Recommended reading on ecofeminism is contained in Carolyn Merchant's book
"The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution." To my
mind this is the very best book from the previous decade regarding
"domination" of women and nature. I particularly like the comment on the
back of my copy by Everett Mendelsohn, professor of the History of Science,
Harvard Univ., where he states "no reader will emerge from confrontation
with this book without having rethought the meaning of science...." Have you
ever imagined a book as being a confrontation? But we are being confronted
by the implications of male dominated science and policy, still today. 

"...traces how an older world order based on cooperation between humans and
nature was lost, and it leads to rediscovery of values from this postmodern
era that can be the key to restoring the balance." 

"Until the seventeenth century, midwifery was the exclusive province of
women: it was improper for men to be present at such a private and
mysterious occurence as the delivery of a child. Midwifes were
professionals, usually well trained through apprenticeship and well paid for
their services to both rural and urban, rich and poor women. Yet no
organization no organization of midwives existed that could set standards to
prevent untrained or poverty-stricken women from taking up the practice.
Moreover, women were excluded from attending universities and medical
schools where anatomy and medicine were being taught....While women's
productive roles were decreasing under early capitalism, the beginning of a
process that would ultimately transform them from an economic resource for
their families' subsistence to psychic resource for their husbands, the
cultural role played by female symbols and principles was also changing." C.
Merchant

Male domination - given the context here - of women as they became  excluded
from being involved in reproduction at the moment of birth  is amazing given
the role that midwives had before capitalism.

john

At 08:20 AM 11/8/1998 -0700, you wrote:
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Bryan Hyden <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
>Date: Sunday, November 08, 1998 8:51 PM
>Subject: Re: gentlemen?
>
>
>>>Bryan, please define "higher nature."
>>
>>Sure Corey.  We are of a higher nature because we are self-aware.  Now, the
>>language gets a little slippery here because someone could argue that
>>there's no way of knowing whether or not animals (for instance) are
>>self-aware.  So I'll use different language.  Human's are the only earthly
>>possesors of 'free-will'.  I mean we have free-will in the sense that we
>can
>>trancend the physical world.  We are not of this earth.  We are not our
>>bodies.
>
>If we are "not of this earth," what are we of? "Transcend the physical
>world"? How? Sorry, but you've really lost me here. Are you talking
>trascendentalism as in eastern religions or what?
>
>Steven J. Bissell
>http://www.du.edu/~sbissell
>http://www.responsivemanagement.com
>Our human ecology is that of a rare species of mammal
>in a social, omnivorous niche. Our demography is one of
>a slow-breeding, large, intelligent primate.
>To shatter our population structure, to become abundant
>in the way of rodents, not only destroys our ecological
>relations with the rest of nature, it sets the stage
>for our mass insanity.
>                                                       Paul Shepard
>
>
>
        



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