Mother Nature

Nature. The earth is made easy to exploit and subjugate by being considered female; "in our culture, words matter: The masculine dominates the feminine. To consider the Earth in terms wholly female implies that it is to be acted upon at our will. Plowing fields, cutting timber, mining ore, burning rain forests, and dumping our garbage into landfills and oceans are actions that characterize this view of the Earth as an entity we dominate" (Mary Morse, in Utne Reader). Elizabeth Dodson Gray (in Creation) says giving nature a traditional feminine image is reassuring to us for "surely a mother will always be loving toward us, continue to feed us, clothe us, and carry away our wastes, and never kill us no matter how much toxic waste we put into the soil or CFC's into the ozone." In the same way Nature has been hurt by the association with the feminine, women have been discounted because of their association with Nature. Sherry B. Ortner (in M.Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere, eds., Woman, Culture, and Society) attributes the secondary status of woman in society ("one of the true universals, a pan-cultural fact") to the way every culture distinguishes between "nature" and "culture" and then associates women with nature and men with culture. Woman is perceived as being closer to nature because of (1) her body and its functions—which place her in (2) social roles that are considered to be at a lower order of the cultural process than man's and which lead to a (3) psychic structure which is seen as being closer to nature; "proportionately more of a woman's body space, for a greater percentage of her lifetime, and at some—sometimes great—cost to her personal health, strength, and general stability, is taken up with the natural processes surrounding the reproduction of the species." In contrast, man, lacking natural creative functions, asserts his creativity externally, "artificially," through technology and symbols. "In so doing, he creates relatively lasting, eternal, transcendent objects, while the woman creates only perishables—human beings." The association of women with second-class nature is reinforced by her association with incontinent, unsocialized children (who are, being "uncivilized," closer to nature) and by her traditional confinement to the domestic sphere (originally because of bearing and nursing children), which is always considered "less" than the public sphere since society is logically at a higher level than the domestic units of which it is composed. "Since it is always culture's project to subsume and transcend nature, if women were considered part of nature, then culture would find it 'natural' to subordinate, not to say oppress, them."