SOURCE: Norwood, Vera. “Pleasures of the Country Life: Susan Fenimore Cooper and the Seasonal Tradition.” In Made from this Earth: American Women and Nature, pp. 25-53. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Norwood discusses Cooper's entry into the male-dominated arena of nature writing, the specific gender issues she brought to the genre, and her continuing influence on women's nature writing well into the twentieth century.]

We are none of us very knowing about the birds in this country, unless it be those scientific gentlemen who have devoted their attention especially to such subjects. The same remark applies in some measure to our native trees and plants; to our butterflies and insects. But little attention has yet been given by our people generally, to these subjects … Had works of this kind been as common in America as they are in England, the volume now in the reader's hands would not have been printed … But such as it is, written by a learner only, the book is offered to those whose interest in rural objects has been awakened, a sort of rustic primer, which may lead them, if they choose, to something higher.

—Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rural Hours

With the publication of her seasonal journal—Rural Hours—in 1850, Susan Fenimore Cooper stepped into the charmed circle of American writers who created and popularized the nature essay. Although there were a few precedents, such as William Bartram's late eighteenth-century Travels, not until the early nineteenth century did American writers and artists give voice to the beauties of the American landscape. William Cullen Bryant and Susan's father, James Fenimore Cooper, had written nature poems and novels based on the American country landscape for only a little more than twenty-five years. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature appeared in 1835. Henry David Thoreau had published his first essay only four years earlier and was still four years away from the introduction of Walden. John Burroughs's popular essays on birds would not appear for another fifteen years.¹ Obviously, all of these writers were men, although their adult reading public consisted of both men and women. Susan Cooper was the first woman to enter this company.² Her appearance not only sets the stage for women nature essayists, but also raises the question of how she and the men whose world she entered handled this new woman's public voice. For she also grew to womanhood during a very restrictive period in American women's history, when many northeastern, middle-class, Euro-American women were confined to the home and domesticity. Her life mirrored the picture of proper womanhood touted in ladies magazines and sentimental novels of the time.³

James Fenimore Cooper believed that members of the female sex were most suited to the privacies of home and needed the thoughtful protection of their men. Discouraged by both parents from marrying, Susan, the oldest daughter, never left the family home. Early in life she took on the role of assistant to her father's writing career.⁴ Her parental fidelity was also instrumental to her education. Her family taught her to love the plants and animals of her native New York and exposed her to some of the premier naturalists and tastemakers of her day. In “Small Family Memories,” an autobiographical essay, she fondly remembers a flower garden kept by her Grandmother Cooper. Her maternal grandfather first introduced her to botanizing as he took her on drives throughout his property. Her father was an avid gardener and followed the new American landscape aesthetic espoused by Andrew Jackson Downing. Susan often rode with him around their Otsego properties, consulting with him on landscape design. James Fenimore Cooper's father, Judge William Cooper, had written one of the first American texts on the agricultural potential of the wilderness. His son retained an interest in the natural history of the region. Not only did father and daughter read widely in natural history; they had as visitors to their home such luminaries as Downing and Dr. James De Kay, author of an early New York zoology.⁵ By the mid-nineteenth century such interest in nature was a socially condoned way for middle-class American women to display their civility. Susan received her training within the approved bounds of home under a watchful paternal eye. The effort signified her rejection of the frivolous materialism so much a threat to city women.

Cooper's writing career further demonstrates the importance of gender-role expectations in her life. Before the publication of Rural Hours, she had tried her hand at the domestic novel, a genre that was popular among female writers by mid-century. In 1846, under the pseudonym Amabel Penfeather, she published Elinor Wyllys; or, The Young Folks of Longbridge with her father's blessing and help. When the manuscript of Rural Hours was complete, James took on the public role of choosing a publisher and negotiating the financial deal. Susan remained secluded in the country, safe from the potentially coarsening impact of such city doings. The anonymity of Rural Hours attested to a fitting modesty. The mechanisms behind the publication of Susan Cooper's works mirror strategies of the women writers of the time, women Mary Kelley has dubbed “literary domestics.” The content of her writing also fits the mold. Literary domestics brought the scenes and values of middle-class homes to a wide readership. They handled the tensions involved in such an effort by “disparaging and dismissing” their talent and by couching their literary role as an expansion of their domestic duty.⁶

Although her own domestic novel did not garner Cooper the kind of fame others achieved, Rural Hours did place her on the public stage. William Cullen Bryant and Washington Irving both knew of the book; Bryant wrote a favorable review. Downing encouraged Fredrika Bremer to read it as an example of American women's nature writing. And Henry David Thoreau cited her comments on loons in his journals.⁷ Prefacing Rural Hours with a disclaimer, Cooper alerted the reader that she had written a “simple record” of the “little events” of her life that have slight “merit of their own” and “make no claim to scientific knowledge” (v). With such language, she carefully maintained female propriety. As the literary domestics centered around home, so she focused her nature essay on the family grounds. Such tactics upheld the social codes bounding Susan Cooper's public voice.

