Women’s Interconnection with the Environment An Enduring Societal Polemic by JESSICA STUBBS A staggering female majority champions modern environmental revolutions and sustainability movements. Yet, this pervasive and seemingly intuitive trend has not been thoroughly explored. Women’s capacity for reproduction has long tied their biological identity to the symbiosis of the natural world. Similarly, their historical and cross-cultural roles as agricultural producers and home managers have linked them to the land in which they cultivate. These powerful connections, however widespread, do not categorize women, instead they are vehicles for women to define their own distinct essence and impact on the world. Some consider the acknowledgment of women’s intimate relationship with nature to be essentialism–the reduction of all women to a ubiquitous socially-constructed set of attributes. In reality, it allows for multi-layered analysis of 23
Spring 2020 / Perennial
the diverse and copious interactions between women and the natural world, far beyond their presence in environmentalism. Women’s biological and historical interrelatedness to nature fortifies a “special connection”, in ecofeminist professor Noel Sturgeon’s words, that women share with the non-human natural world (Merchant, Ecology 242). This “special connection,” no matter how individually potent, provides women the opportunity to engage with the world in dynamic and reciprocal manners. Monthly reproductive cycles, pregnancy, childbirth, rearing and raising young are biological processes that “ground women’s consciousness in the knowledge of being coterminous with nature’’ (Merchant, Ecology 216). Some assert this makes women increasingly sympathetic to envi-
