ABSTRACT
Without question, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution is one of the most successful and influential books of feminist scholarship ever written. Published in 1980 by American environmental historian Carolyn Merchant, it has remained in print, continuing to sell well and to speak to lay and expert readers alike. The book’s continued ability powerfully to connect sexism and other forms of domination prevalent in modern life with a historical and analytic framework for examining ecological devastation remains deeply compelling. One may disagree with the interpretation of a particular piece of evidence in the text, or find the structural explanation to be too sweeping, but the fundamental insight retains its explanatory power. The idea that the rise of modern science, technology, and capitalism produced and relied on the death, domination, and exploitation of a nature gendered female, and that this reinforced and reflected the cultural subordination and exploitation of women, is the kind of provocative thesis of which academia has too few.
