The feminization of nature is a familiar story to historians of science. In The Death of Nature, for instance, Carolyn Merchant famously argued that nature’s presumed femininity acted first to restrain then to justify exploitative practices like mining in early modern Europe. Less well known are the tensions within this seemingly hegemonic discourse. This paper revisits the activities of travelers who, as women, were politically subjugated, and whose writings re-worked typically misogynistic tropes about the earth’s “womb” and “springs” to challenge prevailing views of nature and society. In Germany ca. 1800, views of nature and sexuality were rooted in cameralism, an administrative science that made all natural resources—including human and especially women’s bodies—subject to the revenue-raising enterprise of the state. Germans’ conception of the subterranean as a fertile cavity there to be penetrated and plundered was thus echoed in primers that taught “Germany’s Daughters” to emulate the “Utility and Fertility” of their natural counterparts. Some, however—like Julie von Bechtolsheim (1751-1847) and Bettina von Arnim (1785-1859)—saw in this domineering view of nature an “apt moral” (to borrow from Mary Shelley), and used the feminization of nature as the basis their social and environmental protest. Among other things, this talk will examine the relationship between Arnim’s and Bechtolsheim’s use of weaving as a metaphor for subterranean nature and their establishment of spinning mills for impoverished women, as well as the role of (literal and metaphorical) suicide in a political program grounded in the feminization of nature.
