Reframing ‘Mother Nature’ in the wake of misogynistic climate denialism
In her 1773 work “The Invitation,” the poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld likens modern scientific practices to the rape of nature. While a botanist cautiously “unfold[s] the silky texture of a flower” and an entomologist carefully “inspect[s] an hornet’s sting, and all the wonders of an insect’s wing,” the modern scientist exerts violent, nonconsensual domination over nature as he “untwist[s] her beauteous web, disrobe[s] her charms, and hunt[s] her to her elemental forms.” By identifying nature as female, Barbauld highlights a prevalent thought in the male-dominated scientific field of the 18th century: women and nature exist to be controlled.
Barbauld wasn’t alone in portraying nature as female. Men, too, have imagined nonhuman nature as female for millennia—though to much different ends than Barbauld. In Greek mythology, Apollo chases Daphne through the forest; to free her from his predation, Peneus the river god turns Daphne into a laurel tree. In the 16th century, Francis Bacon adopted rape imagery to illustrate men’s power over nature. And in the 19th century, Charles Darwin placed women lower than men and closer to nature in evolutionary hierarchy, thereby justifying women’s inferior social status and subjugation in Victorian England. Associating women with nature is no coincidence, then. Rather, it’s a product of Western culture’s baked-in misogyny, in which men’s dominance is valued over all else. To not be a man is to be a piece of nature ripe for the taking.
It should not be surprising, then, that a growing body of research links gender reactionaries to climate denialism. The authors of a 2013 paper, for instance, noticed that the mostly male population of climate skeptics in Sweden saw climate activism as a threat to a modern industrial society that mirrors their form of masculinity, one that is entitled to the exploitation of nature. Fueled by the adoration of an economic system that glorifies exploitation and domination, male reactionaries view climate activism and general care for the planet as the feminization of their world.
Even men who do accept climate change subscribe to the centuries-old belief that women are closer to nature. Men see eco-friendly behavior, whether using a reusable canvas grocery bag or actively reducing car use, as inherently feminine. They instead embrace a more Baconian view of a masculine science acting on a feminine nature in supporting aggressive technological interventions in climate, which they view as more masculine. This gendered relationship to nature is what connects our current climate crisis to 18th- and 19th-century ideas about science.
Three centuries ago, Barbauld pushed back on the idea that science should be a force for natural domination. She became active in scientific discourse through her participation in the Rational Dissent cause. Rational Dissenters broke from the Church of England and advocated for free inquiry unhampered by state religion. In fact, she wrote “The Invitation” to convince a friend (the “Miss B—” in the poem, presumed to be Elizabeth Belsham) to enroll at her alma mater Warrington Academy, a known dissenting academy and one of the most progressive British schools of its day. Barbauld received a liberal education that allowed her to study the “general topics of all sensible conversation,” including scientific subjects. Being a Dissenter brought her into an intellectual milieu that gave her firsthand experience with the world of science—including befriending scientist Joseph Priestley, best known for his work on electricity and the discovery of oxygen. But it also allowed her to critique the scientific field with which she became so familiar.
“Regardless of her wish that her work be taken as serious scientific critique, literary critics essentialized her as a lady writer with a feminine affection and affinity for the natural world.”
Even though Barbauld’s knowledge of science was vast, she was barred from publishing in scientific journals. Like many educated women of her time, she turned to poetry as her avenue for both discourse and dissent. In the 1773 poem “The Mouse’s Petition,” Barbauld participates in the public debate surrounding the use of nonhuman creatures in scientific experimentation, calling out her friend Priestly specifically. Through the voice of a laboratory mouse Priestley had caged for an experiment, Barbauld makes a compelling case for its release and challenges the idea that killing a nonhuman creature in the name of progress is just.
Barbauld’s entire body of work is riddled with both praise and critique of the world of science. In poems like “The Invitation” and “The Unknown God” and prose work like “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, and on Sects and Establishments,” she shows a keen and genuine interest in scientific work while also questioning the role of the scientist as nature’s investigator, one endowed with God-given legitimacy to inflict pain upon nature in order to uncover its secrets. Yet, because Barbauld was mostly known for being a woman writer of children’s literature, she wasn’t framed as a legitimate authority on science. Rather, she was regarded in her time as an educated woman who expressed her feelings in verse. Reviews of “The Mouse’s Petition” declared it “the plea of humanity against cruelty.” In the poem’s third edition, Barbauld objected to this appraisal of her work, preferring it to be accepted as constructive criticism of Priestley’s scientific experiment, not an outpouring of feminine sentimentality that men of science could use to keep women out of their “masculine” field.
