The Undomesticated Nature of Feminism: Mary Austin and the Progressive Women Conservationists

Abstract

THE UNDOMESTICATED NATURE OF FEMINISM: MARY AUSTIN AND THE PROGRESSIVE WOMEN CONSERVATIONISTS Stacy Alaimo University of Texas at Arlington In no national movement has there been such a spontaneous and universal response from women as in this great question of conservation . Women from Maine to the most western shore of the Hawaiian Islands are alive to the situation, because the home is woman's domain. She is the conserver of the race. Whatever affects the home, affects the very life of the Nation. —Margaret Russell Knudsen1 It is a common weakness of human nature to think of itself as idealistic when it is merely unimaginative. —Mary Austin2 At the start of the twentieth century, during a time of rampant racism , xenophobia, and gender anxiety, when women such as Margaret Russell Knudsen of the Progressive Conservation Movement were exalting white women' s mission to conserve natural resources in order to protect "the home" and enshrine "the race," Mary Hunter Austin saw nature not as a repository of resources for household use, but as an undomesticated, potentially feminist space. Austin, social critic, feminist , and nature writer, challenged the "Municipal Housekeeping" ideology of the Women's Progressive Conservation Movement, which adhered to a utilitarian conception of nature and promoted women's domestic skills as their qualification for conservation work. Austin disentangles women from domestic ideologies by invoking nature and releases nature from the grip of utilitarian philosophies by casting it as a woman. In Cactus Thorn and in other stories in which the desert appears as a seductive mistress, Austin takes the historically entrenched image of a feminine nature and turns it against itself, contesting discourses that position women and nature as resources for exploitation. Austin's startling creation of a sexual but not maternal land offers women a figure ofidentification outside the law by depicting nature as a force that exceeds and resists mastery. 74Stacy Alaimo Austin's desert mistresses seem particularly unruly and heretical when set against the gospel ofefficiency and the exaltation ofthe home then sweeping the United States. "Efficiency" impelled both the methodical mastery of nature through conservation and the management of the home through the emerging field of domestic science. Domestic science was one answer to the "problem" of the home, which became a major political issue at the turn of the century.3 Writers, clergy, and politicians railed about the sanctity of the home, and motherhood, not surprisingly, became an extraordinarily potent ideological nexus. What is perhaps most remarkable about Austin' s feminist perspective is the extent to which she was able to counter her time's omnipresent rhetoric, ideology, and politics of motherhood. As Molly LaddTaylor states of the Progressive era, "Virtually every female activist used motherhood rhetoric, and virtually every male politician appealed to motherhood." Teddy Roosevelt insisted that "woman must bear and rear the children as her first duty to the state," lest "the whole social system collapse;" the National Congress of Mothers, devoted to maternal ideals, not gender equality, boasted nearly 200,000 members; and the maternalist social reformers intervened in the domestic practices of immigrant women in order to naturalize the threat of cultural diversity and to ensure that good, Americanized citizens would issue from these homes.4 Though many women activists sought to radically redefine the domestic realm, they frequently invoked maternal ideals to forge their positions. Jane Addams, for example, celebrated women's motherly talents both within the family and as an important resource for social reform. Charlotte Perkins Gilman glorified motherhood, even as she denaturalized women's responsibility for housework and childrearing and advocated taking the kitchens and nurseries out of houses in order to free mothers to be "world-servant[s] instead of houseservant [s]."5 In contrast to Gilman, Addams, and other early New Women of her generation, Austin turned from maternal ideals in order to interrogate accepted notions of womanhood and the nature of gender. But unlike feminist modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein who were also overturning the "naturalness" of gender, Austin's writings do not repudiate the "natural" by depicting " 'unnatural' worlds and unstructured situations beyond the threshold of conventional order."6 Countering the ideologies ofmotherhood, the home, and woman...