The Erasure of the Female and “The Conservation Cause”

• In Event: Sex, Race, and Merchant’s Scientific Revolution

Abstract

Carolyn Merchant’s analysis of the effects of the scientific revolution and the erasure of female generativity and the feminine from the Western understanding of the natural world in The Death of Nature is foundational to my research on ecological thinking and the contributions of women to the roots and history of the USDA Forest Service.
In my doctoral dissertation at the University of New Hampshire and current book project, Merchant’s work was foundational to a concept I develop called “the conservation cause,” first articulated by Susan Fenimore Cooper. From the mid-nineteenth century, many important intellectual foundations were laid by women botanists and naturalists that were central to the agency’s foundation and operation over the course of the twentieth century. So too were women workers, some of whom were employed as fire lookouts, scientists, and educators, and others of whom were unpaid adjuncts for their USFS husbands and fathers, who served as rangers, lookouts, and firefighters. Merchant’s research on the deep roots of this erasure of women and the female from the scientific imaginations of men were foundational to my analysis of the modern history of the Forest Service and its underpayment, underplacement, and perhaps even its recently reported history of the sexual abuse of women.

Author

• Rachel D Kline, Public historian, USDA Forest Service