Commissioning Editor Ruby Ekkel launches a new VIDA series, exploring the intersections of environmental and women’s history.
‘Make the back-yard the embryo of your future desires. As a country we are not wanting in manhood, or the attributes which count for such. Gallipoli and the fields of France proved that. But we must endeavour to keep the stamina up, and here again our country has every advantage of being to the fore. And the girls! What a future is open to these fair possessors of the beautiful instincts inherited by Eve! They are keenly alive to the glories of a flower garden, and realise what a difference these “smiles of nature” impart to the home.’
The Garden and Home Maker, August 1, 1925, 3.
Human interactions with the natural world are deeply shaped by gender, as this 1925 appeal to young Australian gardeners makes clear. Amid advice on planting tulips and recipes for pickled onions, The Garden and Home Maker regularly urged readers to take up this ‘wholesome’ pastime, not only for health and happiness, but for the good of home and nation. The editor felt that everyone could benefit from starting a garden, but he tailored his encouragement to different audiences. Boys were encouraged to foster their warlike, nation-making masculinity in the vegetable garden (a ‘real man’s job’) while girls were urged to brighten the domestic sphere by cultivating the flower patch. When I came across this article at the National Library, I was struck by how religion, nationalism, war, politics and gender mingled in the cultural and ecological compost of the backyard, and how a special environmental role was carved out for women and girls.
Environmental historians have often overlooked both the role of gendered ideas in relation to nature, and the distinctive environmental interventions of women. In 1990, Carolyn Merchant challenged leading historians to add the lens of gender to their environmental repertoire. She presciently argued it would complicate and deepen their understandings of ecology, production, cognition and reproduction. Later, Nancy Unger evoked influential feminist historian Joan Scott in promoting gender and women as ‘useful categories of analysis’ in environmental history.
Despite these and other calls for change, women’s ideas and agency remain muted in many histories of nature, environmentalism, or animals. In the recent and wonderful World Congress of Environmental History, for example, I was surprised to see no panels dedicated to themes of gender or women. This continues a trend noted by Ruth Morgan – featured in this series – in 2017.
Introducing In Her Nature
It’s not all doom and women-less gloom, however. In Australia and beyond, a growing number of historians are tracing the knotted histories of women, gender, and the environment in creative and urgent ways. This blog series joins that momentum and seeks to articulate some of its insights. This is a space to showcase and reflect on fresh historical thinking at the intersection of women’s and environmental history.
Of course, the work of gendering environmental history is not only about recovering women from archival obscurity, and recognising their ecological interventions —though this remains a pressing task. It also means rethinking powerful gendered and sexualised ideas about nature: think of the feminised ‘Mother Earth’, or the man-building outdoorsiness promoted by The Garden and Home Maker. Additionally, it means considering how environmental forces have shaped concepts of masculinity and femininity. In Australia and other settler colonial spaces, telling gendered histories of nature means reckoning with settler women’s roles in claiming colonised landscapes, and Indigenous women’s environmental interventions before and during the upheaval of colonisation.
In this series, our contributors will explore these themes in diverse domains, spanning Aboriginal advocacy, meteorology, neglected climate science, and heteronormative ornithology. In our next blog post, for example, Susan Broomhall reflects on her edited special issue of Australian Historical Studies, exploring new research on the ways gender ideologies shape the management and imagination of the continent’s natural resources.
These perspectives are vital in a time of climate crisis, when many kinds of environmentalist action are portrayed—or dismissed—as feminine, and when women are staggeringly more likely to die or be otherwise impacted by environmental disasters. Around the world, environmental protections are being degraded alongside a rollback of hard-won protections for women’s rights. ‘Despair cannot, however, be our response’, as Broomhall reminds us. We need environmental histories attentive to gender and women’s roles, not just to correct environmental history’s ‘sex secret’, but as a lens through which to understand the political and ecological urgencies of our own moment.
RUBY EKKEL is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University, Australia. Her research examines changing interactions with Australian native animals, especially as mediated by women. Ruby has published award-winning work spanning animal history, environmental history, and women’s history in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She also contributes to public forums including The Conversation, ABC Radio, and the Australian Book Review. Ruby has served as an HDR Representative for the Australian Historical Association Executive, and was a co-editor of the ANU Historical Journal II no. 4.
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