Rural Hours also benefited from changing ideas about the value of the native American landscape. Hans Huth has shown how the development of a strong set of nationalistic ideas in early nineteenth-century America altered artists' and writers' portrayal of the natural landscape. Exemplifying this trend, the landscape painter, Thomas Cole, in 1835 wrote about the importance of familiarity with the “home” scene. Responding to Europeans' image of Americans living in a wilderness that contained no civilized history, Cole urged his countrymen and countrywomen to adopt the American landscape as a true and worthwhile domicile. James Fenimore Cooper was himself one of the early proponents of the value of sparsely settled, rural America over European cities. Encouraged to locate their homes in nature, Americans incorporated images of that landscape into their homes. Huth documents the rise of landscape painting and the frequent appearance of regional landscapes on such domestic appurtenances as glassware and wallpaper. Further, as the century progressed, the value of rural life increased as an antidote to America's own increasingly urban character. Country traditions in the old homestead—in touch with the seasons, the birds, and the trees—were inherently more moral than a life dominated by the artificial environment of the city.⁸

Who could better tell the story of America domestica than an individual whose own life mirrored what was most valuable in the national character? Secluded from urban corruption, often situated in the suburbs or the country, women like Susan Cooper lived in households within the larger home that was nature. Collecting and identifying the common flowers of their gardens and local woods, studying natural history in order to adequately educate their children as well as nurture their own moral character, women were primed to participate in the burgeoning celebration of the American environment. Unique though it was, Rural Hours was actually a predictable occurrence. Conjoining women's roles as domesticator and the American landscape's new image as home, Susan Cooper found a space in which to write a classic naturalist's essay. In so doing, she framed the context in which many American women have produced such works from her day to the present.

Rural Hours grew out of the perfectly centered Cooper family home in Otsego. From her ancestral base, Susan Cooper describes the changing, seasonal landscape in an area within walking distance, or occasionally a day's carriage ride from this spot. All the important elements of the biophysical environment exist in this space. Her book, though written over a two-year period, recounts one year in her life roaming the gardens, fields, and woods of her region of New York. Divided by the four seasons, beginning with spring and ending in winter, the text takes the form of a diary that documents how the details of her own domestic life are embedded in the natural round. Although the restriction of her rambles to home and environs, and of her voice to that of the common woman's diary, marks this as a female genre, precedents existed among male naturalists for just this approach.

Two of Cooper's favorite authors, and two men who influenced the circle of American nature writers, were the Englishmen Gilbert White and John Leonard Knapp. White inaugurated the natural history essay with the appearance in 1789 of his Natural History of Selborne. Knapp looked to him as a mentor when in the early nineteenth century he published Country Rambles. Susan Cooper served as the American editor of Knapp's text when it was reprinted in America in 1853; her introduction praises both Knapp and White for their work.⁹ These Englishmen focused their nature study on the landscape of their homes. White's text consists of letters sent to colleagues. Although not as tightly structured around the seasons as Cooper's Rural Hours, both books cover the seasonal round. Such harmonies between her role as a nineteenth-century female writer and the traditional nature essay style enhanced Cooper's ability to appeal to a broad readership.

In Rural Hours, Cooper speaks to a mixed-sex public in the voice of a woman with an interest in the national issues of her day. Although her identity was meant to be a secret, her gender was not. On the title page is the descriptor “By a Lady.” References to the utility of a parasol in a lady's adventurous walks around local terrain reinforce her status. Throughout, Cooper's lady is very clear on appropriate behavior for women. Observing women laboring in a hayfield or behind a plow in her neighborhood, she imagined them newly arrived from Europe, for American men would never expect such work of their wives and daughters (171-72). Although she bemoaned the harsh life of these poor rural women, she did not celebrate the ease of more middle-class village dwellers. Concerned that young village girls were too materialistic—“these are often wildly extravagant in their dress”—she offered farm wives of a certain class as better models. Making their own domestic goods kept farmers in their proper domain: “it is certainly pleasant to see the women busy in this way, beneath the family roof, and one is much disposed to believe that the home system is healthier and safer for the individual, in every way. Home, we may rest assured, will always be, as a rule, the best place for a woman; her labors and interests, should all centre there, whatever be her sphere of life” (161-62).

Cooper stated here a set of conservative values that she clung to for the rest of her life. Unlike some women of her time, she never shifted from her commitment to the woman's sphere to argue for women's rights. Cooper resisted feminism, preferring to end her days performing the sort of charitable work common to women's maternal associations. Unlike some of her literary sisters, she did not doubt that the dominant culture paid serious attention to the values of home. This did not mean, however, that the domestic round offered no corrective to American public life. On the contrary, women's different voice in Rural Hours serves just the purpose it should in recalling her readers to their republican roots in the unassuming country life.¹⁰

Although well read in the naturalists of her day, not all Susan Cooper learned met with her approval. She found the new specialists somewhat too willing to take over knowledge of nature from the common folk. Rural Hours contains a long discussion of the perils of the Latinate system for naming plants. Its author bemoaned the loss of common names for wildflowers. She felt that many American plants never had a chance of receiving a common English name, discovered as they were by traveling naturalists who proceeded to dub them “Batschia, Schoberia, Buchnera, Goodyeara,” and the like. Such practices denied nature its poetry (and female muses): “Can you picture to yourself … maidens, weaving in their golden tresses, Symphoricarpus vulgaris, Tricochloa, Tradescantia, Calopogon?” (138-40). Further, scientific naming removed nature study from the home: “if we wish those who come after us to take a natural, unaffected pleasure in flowers, we should have names for the blossoms that mothers and nurses can teach children” (141).

Expanding on women's duty to use nature study for moral education throughout her text, Cooper used plants and animals she saw in nature as a springboard for religious meditation and moral instruction.¹¹ Critical of scientists' tendency to forget the moral aspect of their studies, she reminded her readers that “every new science introduced into the school-room brings with it an additional weight of moral responsibility” (366). So, parasol in hand, Susan Cooper sallied forth from her domestic hearth to the gardens and woods of her home to speak to all Americans about their native land, in a voice blending lessons from the woman's sphere with knowledge garnered from the scientist-naturalists whose company she kept and books she read.