Regardless of her wish that her work be taken as serious scientific critique, literary critics essentialized her as a lady writer with a feminine affection and affinity for the natural world. This essentialization is mirrored in the alleged circumstances that led her to write “The Mouse’s Petition.” According to William Turner’s account in The Newcastle Magazine, Barbauld expressed concern to Priestley over dinner about his upcoming scientific experiment using a mouse. While staying the night at Priestley’s home, she penned the poem and stuck it in the wires of the mouse’s cage. Upon reading her poem the next morning, Priestley released the mouse.
Unlike her male counterparts, who could write critiques in scientific journals or voice their opinions in the laboratory, Barbauld’s voice was relegated to a domestic space. As long as her prose and verse existed within a frame through which men were comfortable observing women —domestic in appearance and focused on nature — her critical voice could, at the very least, be tolerated.
When Barbauld stepped outside that tolerated frame, however, her writing career abruptly ended. In her poem “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,” Barbauld criticized Britain’s ongoing participation in the Napoleonic Wars. Britain seemed to be on the brink of losing; Barbauld argues in the poem that Britain was in demise as the American empire thrived. But her opinion didn’t fit the national mood of a British Empire staring down the jaws of defeat. Conservative and liberal critics alike condemned her for it in a slew of reviews that ranged “from cautious to patronizingly negative to outrageously abusive.”
Writing within the realm of domesticity could be tolerated—despite her critiques of progressive science—but writing about and criticizing the nation’s politics could not. The reactions to her denunciation of war were so vitriolic that Barbauld never published another work in her lifetime. Barbauld used her platform to criticize the masculine domain of British politics; with men in control of politics, public opinion, and publishing, it isn’t surprising that her poem led to her ultimate erasure. As she retreated from view, she became a blip in both literary and science history. In the last few decades, though, scholars have worked to recover her voice as an influential critic of science who both shaped and was shaped by the Scientific Revolution.
Despite efforts to invalidate Barbauld’s career in the 18th century, her poetry still holds valuable lessons in our present state of climate catastrophe. When we personify objects and nonhuman creatures, the goal is often for us to show empathy. When Barbauld equates the rape of nature by science to the rape of women by men in “The Invitation,” however, it doesn’t really provoke empathy. Instead, it shows that gendering nature as female only perpetuates gendered violence onto nature as woman. Gendering science as male and nature as female has been carved so deep into our culture that it has become a pervasive and undisputed norm.
“Gendering science as male and nature as female has been carved so deep into our culture that it has become a pervasive and undisputed norm.”
We need to reframe the way we talk about nature—the very idea of Mother Nature itself— because when rampant misogyny runs free on a dying planet, gendering the natural world as female is counterproductive in even the most progressive and well-meaning of circles.
The phrase “she’s dying” is often used to talk about the state of our planet. But saying “she’s dying” doesn’t provoke empathy for the children, mothers, and child-mothers detained at the U.S. border whose lives are at risk from deprivation of safe and sanitary conditions. “She’s dying” doesn’t help the thousands of women who lose their lives each year to domestic violence. “She’s dying” doesn’t help prevent maternal deaths that occur as a result of the government denying women access to safe abortions. If saying “she’s dying” in reference to the lives of actual women doesn’t prompt action from those in power, then it doesn’t do much to make them care about the planet. Said among those in positions of power whose livelihoods wouldn’t change in their favor if “she” were to be saved, “she’s dying” is more of a stated fact than a call for action.
Barbauld left the domestic and natural frames in which men preferred to keep her and instead stepped in the political field, effectively ending her career. Now, three centuries later, women are still a leading voice in the environmental movement. In positions of political power that were denied to Barbauld, they have the potential to instill real change. But as long as we continue to enable men’s oppressive domination over women and marginalized communities, associating the natural world with women will only perpetuate the suffering of the two.
Further Reading
Saunders, Julia. "'The Mouse's Petition': Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the Scientific Revolution." The Review of English Studies, New Series, 53, no. 212 (2002): 500-16.
Bellanca, Mary Ellen. "Science, Animal Sympathy, and Anna Barbauld's "The Mouse's Petition"." Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 1 (2003): 47-67.
Image credit: “His nurse is the earth,” Emblem 2d: "Nutrix ejus terra est." of Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, ca. 1618 (Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain)
