SISTERS OF THE EARTH -- WOMEN'S PROSE & POETRY ABOUT NATURE

Nature has been for me, for as long as I can remember, a source of solace, inspiration, adventure, and delight; a home, a teacher, a companion. Inevitably, I read Walden, and Thoreau became my passion. It was a revelatory moment for me when, in Boston on a college trip, I sat at a massive wooden table in Houghton Library at Harvard, opened a manila folder holding fragments of Thoreau's writing, and saw his words scrawled in black ink in an old-fashioned hand. His humanness struck me then, his crankiness, the courage of his principled life, his vision, his struggle against the odds.

I had another revelatory moment regarding nature writers and nature writing years later. I was leafing through a magazine when an ad for the Sierra Club caught my eye. "Wild Should Wild Remain" it proclaimed, and backed these fighting words with quotes from Aldo Leopold, Robinson Jeffers, Edward Abbey, and Wallace Stegner. These were all men whose writing I admired and whose defense of the earth's wild places I agreed with wholeheartedly. Nevertheless, in that moment a question took shape in my mind.

Where were the women's voices?

I dug up my notes from "Literature of the American Wilderness," a college class I had taken in the 1970s. I found we had read Hawthorne, Emerson, Irving, Whitman, Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and Abbey.

I went to the library and thumbed through all the nature anthologies I could find. They consistently focused on work by male writers, overlooking altogether or giving short shrift to women writers.

And they referred often to the issue of "man and nature."

The canon of nature writing, like the literary canon in general, has been male-centered, both a reflection and a reinforcement of a culture that once defined only men's experience as important and only men's voices as authoritative. As China Galland notes in her book Women in the Wilderness, "Most of what we have now is a record of the world as experienced and perceived by men. It is valid. Yet there is something missing: the world as perceived by women, out of our own experience rather than as defined in opposition to masculine experience."

We live in a time of rebalancing. At this point in our journey as a species, we are opening to two ecological truths: that all of life is a circle within which everything has value and serves an indispensable purpose, and that strength and health derive from diversity. The important social and political movements of this century all have been concerned with extending our culturally defined circle of value to include those previously excluded: women, people of color, foreign "enemies," animals -- even trees, water, mountains, soil. The time is ripe for bringing women's voices into the circle of nature literature valued by our culture. I began compiling this anthology as a step toward realizing that vision.

At the outset, I wondered if there was such a thing as a woman's view of nature. Traditional gender socialization in our society helps women relate well to nature by encouraging caring, nurturing, receptivity, empathy, emotional responsiveness, appreciation of beauty, and a feeling of kinship with animals; on the other hand, it hinders women's relationship to nature by assigning us to the indoor domestic sphere. Some writers have claimed that women as a group are innately closer to nature than men are, but this is a matter of some debate and isn't a claim for which I see much evidence. Women, like men, are individuals, each with a slightly different perspective conditioned by both innate sensibility and experience. It now seems to me that there are as many women's views of nature as there are women.

Indeed, in my quest to piece together a literary account of women's experiences with and responses to nature, I've deliberately cast my net wide to encompass writers of varied backgrounds and perspectives. Few of the writers included here can be classified strictly as literary naturalists; what I've looked for instead is an authentic, heartfelt response to nature. By weaving together different kinds of literary materials -- poems, short stories, essays, novel excerpts, journal entries, autobiography, natural history -- I've hoped to create a tapestry revealing the full range and strength of women's imaginative responses to nature.

To keep this volume to an approachable length, I've used writing only by women of the United States. My choices have been subjective, as any anthologist's must be, and I've no doubt missed writing that deserves to be included here. The bibliography points to additional authors and titles, but even this is not an exhaustive survey. Consider this anthology a starting point, not the final word. New literature is being created every day, and I hope this volume itself will inspire a new generation of women to write about nature.

Although I've concluded that there is no such thing as a woman's view of nature, I do think there is a feminine way of being in relationship to nature. This way is caring rather than controlling; it seeks harmony rather than mastery; it is characterized by humility rather than arrogance, by appreciation rather than acquisitiveness. It's available to both men and women, but it hasn't been exercised much in the history of Western civilization. The women's voices I've chosen to include here speak for this way of being.

I've adopted the metaphor of earth as female in naming the themes I've grouped the writing around. Some feminist writers, such as Elizabeth Dodson Gray and Carolyn Merchant, reject the practice of projecting female attributes upon nature, seeing this as an inadequate male symbolization of nature, and pointing out that to personify the earth as a woman is to invite treating it as the second-class citizen women have been. With that objection in mind, I've nevertheless used the metaphor because it has poetic beauty and historical import, having been used by varied cultures throughout the ages. My hope is that if we teach ourselves to revere what is feminine, the image of earth as mother will evoke the reverence that is earth's due.

To me, the story most worth telling in the last decade of the twentieth century has to do with the earth, and with the relationship to it of the one species that while utterly reliant on it has nonetheless seemed bent on, or perhaps just oblivious to, its destruction. If we're to give our endangered planet the time and space to heal, we must begin to see nature not just as a backdrop against which the human drama is enacted, but as an integral part of our lives, as something we must respond to, respect, actively care about. I hope the writing in this volume will encourage that attitude.

LORRAINE ANDERSON
Palo Alto, CA

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