The home-dwelling, semirural women among whom Cooper counted herself shared in the national effort to define America and Americans. She counseled her compatriots to cherish the rural life and native plants and animals of their locale, rather than looking back to Europe for models of landscape beauty. This emphasis on the virtues of the bucolic American scene continued throughout Cooper's writing career. In her sentimental novel Elinor Wyllys, the female protagonist is a country dweller whom her male counterpart comes to love only after rejecting the lures of Europe; one of the other sympathetic characters is an American landscape painter. Her appendix to Knapp's Country Rambles mostly distinguishes American flora and fauna from that described by Knapp. In her preface to the same volume, she states that many Americans, through their familiarity with English writers, have more knowledge of the British outdoors than their own. She exhorts readers to “open [your] eyes to the beautiful and wonderful realities of the world we live in … Americans are peculiarly placed in this respect; … their native soil being endued with the … deeper interest of home affections.”¹²

Cooper knew that English literature, particularly that penned by the romantics, relied on images from nature for its effect. British flora and fauna provided most nature symbolism for English and American writers. Yet America, she argued, could now provide the stage for new achievements in literature about nature. If the English bard James Thomson had established the standard for poetry of this type in “Seasons,” American poets could create their own national literature writing about the unique seasonal round of their new homeland.¹³ Cooper envisioned that ultimately Americans would surpass the English in nature writing, making her country the standard-bearer of romantic nature poetry (335). At the heart of this new writing was the rural landscape in the fall, seen in Rural Hours as the essential American homescape: “At this very moment, … the annual labors of the husbandman are drawing to a close, … the first light frosts ripen the wild grapes in the woods, and open the husks of the hickory-nuts, bringing the latest fruits of the year to maturity … [these] are the heralds which announce the approach of a brilliant pageant—the moment chosen by Autumn to keep the great harvest-home of America is at hand” (337-38).

As a rural woman, Cooper conserved traditional American country life because the gardens and woods of Otsego were an extension of her domestic sphere. As a public figure, and as the daughter and granddaughter of men who helped define what it meant to be an American, she wanted to protect America domestica—those aspects of nature widely perceived by mid-century as the American heritage. Throughout her descriptions of the plants and animals of her home, these two positions—as native daughter and as member of the new breed of American nature writer—intermingle to create a text that speaks from the personal experience of a rural lady in a voice tinged with the public duty of a well-educated scion of an influential family and class.¹⁴

By the middle 1800s the Northeast had been settled and cultivated by many generations of Euro-Americans. As James Fenimore Cooper well knew, the location for the classic American tale of confrontation with the wilderness was shifting further west along a moving frontier. To describe America as home, however, required something more than awesome accounts of newly discovered terrain. In striking contrast to the frontier tales of families who kept moving west over the course of the century, and to her father's parallel motion of Leatherstocking's escape to the same wilderness terrain, Susan Cooper and other native nature writers wrote stories of a landscape in which they had deep roots. Because generations of Euro-Americans had lived in the same spot for many years, they could experience American history in a way that more mobile Americans and visitors from Europe could not. As Europeans were reminded of the history of their civilization upon viewing their cathedrals, so Americans could now find a record of their achievements in the land they had domesticated.¹⁵

On seeing flowering thorn trees while out for an afternoon drive, Susan was reminded of the Revolution: “during the war … the long spines of the thorn were occasionally used by the American women for pins … probably it was the cockspur variety, which bears the longest and most slender spines, and is now in flower” (121). She went on to note that though there was no longer any need for such improvisation, the thorn tree still was useful to rural women for storing yarn (122). Americans did not have to build monuments, or constantly seek new territory, to create a national identity. As Cooper knew, they read their history in the common, everyday plants around and in their towns and villages. As she shows here, knowledge of natural history—of the difference between one kind of tree from another—is integral to the construction of national history. One gathers knowledge by settling in one place, becoming familiar with its native flora and fauna.

A mixture of wild and tame plants constituted a chief virtue in Cooper's rural landscape. Domesticating the wilderness did not necessarily eradicate it. For Cooper, the original natural landscape before Euro-American settlement remained an integral part of the country's heritage and appeared in the terrain around her home. A stand of forest pines at the top of a hill overlooking her village represented a crucial aspect of American history as surely as a ruined castle contained symbolic meaning for an Englishwoman. In describing such a stand of aged trees, Cooper labored to give them an exact and unique past similar to the history found in buildings. This specific pine grove could not be cut down and replanted with young trees to grow back over time. Rather, like a historic monument, the forest pines were creatures of a particular time and place. Losing them meant losing American history: “no other younger wood can ever claim the same connection as this, with a state of things now passed away forever; they cannot have that wild, stern character of the aged forest pines” (194). As the thorn tree reminded her of the Revolution, the pine stand contained memories of the “tenants of the wilderness”—the “wild creatures” and the “red man” (190). In taming the land, Cooper asserted, Americans had a responsibility to preserve as historic monuments those features of its original face, for without them her country would be in danger of losing its knowledge of the past. In this way, wilderness became part of a homescape rather than some far and fearsome frontier threatening civilization.

In Susan Cooper's time and place, wilderness had been, at least for her, subsumed under a new class—the native. Used to define a distinctive American character, the native usually was elevated over the imported.¹⁶ Original American forest was not so much wild as it was indigenous; in this lay its merit. Cooper realized that she and her compatriots were most knowledgeable about the plants and animals of England. She also knew a good deal about their importation to America. Although appreciating many of the changes wrought by these foreigners, she consistently encouraged her readers to value the bounty of their own land. Much of her journal celebrates patches of native growth surprised among recently cultivated fields around home. Following a path through a meadow, she led her readers into a hidden runnel “filled with native plants; on one side stands a thorn-tree, whose morning shadow falls upon grasses and clovers brought from beyond the seas, while in the afternoon, it lies on gyromias and moose-flowers, sarsaparillas and cahoshes, which bloomed here for ages, when the eye of the red man alone beheld them. Even within the limits of the village spots may still be found on the bank of the river, which are yet unbroken by the plough, where the trailing arbutus, and squirrel-cups, and May-wings tell us so every spring” (148-49).

