Acknowledgments
Introduction: Sex, Sexuality, and Gender as Useful Category of
Analysis in Environmental History
1. Gendered Changes to the Land in Pre-Columbian and Colonial
America
2. The North and the South from Revolution to Civil War
3. The Frontier Environment as Test of Prescribed Gender
Spheres
4. "Nature's Housekeepers": Progressive-Era Women as Midwives to
the Conservation Movement and Environmental Consciousness
5. Reasserting Female Authority: Women and the Environment from the
1920s through World War II
6. Middle Class White Women in the Cold War
7. Women's Alternative Environments: Fostering Gender Identity by
Striving to Remake the World
8. The Modern Environmental Justice Movement
Epilogue: Women, Gender, and the Environment in the 21st
Century
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Nancy C. Unger is Professor of History at Santa Clara University. She is the author of the prize-winning biography Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer, and book review editor of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
"Provides a useful survey of the ways that environmental history
and women's history can come together. Between the early
discussions of women's labour and land use, to discussions of how
constructions of gender have been informed by the association
between femininity and nature, to women's role in environmental
movements, Unger provides a number of different directions for
readers to follow up."--Women's History
"Nancy Unger's Beyond Nature's Housekeepers: American Women in
Environmental History chronicles women's interactions with nonhuman
nature throughout American history. It is an ambitious and
important work that combines American environmental and women's and
gender history into an accessible synthesis that would be useful
not only in women's and environmental history survey courses, but
also in both halves of the US history survey. Unger's book
would
also appeal to readers with a general interest in American women's
or environmental history....Unger weaves together a highly engaging
narrative of women's and environmental history that incorporates a
multitude
of fresh voices into the master narrative of American
history."--Peggy Macdonald, Environmental History
"In Beyond Nature's Housekeepers, Nancy Unger brings together a
breadth of scholarship that touches on American women's experience
and impact on the environment in a short, well-written book. The
relatively brief chapters with vivid anecdotes are perfect for an
undergraduate audience."--Pacific Historical Review
"With this book, Unger has undertaken a formidable task that could
have failed in the hands of a less-accomplished historian. She
persuasively demonstrates that there is a distinct women-centered
understanding of environmentalism and the people's relationship to
the environment that transcends time and place and that this
perspective must be incorporated into any analysis of environmental
history."--American Historical Review
"Unger's narrative is a go-to reference for anyone interested in
the socially constructed and physical ways both sex and gender
intersect with nature in the United States. It is an important work
that will be a reference in the field for quite some
time."--Environment and History
"In this rich, learned, and lively synthesis, Nancy C. Unger
reveals the astoundingly varied, crucial roles women have played
throughout American environmental history. Where we have heretofore
seen glimpses and snippets of this immense and still evolving
story, Unger gives us a sweeping narrative to savor and ponder. A
marvelous achievement!"--Virginia Scharff, University of New Mexico
and Autry National Center
"In the United States sex, sexuality, and gender have mattered in
the way that women's concerns and activism in regard to
environmental issues have been framed and received by the larger
culture. Beyond Nature's Housekeepers provides a comprehensive
overview of the subject."--Vera Norwood, author of Made From This
Earth: American Women and Nature
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