Feminism, Health, and Environment in the Long Nineteenth Century

DeWitt, Rachael; DeWitt, Rachael

The topic of this panel is the convergence of ideas about women’s health and the natural environment in American literature of the long nineteenth century. While Americanist scholars have long noted the cultures of masculinity that attended the settler-colonialist transformation of the North American landscape, far less attention has been paid to women’s participation in these processes, or to the role of the environment in women’s writing and the early women’s movement. Meanwhile, the influence of the health humanities on literary studies has brought out new perspectives on the vexed discourse of women’s health that permeated early American print culture. This panel intervenes in these two scholarly conversations by opening up a discussion of how ideas about women’s health and ideas about the environment converged in the long nineteenth-century—a time when both feminism and environmentalism were fomenting, but had not yet taken their modern political form. In so doing, it draws attention to the undertheorized presence of nature in early feminist expressions—expressions which we in the twenty-first century have begun to recognize as either expressing and resisting other forms of exclusion and violence. The papers gathered here will speak to different moments, different possibilities, different limitations of early women writers to write their bodies into the political sphere via nature.

The four, thirteen-minute papers in this panel focus on the different stakes which women writers brought to bear on their interlinked concerns for their bodies and their environments. The first paper in the lineup from Rachael DeWitt, titled “Queer Mountains and Feminist Environments,” takes up gender non-normativity in early American feminist writing about wilderness. DeWitt draws together a corpus of early national and antebellum mountaineering narratives by elite white women writers whose texts appeal for political inclusion based on the gender-queerness they performed while mountaineering. DeWitt draws from trans studies scholars Emma Heaney and Eagan Dean whose respective works on the formal dynamics of penetration and the settler application of transness toward nation-building offer models for attending to the unexpected, complex, and sometimes paradoxical presence of gender-queerness in American literature.

Similarly, Alice de Galzain’s paper explores the intersections of health and the environment in the writings of Transcendentalist women thinkers. In “Transcendentalist Crip Epistemologies,” de Galzain investigates how Margaret Fuller, Caroline Healey Dall, and Anna Thaxter Quincy Parsons turned to the natural world—especially the language of plants—to articulate experiences of disability, chronic illness, and invisible suffering. Building on Tobin Sieber’s foundational Disability Theory (2008), as well as the recent collection Critical Neurodiversity Studies (2025), de Galzain considers how Fuller, Parsons, and Dall developed eco-feminist ways of knowing shaped by illness, neurodivergence, and embodied vulnerability.

Shifting toward the end of the century, Sari Edelstein’s paper, ““An Old Maid’s Paradise: Some Notes on the Feminist History of the Beach” thinks through the affordances of the beach as a site of feminine intimacy and liberty. Edelstein traces how the “beach read”—a genre now deemed lite and frivolous—emerged in the postbellum period as a form for feminist dreaming and experimentation. Asking what the seashore meant to women pursuing self-determination and political power, and, also, why it features so prominently in the feminist imagination, Edelstein considers the ways in which The Island Neighbors by activist Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Old Maid’s Paradise by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps render the beach as a site that fosters same-sex intimacies, cross-generational affiliation, and ecological knowledge.

Mary Kuhn transposes these feminist engagements with landscape into the space of the household in her paper, “‘These Days of Paint, Polish, and Powder’: Ellen Swallow Richards, Fannie Farmer, and the Chemical Landscape of Life.” Kuhn’s paper centers on Richards’s work on the body’s porosity to toxins through air, water, and food, and on culinary expert Fannie Farmer, often dubbed “the mother of level measurements,” to analyze their role as science writers who framed the home as a site of chemical experimentation, contamination, and analysis.

These papers flow chronologically and engage topics as wide-ranging as mountaineering, botany, chronic illness, the beach, toxicity, and food measurement. Across these investigations into American feminism’s past, this panel offers a new take on the eco-feminism of the present. By returning to the archive, we offer a historicist complement to the more theoretically oriented work happening at the intersection of feminism, the body, and the environment.

273 Feminism, Health, and Environment in the Long Nineteenth Century: Calls for Papers