With the negative connotations of wilderness controlled in the celebration of the native, Cooper offered her audience a bountiful nature functioning as the mid-nineteenth-century home was meant to function—as a place of harmony where citizens found security, contentment, and civility. This domestic haven arose not only from the tended crops, but equally from the native plants and animals of the region. On her daily walks, Cooper often gathered food from wild-growing plants—various berries were a particular source of pleasure. Other plants, such as the pumpkin, transplanted easily into the country garden. In fact, the whole landscape appears to have been incredibly fecund, created as a sort of Eden for the new settlers: “Year after year, from the early history of the country, the land has yielded her increase in cheerful abundance; the fields have been filled with the finest of wheat, and maize, and rice, and sugar; the orchards and gardens, aye, the very woods and wastes, have yielded all their harvest of grateful fruits … like the ancient people of God, we may say, that fountains of milk and honey have flowed in upon us” (392). In a landscape revealing little difference between tilled fields and the “woods and wastes,” where terrain served the same purpose as another room in their household, settlers rightly preserved all aspects of nature.

Finally, American readers discovered that, for all the blessings peculiar to their new home, their land was really but one room in the greater household of earth: “The mandrakes, or May-apples, are in flower … This common showy plant growing along our fences, and in many meadows, is said also to be found under a different variety in the hilly countries of Central Asia. One likes to trace these links, connecting lands and races, so far apart, reminding us, as they do, that the earth is the common home of all” (91). With language culled from religious texts, and from the emerging ecological understanding of the naturalists, Cooper constructed an all-encompassing household, placing a heavy duty on its human tenants to make their individual homes in keeping with the terms of the environment.

Cooper encouraged her readers to change their confrontational attitude toward their home. For all her glowing reports of the fecundity of the American landscape, Rural Hours also documents declining populations. Animal life suffered the most obvious loss. Cooper wrote little about animals until the winter, when she had less to say about the plant world. Spending more time indoors, writing from her reading, she reported on the decline in fish and game birds; on the disappearance of deer, bear, and beaver from her region; and on rare sightings of otter, of whom she could only report that “it is said that they actually slide down hill on the snow, merely for amusement … One would like to see them at their play” (499). She called for the enactment of laws to protect certain animals before hunting and settlements eradicated them from the area (306, 376).

In the plant kingdom, her major concern was the devastation of the forests, and here the home imagery came to the fore. Arguing for the preservation of native forests, Cooper appealed to a variety of interests—some pragmatic, some aesthetic, some moral and religious. All centered, however, on the understanding that Euro-Americans could no longer behave as though they were just passing through, on their way back to the old home across the ocean or to the new on the western frontier. First, she counseled those who profited from the land to remember that trees constituted a large part of the country's current and future wealth (214). Then, moving on to the moral value of trees (conjoining the good with the beautiful here), she declared that preservation of trees around the home signified advanced civilization and looked better than expensive coats of paint on the walls or columns around the porch (items often purchased with funds earned by cutting down native timber) (215).

She argued that the wanton cutting of trees displayed “careless indifference to any good gift of our gracious Maker, shows a want of thankfulness, … betrays a reckless spirit of evil” (217). If we are to live here, it is our responsibility to act with restraint and nurturance toward the woods: “thinning woods and not blasting them; clearing such ground as is marked for immediate till-age; preserving the wood on the hill-tops and rough side-hills; … permitting bushes and young trees to grow at will along the brooks and water courses; sowing, if need be, a grove on the bank of the pool” (216). Much of creation could be lost with the devastation of the forest. Understanding that “the dullest insect crawling about these roots lives by the power of the Almighty; and the discolored shreds of last year's leaves wither away upon the lowly herbs in a blessing of fertility” (203) obligated citizens to protect all of the forest and its denizens as it would its own family.

Her religious belief in a divinely created, static nature, in which humanity's responsibility was to preserve an assumed status quo, informed Cooper's understanding of a rudimentary sort of ecology. Yet, in her arguments for the conservation of nature, hers was one of the early voices warning Americans about the dangers of their profligate use of resources. Certainly, some of her insight sprang from her father's tutoring and from her reading of the naturalists. But Rural Hours remains one of the few popular texts of the time containing a holistic comprehension of nature, calling for the protection not only of certain plants and animals, but also of the household in which these individuals flourished.¹⁷ Her father sensed the uniqueness of her work when he observed that he had “very little doubt of its ultimate success, though at first the American world will hesitate to decide.”¹⁸ Actually, her words were perfectly timed. The journal sold well, reflecting increasing interest in such conservation activities as Arbor Day and the rise of the popular essay celebrating amateur birding.¹⁹

