The Death of Nature: Production, Reproduction, and the Female

Abstract

The historical connection between women and nature as concepts of Western thought is the core of the ecofeminist theory developed in the movement since the 1970s. Carolyn Merchant’s book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Sci- entific Revolution (1980), excepts from which constitute this paper, has played a key role in the formulation of this issue. Merchant traced the genealogy of this relation- ship in the context of fundamental changes in the economy, philosophy and sci- ence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which reduced women and nature in both theory and practice to resources for capitalist production and human repro- duction. The book’s introduction entitled “Women and Ecology” substantiates the relevance of ecofeminist theory as a symbiosis of the environmental movement and feminism which both flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. The subversive nature and egalitarianism of the feminist and environmentalist viewpoints provide a way to see the history of Western and Westernized culture “from the bottom up” and so reveal previously overlooked parallels that are important for understanding the modern worldview. Merchant investigates the connection between women and nature as it underwent the transformations of the seventeenth century — the transition from organicism to mechanistic philosophy, from a sub- sistence economy to a market economy, etc. — and insists on restoring the complete range of thinking during this period by including marginalized elements, by reject- ing the belief in the objectivity of science and by tracing its direct connection with the ideas of the era. The chapter entitled “Production, Reproduction, and the Female” discusses in more detail the displacement of women from the economic sphere and their loss of their dominant role in childbearing and childrearing in the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries as Western man’s perception of the world changed markedly. Mer- chant connects this economic displacement with the transition to a capitalist system of production and the circumscription of maternity with the development of embry- ology and the medicalization of childbirth, whose ideological basis was the Aristote- lian opposition between the active male and passive female principles.