IntroductionAuthor(s): Joan CaddenSource: Isis, Vol. 97, No. 3 (September 2006), pp. 485-486Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/508077 .

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Isis, 2006, 97:485–486�2006 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.0021-1753/2006/9703-0004$10.00

485

FOCUS

FOCUS: GETTING BACK TOTHE DEATH OF NATURE:REREADING CAROLYN MERCHANT

Introduction

By Joan Cadden*

ABSTRACT

In 1980, Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature challenged standard accounts of theScientific Revolution by introducing feminist and environmental perspectives. The essaysin this section and the activities of the Women’s Caucus of the History of Science Societyexemplify subsequent developments in the discipline and the profession of the history ofscience.

W HEN IT APPEARED IN 1980, Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women,Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution was both a sign and an instrument of broad

changes in the scholarship and the profession of the history of science.1 Its outrageousclaim was that the narrative of the Scientific Revolution, the accepted fulcrum in thedevelopment of Western science, could be understood only in relation to changing eco-nomic, social, and intellectual formulations of gender and the environment. This Focussection considers the legacy of this challenge by addressing each of the elements enumer-ated in the book’s subtitle. At the same time, the individual contributions reflect the im-possibility, twenty-five years later, of isolating those elements. While commemorating apublishing event of 1980, the essays engage the most recent scholarship in the field. Indoing so, the authors underscore the continued urgency of the issues raised by The Deathof Nature. In her response, Carolyn Merchant does likewise: in addition to commentingon the individual papers, she illustrates the continued controversies surrounding the Sci-entific Revolution by sustaining a debate she instigated about Francis Bacon, one of itsmost revered protagonists.

Charis Thompson associates The Death of Nature with the ecofeminism of the 1980s

* Department of History, University of California, Davis, California 95616.1 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco:

Harper & Row, 1980).

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486 FOCUS—ISIS, 97 : 3 (2006)

and responds to subsequent poststructuralist critiques. She acknowledges as fruitful thedeconstruction of categories such as “woman” and “environment” but rejects the implicitagnosticism to which it has given rise. She suggests the possibility of scholarship andactivism that is, like Merchant’s work, neither essentialist nor static but, rather, sensitiveto various contingencies and contexts. Such differences, in particular the “ecology of in-equality,” also play a part in Gregg Mitman’s essay. Asthma in New Orleans provides acase study in the complexity of material, social, and cultural conditions faced by historians,as well as by public officials. Mitman calls for the integration of the histories of ecologicalthought and environmental change, a synthesis foreshadowed in Merchant’s book but ham-pered by the divergence of history of science and environmental history. For KatharinePark, too, the evolution of history of science as a discipline has affected how the challengeposed by The Death of Nature has been taken up in the intervening years. Embraced byfeminist scholars, particularly in literature, Merchant’s work was not only resisted byhistorians of early modern science committed to a positivist narrative of the ScientificRevolution but also avoided by those for whom the legitimacy of the discipline requiredrejecting any broad narrative. Park cites a growing appetite within the discipline for moresynthetic work. In her view, Merchant’s account of early modern European science showsus how people could and can reimagine the natural and social world.

The idea to explore the intellectual legacy of The Death of Nature arose at an openmeeting (there is no other kind) of the History of Science Society’s Women’s Caucus,formerly the Standing Committee on Women in the History of Science, of which CarolynIltis (Merchant) was the first chair in 1974.2 Elizabeth Green Musselman, the caucus’scochair in 2004, brought the group’s ideas to fruition as a session at the HSS annualmeeting in 2005; that session in turn formed the basis of the present Focus section. Overthe years, the Women’s Caucus has surveyed employment in the history of science withattention to gender and race, compiled bibliographies and syllabi on women and science,published a directory of women historians of science, lobbied for child care at annualmeetings, and instituted the Margaret W. Rossiter Prize for publications on women andgender in the history of science. Its activities have thus shared with The Death of Naturean integration of scholarly and social concerns. In the same way, by suggesting the pos-sibility of feminist ecology, environmental justice, and a reinvented world, the followingessays ask us to reflect on the changing dynamics of science, gender, and nature, bothhistorically and in our own time.

2 I am grateful to Rima Apple for supplying me with a chronology of the history of the Women’s Caucus.

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