In the public arena, Cooper's linkage of America and home served broad political purposes. Home also meant a private, secluded space for which she, as a woman of her time, had special responsibility. But seclusion did not mean a life restricted to domestic interiors. Protected from the physical and psychic threats of the city, the proper country home allowed women spatial freedom to seek outdoor pleasures and nature studies. An idealized version of the country house and grounds appears in the home of Cooper's hero in Elinor Wyllys: “The grounds were of the simplest kind. The lawn which surrounded the house was merely a better sort of meadow, from which the stones and briars had been removed with more care than usual, and which, on account of its position, received the attention of one additional mowing in the course of the summer. A fine wood, of a natural growth, approached quite near to the house on the northern side, partially sheltering it in that direction, while an avenue of weeping elms led from the gate to the principal entrance.”²⁰ For urban apartments or the new suburban houses on modest lots, the dividing line between private and public began at either the family's front door or the edge of the lot. Country houses had the luxury of more expansive surroundings. The yard and local woods and fields of Otsego were merely extensions of Cooper's (and her imaginary hero's) domestic round.²¹ Thus, in describing her personal circumstances in Rural Hours, she made no distinction between the supposedly secluded domain of her father's house and the natural world outside her door. Her life exemplified the interconnections and interdependencies between humans and the rest of the natural world that she espoused in her book.²²

Confined to the house on a blustery day, longing for early spring flowers, she consoled herself by surveying the nature imagery in the wallpaper, rugs, furniture, and glassware of her home:

here, winter as well as summer, we find traces enough of the existence of that beautiful part of creation, the vegetation; winter and summer, the most familiar objects with which we are surrounded, which hourly contribute to our convenience and comfort, bear the impress of the plants and flowers in their varied forms and colors. We seldom remember, indeed, how large a portion of our ideas of grace and beauty are derived from the plants, how constantly we turn to them for models … Branches and stems, leaves and tendrils, flowers and fruits, nuts and berries, are everywhere models.

(504-5)

Cooper was a proponent of Andrew Jackson Downing's rustic style. Her sense of oneness with nature's aspects, however, was not merely a fashionable fancy. Generally unconcerned in Rural Hours with the interior of her home, she mentions it only at this point, when it serves as a surrogate for the outdoors. As the flowers on the wallpaper were reflections of nature's model, so her house and its domesticity mirrored the lives of plants and animals living on the Cooper grounds. Their nests and dens, their responses to various forms of domestication, offered corollaries to her own experience as a female in a very traditional household.²³

Excepting the coldest part of winter, Cooper usually took one and sometimes two daily walks or drives around Otsego. On these excursions she surveyed the state of agriculture and engaged in amateur naturalizing—seeking flowers or birds new to her. She often considered how other forms of life provide models or cautions for human behavior. She was consumed with understanding what nature suggests about female roles and family responsibilities, and how gender definitions and familial arrangements help people comprehend what they see in nature. Birds specifically interested Cooper, as she, and apparently many of her generation, subscribed to Alexander Wilson's contention that humans and birds share common habits and emotions.²⁴ Her comments about birds exemplify the influence of gender roles on her ideas about nature.

Cooper felt a strong sense of fellowship with her bird neighbors. On one chilly fall day she hoped that they would come in her windows for “they would be very welcome to warm themselves and fly away at will” (320-21). Equally as willing to open her house to their view as they were to display theirs for her, she spent long hours watching their domestic round:

late evening hours are not the most musical moments with the birds; family cares have begun, and there was a good deal of the nursery about the grove of evergreens in the rear of the house, to-night. It was amusing to watch the parents flying home, and listen to the family talk going on; there was a vast deal of twittering and fluttering before settling down in the nest, husband and wife seemed to have various items of household information to impart to each other, and the young nestlings made themselves heard very plainly; one gathered a little scolding, too, on the part of some mother robins.

(77)

Anthropomorphizing at will, she gave the birds' home a domestic arrangement similar to her own, breathing individuality into the creatures with her tale of domestic dissent.

Sometimes birds serve as models of excellent behavior; rather than our equals, they then become our betters. A mother on the nest offered one exemplar. Her “voluntary imprisonment” “hour after hour, day after day, upon her unhatched brood, warming them with her breast—carefully turning them—that all may share the heat equally, and so fearful lest they should be chilled, that she will rather suffer hunger herself than leave them long exposed” is “a striking instance of that generous enduring patience which is a noble attribute of parental affection” (39-40). Of course, not all birds merit such high praise. Cooper was quick to distinguish between the more reliably “domestic” ones and such animals as the “cow-pen black-bird.” A terrible mother, she laid her eggs in other birds' nests, abandoning her young to their care (408). Wherever possible, however, Cooper urged her readers to view the domestic arrangements of birds as comparable to and part of nature's great, enveloping household.

Birds were not the only creatures subject to this sort of empathetic regard for their maternal doings. Almost any other creature she observed or about which she had read enough to have a sense of its family arrangements received similar treatment. Her discussion in Rural Hours of the “upholsterer bee” she had seen in England provides a case in point. The bee was associated with a red poppy, whose leaves the animal used in constructing a nest. Cooper provided an extravagant vision of the “careful mother” cutting a bit of “the scarlet flower” for her nest, where she “spreads it on the floor like a carpet” and makes “handsome hangings” for the “brilliant cradle” of “one little bee” (199). As with the birds, such an encapsulated domestic scene gives the insect a moral character comparable to that of a human mother. John Leonard Knapp, who also wrote about these bees, took little notice of the insect's domesticity. Knapp and Cooper also parted company in describing the English hedgehog. Both saw it as a harmless animal subjected to much mistreatment by humans. But whereas Knapp described a generic hedgehog, focusing on its physical features and habits, Cooper, in her addition to his text, tells a touching tale of a mother hedgehog's fidelity, even unto death, to her young.²⁵ For Susan Cooper, gender and the family responsibilities of females in particular were significant aspects of hedgehog, bee, and bird character.

