. 

Humanity and Exclusion 

The view that the connection of women with nature should simply be set aside as a relic of the past assumes that the task of both women and men is now that of becoming simply, unproblematically and fully human. But this takes as unproblematic what is not unproblematic, the concept of the human itself, which has in turn been constructed in the framework of exclusion, denial and denigration of the feminine, the natural and the sphere associated with subsistence. The question of what is human is itself now highly problematic, and one of the areas in which it is most problematic is in the relation of humans to nature, to the non-human world. 

The framework of assumptions in which the human/nature contrast has been formed in the west is not only one of feminine connectedness with and passivity towards nature, but also a complementary framework of distancing, exclusion and domination of the sphere of nature by a white, male elite, which I shall call the master model. But the assumptions in the master model are not seen as such because this model is taken for granted as simply a human model and the feminine as a deviation from that. Hence to simply repudiate the old tradition of feminine connection with nature and to put nothing in its place, usually amounts to implicitly endorsing an alternative master model of the human and of human relations to nature and to implicitly endorsing also female absorption into this model. It does not yield, as it might first appear, a gender neutral position because unless the question of relation to nature is explicitly put up for consideration and renegotiation, it is already settled – and settled in an unsatisfactory way – by the dominant western model of humanity into which women will be fitted. This is a model of domination and transcendence of nature, in which freedom and virtue are construed in terms of control over, and distance from, the sphere of nature, necessity and the feminine. The critique of the domination of nature developed by environmental thinkers in the last 20 years has shown, I think, that there are excellent reasons to be critical of this model of human/nature relations. Unless there is some critical re-evaluation of this master model in the area of relations to nature, the old female/nature connection will be replaced by the dominant model of human distance from, transcendence and control of nature. 

Critical examination of the question then has to have an important place on the feminist agenda if this highly problematic model of the human and of human relations to nature is not to triumph by default. If the model of what it is to be human involves the exclusion of the feminine, then only a shallow feminism could rest content with affirming the "full humanity" of woman without challenging this model. (Compare first- versus second-wave feminism.) 

There is another reason then why the issue of nature cannot be set aside as now irrelevant to feminism. As Karen Warren has observed, many forms of feminism need to put their own house in order on this issue. Feminists have rightly insisted that women cannot be handed the main burden of ecological morality, especially in the form of holding the private sphere and the household responsible for the bulk of the needed changes. The attempt to lodge responsibility mainly with women as household managers and consumers should be rejected for three reasons: (1) because it continues to conceive the household as women's burden; (2) because it misconceives the power of the private household to halt environmental degradation; and (3) because it appeals to women's traditional self-abnegation, asking them to carry the world's ills in recognition of motherly duty. Nevertheless, women cannot base their own freedom on endorsing the continued lowly status of the sphere of nature with which they have been identified and from which they have lately risen. Moves upwards in human groups are often accompanied by the vociferous insistence that those new recruits to the privileged class are utterly disassociated from the despised group from which they have emerged – hence the phenomenon of lower middle-class respectability, the officer risen from the ranks, and the recently assimilated coloniser. Arguments for women's freedom cannot convincingly be based on a similar put down of the non-human world. 

But much of the traditional argument for a feminism of uncritical equality has been so based. For Mary Wollstonecraft for example, what is valuable in the human character ideal to which women must aspire and be admitted is defined in contrast to the inferior sphere of brute creation. In her argument that women do have the capacity to join men in "superiority to the brute creation", the inferiority of the natural order is simply taken for granted. It is certainly no longer acceptable for feminists to argue for equality in this way. 

Radical Feminism and the Masculinity of Culture 

What has been variously called cultural feminism or radical feminism has been a major rival to and critic of the feminism of uncritical equality. If liberal feminism can be seen as rejecting the ideals of feminine character, radical feminism (as well as certain forms of socialist feminism) can be seen as rejecting masculine ideals. A major form of radical feminism insists on the rejection or modification of the masculine identity which it takes to be the model for the human (and the individual) as rejecting the masculinity of dominant culture. 

This has given rise to several varieties of ecofeminism. Ideals thought of as masculine are similarly rejected by some ecofeminists and by some theorists of non-violence, who link masculine identity and its character ideal (and in some case biological maleness) to aggression against fellow humans, especially women, as against nature. They reject the absorption of women into this male mould, which is perceived as yielding a culture not of life but of misogyny and death (e.g. Daly and Dworkin). This critique is based on the perception that it is not only that women have been damaged and oppressed by assimilation to the sphere of nature, but also that western culture itself has been deformed by its masculinisation and denial of the sphere associated with women. According to this cultural critique, the dominant forms of western culture have been constructed in part at least through control, exclusion and devaluation of the feminine and hence of the natural, which has been associated with the feminine in western thought. Because western culture has conceived the central features of humanity in masculine terms and empowered qualities and areas of life which are male or which are classed as masculine over those classed as feminine, it has evolved hierarchical, aggressive, and destructive of nature and of life, including human life. The real task of liberation for women is not equal participation or absorption in such a male dominant culture, but rather subversion, resistance, and replacement. 