One commentator on Rural Hours has argued that, as a woman of her time, Cooper had to “dispense moral precepts and display a set of principles,” whereas Knapp and Gilbert White could freely engage in “spontaneous” nature description.²⁶ Although Cooper admired White, as did most of the budding nature essayists in England and America from the 1830s on, she and Knapp wrote about nature in rather different circumstances than White. As Donald Worster has shown, for White, nature study was an “integral part of the curate's life.” White's work became important fifty years after its publication, when the pressures of industrialization engendered a search for the old pastoral landscape of White's Selborne.²⁷ Writers like Knapp and Cooper described nature with an eye to morally improving a people who were sorely threatened by the materialism of the city, thus taking a more principled tone than White. The more basic, gender-coded difference between Cooper and her male predecessors is Cooper's focused interest in family life and female behavior in plants and animals. That many important moral lessons sprang from nature's domestic affairs obviously supported the valuable contribution women (who viewed themselves as most attuned to family life) could make to nature study and appreciation.

Knapp and White gave little thought to what nature, or nature/human interactions, had to say about gender roles. On one occasion Knapp chided his countrymen for killing hedgehogs to prove their manhood, but on the whole his moralizing took a more general tone.²⁸ Nor was nature thought of as home in the same way in the men's writings. Knapp and White open their texts with a loving description of their home regions but present themselves primarily as researchers into nature's secrets. They collected plants and animals, experimented with them, and corresponded with scientific colleagues about their findings. Nature's household was not commensurate with their own. Neither pondered what their findings suggested about their roles as fathers and husbands.

Susan Cooper always considered what her knowledge and her actions had to say about her womanly role, particularly as keeper of the home. Although she might join in pronouncements with men when public concerns mirrored domestic affairs, she was conscious of her status as a lady. In Rural Hours, we never see Cooper engaged in collecting specimens for the microscope. She collected flowers for ornament and berries for dinner. When, as in her comments on bird families, bees, and hedgehogs, she addressed her audience as a private woman describing her feeling for nature, rather than as an American converting the landscape from wilderness to household, Cooper spoke specifically to a female readership about the particular interests of women.

The plant kingdom also provided opportunities for commenting on human gender divisions and sexual differences. Aware of the language of flowers and schooled enough in botany to distinguish among plant types, Cooper showed her female readers how a close observation of flowering plants taught the proper female virtues of modesty, constancy, and sisterhood. When she observed the birds, she found her family; when she looked at flowers, she saw images of the female sex. Laying to rest men's fears that Linnaean botany, with its emphasis on sexual characteristics of plants, was too coarse a subject for female sensibilities, Cooper emphasized the emotional connotations of femininity that flowers called forth. In the spring, she found violets “growing in little sisterhoods” in the fields and forests (78). The regular appearance of these violets as well as arbutus, squirrel cups, and ground laurels offered a lesson in constancy: “How pleasant it is to meet the same flowers year after year! If the blossoms were liable to change—if they were to become capricious and irregular—they might excite more surprise, more curiosity, but we should love them less” (48). She found all of these flowers in her walks. They were not hothouse plants secluded in an artificial environment. Such hardiness was a positive attribute in both plants and women thriving freely and openly in the healthy rural atmosphere of Otsego.

While Cooper celebrated indigenous plants as part of her encouragement to Americans to make their home among the natives of the continent, she also believed that such plants were important sources of virtuous lessons to American women. Echoing Fredrika Bremer's fear of pampering, Cooper counseled her sisters to resist over-cultivation—both in themselves and in their flowers. The wild rose was much lovelier than the grafted tree roses popular in some gardens. Grafted roses lacked modesty: “[they] remind one of the painful difference between the gentle, healthy-hearted daughter of home, the light of the house, and the meretricious dancer, tricked out upon the stage to dazzle and bewilder, and be stared at by the mob. The rose has so long been an emblem of womanly loveliness, that we do not like to see her shorn of one feminine attribute; and modesty in every true-hearted woman is, like affection, a growth of her very nature, whose roots are fed with her life's blood” (123). If women were like roses, then it was their duty to protect the roselike quality of their nature as well as the nature of the rose.

Mirroring her public concern for the loss of morality in science, Cooper, speaking from the domestic sphere in a voice consciously female, reminded her readers that women, as conservators of tradition, had a responsibility to resist ambitious manipulation of God's creation.²⁹ Like the families who sold their native pines to buy ostentatious paint for their houses, women who bought such artificial plants as the grafted rose forgot their republican roots.³⁰ Such behavior endangered nature, American society, and women's status as moral standard-bearers. Linking woman's nature to the indigenous plants of America, Cooper framed women's appreciation, nurturance, and protection of such plants and their environments as a function of gender. By the late nineteenth century many women had picked up on her suggestion and were writing books grounded in their sense of the particular bond between themselves and nature.

Among the many traits these later texts share with Cooper's, the most striking is their emphasis on the gender of the writer. All are self-consciously nature studies by a woman who writes from within the domestic confines of her home about the seasonal round of plant and animal life. Among the earliest to follow Cooper were investigators who added to our knowledge of American flora and fauna. Often connected to the scientific community, these women saw themselves marking out a bit of experimental territory peculiarly suited to their gender. They included Mary Treat (Home Studies in Nature), Olive Thorne Miller (In Nesting Time), and Florence Merriam (A-Birding on a Bronco), all of whom published before the turn of the twentieth century. They lived middle-class, intellectual lives in much the same domestic circumstances as Susan Cooper. Nature study fulfilled their obligation to use their leisure in a productive, nonfrivolous manner that would be beneficial to society.

In Rural Hours Cooper encouraged Americans to learn more about insects, a neglected and misunderstood category of animal life. Mary Treat, of Vineland, New Jersey, took her up on the suggestion. In the 1880s she began publishing accounts of her experiments with spiders in her self-constructed “insect menagerie” at home. Whereas Susan Fenimore Cooper had a rank amateur's understanding of science and never proposed to conduct experiments, Treat—enjoying women's increasing involvement in science—worked at her research.³¹ She provided detailed studies of birds, spiders, ants, wasps, and insectivorous plants, referring the reader to her articles in various scientific and popular journals, quoting from her correspondence with Asa Gray and Charles Darwin, and pointing out her own contributions in the field. She viewed nature as much less static than did Cooper. Aware of the explosion in theory attendant upon the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), Treat argued against human supremacy in a hierarchical natural world created in one stroke by God. She urged her readers to marvel instead at the constantly changing environment in which they lived. Along with others of this early generation of Darwinists, she saw evidence of evolution all around her.³²

Mary Treat was, however, much more Susan Cooper's soul mate than she was Charles Darwin's colleague. Most of her experiments and her work centered around the domestic landscapes of her home in Vineland, with the rest resulting from winter excursions to Florida. In her most comprehensive work, Home Studies in Nature, she argued that to the true nature lover, “the smallest area around a well-chosen home will furnish sufficient material to satisfy all thirst of knowledge through the longest life” (6). Throughout the text she commented on the virtues of observations and experiments made in this more restricted sphere. If most women could not (and perhaps should not) join male naturalists on heroic journeys of exploration, they could make another sort of journey traveling the familiar round of home, garden, and local neighborhood. In this round, too, one could contribute to the public effort to understand the natural world.

For all its scientific voice, Home Studies in Nature is clearly a woman's book. Beginning, as had Cooper, with a description of her home and gardens, Treat highlighted the domestic life of animals. Her studies of birds emphasize family habits and read gender-coded meaning into nesting behavior. Treat's most fulsome consideration of animal life concerns an unlikely specimen—the spider. The spider habitat she built served as both a scientific laboratory and a domestic garden, surrounded by an arborvitae hedge, with a centered maple tree, “ornamental plants,” and a couple of bird baths (113). Particularly interested, as she was with birds, in spider architecture, she offered lyric observations of the maternal instincts of various specimens/pets. One ground spider, whose carefully contrived home tower Treat described in some detail, evinces model domesticity in caring for her young. In one session, the babies crawl over the mother and she picks them up, holding them in front of her and “perhaps giving them a homily on manners. Soon she gently releases them” (105). Shedding their skins, the children dispose of their “baby dresses” (107). When the little ones are old enough to leave the nest, the mother “behaves much in the same way that the higher animals do in weaning their young” (107). Treat stressed not only her status as a woman at home engaging in nature study, but also how nature functions as a home akin to the human home.

Like Cooper, Treat found little difference between outdoors and indoors, or wild and domestic. As well as building a garden for watching wild spiders, she brought them into her study, housed in glass cases, where she could observe them throughout the seasons. Domesticating an animal meant accommodating it to her presence. In her terminology, wild birds were domesticated when they used her bird bath while she sat quietly watching. Although she was aware of the importance of struggle and competition in Darwin's model of evolution, she chose not to dwell on this aspect of life. Treat saw all of nature as a household, with each plant and animal playing a cooperative, harmonious part.³³ Nature “red in tooth and claw” receives short shrift in her work, whereas images of cooperative behavior predominate. This is particularly true in her comments on preserving bird populations. Aware that many agriculturists held deep prejudices against certain birds, she underlined their dependence on the birds for insect control (41-42). More sophisticated in her ecological understanding than Susan Cooper, she explained in more detail how the organic system operates.

Mary Treat's nature studies provide a missing link in accounting for the explosion of women naturalists studying birds in the late nineteenth century. In most nineteenth-century histories, women appear as individualized voices only once—as participants in these late-century bird preservation movements. During this period, a group of women writers produced many books on birds. Some were scientific studies of bird behavior, some were amateur naturalist accounts of birding, and some were children's books written to encourage the next generation to preserve bird populations. Trying to account for this phenomenon, historians have noted that by this time women had a long tradition of working on social issues through voluntary organizations. Much of the impetus for the “bird ladies” came from the rise of the Audubon clubs, often headed by men but whose members were primarily female amateurs trained in women's colleges.³⁴ Although such reasoning explains the mechanism by which women came to speak publicly for birds, it does not tell us much about the value they placed on these animals or about the nature of their interest. As the language of flowers provided early nineteenth-century women with entrée into botany, so the image of birds as microcosms of human domesticity offered women later in the century a rationale for their study.

Two of the most prolific bird authors, who were also political activists in the fight to save birds from their commercial use in women's hats and from hunters, were Olive Thorne Miller and Florence Merriam. Their works are typical of the sort of book produced by women during this period. Miller (born in 1831) upheld traditional gender-role expectations. She began publishing her bird books only after raising four children and then wrote under a pseudonym. Merriam (born in 1863) was of the next generation, contributing both to the more humanistic nature writing of the time and to the burgeoning science of ornithology. She was the first woman to win the Brewster Medal (for Birds of New Mexico), awarded for original work in ornithology. Merriam has received praise as well for her courage and stamina, when, in 1899, after marrying the naturalist Vernon Bailey, she traveled with him throughout the West surveying birds. Regardless of these differences, Miller and Merriam were close friends. Merriam's library contained inscribed copies of Miller's books, and Merriam occasionally mentions Miller in her own work. Their texts reveal a common language of birds, one concerned with female metaphors of domesticity.³⁵