While such a critique of male-dominant culture is powerful, it can be interpreted in different ways and accordingly gives rise to different forms of ecofeminism and radical feminism. Thus, this form of feminist cultural critique often assumes women's oppression to be the foundational form of oppression from which others are derived, the denial of the feminine being conceived of as the origin point of the distortion of culture. Thus too it is tempting for some opponents of the dominant culture to try to resolve the problem of the inferiorisation of what that culture has denied and subordinated by the simple reversal strategy of giving a positive value to what was previously despised and excluded, that is, both the feminine and the natural. But very different interpretations of reversal strategies are open to us. One of the major forms of it, the feminism of uncritical reversal is just as problematic as the feminism of uncritical equality and perpetuates women's oppression in a new and subtle form. The uncritical reversal position expresses both a tendency and a potential danger of some forms of both radical and ecofeminism, and it is often mistakenly identified with ecofeminism. Although there is an essentially correct insight in the idea of affirming a difference that has been denied and inferiorised, a great deal depends on how the reversal is carried out and on what is affirmed. 

Perhaps the most obvious way to interpret a rejection of the problematic models of the human and of culture is in terms of a position which replaces the masculine model of the human character by a new feminine model, affirming women "nurturant" and celebrating their life-giving powers in a way which confirms their immersion in nature but gives this positive value rather than the negative value of the male dominant culture. That is, it conceives the alternatives for remaking culture in terms of rival masculinising and feminising strategies. If the masculinising strategy of feminism rejected the feminine character ideal and affirmed a masculine one for both sexes, such a feminising strategy would reject the masculine character ideal and affirm a rival feminine one for both sexes. Several slogans sum up this feminising strategy, e.g. "the future is female", "Adam was a rough draft, Eve is a fair copy". But although this is an obvious way to try to find a basis for an ecofeminist argument, it is not either the only way or the best way. 

Out of the Trap 

The essential strategy of this kind of feminism is to reverse the value of the sphere of nature, so it is still said that women are closer to nature and are part of this sphere but, instead of being a bad thing, it's good thing. But this too is limiting and problematic for women. 

Because the reversal approach to women's inclusion in nature fails to challenge the way in which the tradition of the human identity (culture) is seen as opposed to the sphere of nature, it works within the unacceptable choice women are forced to face within patriarchy with respect to their ancient identity as nature. This is a choice between, on the one hand, joining men in the realm of dualised culture construed historically as oppositional to and through the exclusion of nature and the feminine or, on the other, accepting their old dualised identity as not fully human, as immersed in a nature conceptualised as inert and passive and as outside culture. Such a reversal approach to the problem would perpetuate much that is oppressive in women's identification with nature, for example their exclusion from the realm of public life, of freedom and agency, and is rightly seen by many feminists as incompatible with feminism. 

But there is a third way which does not force women into the choice of uncritical participation in a masculine-biased and dualised construction of culture or into accepting an old and oppressive identity as "earth mothers", as outside of or opposed to culture and as not fully human. This third way resolves the problem in a way fully compatible with feminism, without conceding culture to men. It would insist that women must be treated as just as fully human and as fully part of human culture as men, but that both men and women must challenge this conception of human identity and develop an alternative culture which fully recognises human identity as continuous with, not alien from, nature. Such an approach would use women's difference and exclusion from the dominant conception of the human to obtain a critical vantage point on dominant, masculinised culture and its conceptions of women and nature. This is one reason why women's liberation is connected to the liberation of nature. 

In this alternative, women are not seen as purely part of nature any more than men are; both men and women are part of both nature and culture. Both men and women can stand with nature and work for breaking down the oppositional construction of culture, but in doing so they will come from different historical places and have different things to contribute to this process. Because of their placement in the sphere of nature and exclusion from oppositional culture, what women have to contribute to this process may be especially significant. Women's life choices and historical positioning often compel them into a deeper discomfort with dominant structures and foster a deeper questioning of dominant culture. 

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Note: the themes outlined in this speech are explored in detail and key ideas defended at length in Plumwood's much lauded 1993 book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, published not long after this speech was delivered.