Both women wrote books featuring local birds. Miller's In Nesting Time details her efforts to make her home a home to birds. She kept one room in the house separate for her bird studies. In this room she housed birds in cages, but she also encouraged them to roam free. Thus, the room became a large aviary and she just one of the tenants. Generally, the birds were not house pets. After a brief season indoors, they were freed in her yard or the surrounding woods. Whereas Susan Fenimore Cooper, stranded inside in the winter, could locate nature only in the patterns on her rug, Miller entertained herself by watching a brown thrush peel the wallpaper in the bird room: “First came a little tear, then a leap one side, another small rent, another panic; and so he went on til he had torn off a large piece which dropped to the floor, while I sat too much interested in the performance to think of saving the paper. (The room and its contents are always secondary to the birds' comfort and pleasure, in my thoughts).”³⁶ Befitting her book's title, In Nesting Time, Miller concentrates on the mating and nesting habits of birds she kept indoors and those she spied on outdoors. As usual, the primary metaphors for describing behaviors come from her own female duties: “I discovered very soon that mocking-bird babies are brought up on hygienic principles, and have their meals with great regularity” (46). Bird mothers, like human mothers, subscribed to the newest trends in domestic science.

Not only did she write as a woman, she exhorted women readers to enter the field of ornithology. Noting that the old days of killing, dissecting, nest robbing, and mounting were over, that “all that can be learned with violence” has been learned, she asserted that the next phase of bird study required field observation of their habits, “infinite patience, perseverance, untiring devotion, and … a quick eye and ear, and a sympathetic heart” (16). Who among her readers shared these qualities better than women? “This is the pleasant path opening now, and in some ways it is particularly suited to woman with her great patience and quiet manners” (18). Florence Merriam, arriving a generation later, shared some of the qualities of the so-called New Woman, who had a much more visible and diverse public role and was less likely to marry and have children. Yet Merriam couched her interest in birds in exactly the gendered terms that Miller envisioned.³⁷

Although Merriam wrote standard handbooks on western birds, full of straight, scientific information, in these texts and in more personal publications about her life among the birds, her tone differs little from that of Miller, Treat, or Cooper. Merriam patiently watched her subjects, with no more threatening weapons than a parasol and a consuming interest in courtship and family behavior. A good companion book to Miller's In Nesting Time is Merriam's A-Birding on a Bronco, written while the author was in California recuperating from tuberculosis.³⁸ For all the title suggests a woman escaping the confines of home for adventure in the rugged West, Merriam stays close to home, rambling around on her trusty horse until she knows the ranch as well as her own home back east. A-Birding on a Bronco's precursor is not the high adventure of a John James Audubon lost in unknown territory, but Susan Cooper's Rural Hours.

The center of Merriam's interest was the home—the nest—which made nature worth studying. Riding through a eucalyptus grove, she commented on the importance of the domestic scene: “How one little home does make a place habitable! From bare silent woods it becomes a dwelling place. Everything seemed to centre around this little nest, then the only one in the grove; the tiny pinch of down became the most important thing in the woods.”³⁹ Merriam regarded birds as persons, with rights to tenancy on her land and deserving of the same respect due human neighbors (65). As persons, they were interesting in their domestic arrangements. She spent much time speculating about the meaning of their family life. Occasionally, the questions that the women of her time were raising about gender roles informed her descriptions of bird life. Reflecting the New Woman's challenge to some of the constraints of patriarchy, Merriam lamented the classification system that science applied to birds. Female birds had to “bear their husband's names, however inappropriate … Here an innocent creature with an olive-green back and yellowish breast has to go about all her days known as the black throated warbler, just because that happens to describe the dress of her spouse.”⁴⁰ Such a comment suggests somewhat more awareness of women's rights issues than either Cooper or Miller demonstrated. It does not, however, call into question the valuable lessons learned when female naturalists turn their gendered interest on the study of nature. Like Cooper, Merriam found within woman's different culture a source for correcting a form of scientific hubris and drawing a social lesson from nature's domestic arrangements.

Her interest in male/female roles created some difficulties when a bird's sex was not so easily determined by its plumage. Trying to figure which of a pair of gnatcatchers was the female, she realized that certain nesting behaviors could, using the human model, be attributed to either gender (51). Nevertheless, such questions did not lead her to violent methods. Unable to identify an elusive bird family, she was advised to shoot a specimen and send it to “the wise men.” But her familiarity with their domestic scene made this impossible: “after knowing the little family in their home it would have been like raising my hand against familiar friends. Could I take their lives to gratify my curiosity about a name?” (141). A-Birding on a Bronco studies a natural world that is home, not a foreign terrain from which the explorer feels he has a right and an obligation to bring back plunder. As Miller had encouraged, Merriam found in the branch of ornithology emphasizing observational fieldwork a space appropriate to women's conservationist role.

The works of Treat, Miller, and Merriam share one other similarity with the earlier generation's study of the language of flowers. Just as botany was proper only insofar as plant sexuality camouflaged behind a mask of gentility, bird behavior had one taboo arena. With all the emphasis on mating and nesting, the reader might expect occasional descriptions of sexuality. Each author provides some details—describing, for example, a male bird's showy courting dance—but all avoid any mention of the sexual act. Female birds always act modestly as they are being wooed, and a pair invariably retreats to the cover of a handy tree at the point of mating, reemerging ready to build their nest and get on with family affairs. As the struggle to survive is touched upon lightly, so too is the procreative act. Birds, like their female observers, have too much taste to reveal such matters to the public eye.⁴¹

The reticence and gentle quality of the bird books produced by women in the latter part of the century no doubt contribute to their contemporary critical reputation. While women are acknowledged to have had an important impact on wildlife preservation during the period for educating the popular readership in the virtues of birds, they have been dismissed by at least one historian from a secure place in the literary naturalist canon in part because of this emphasis on domesticity: “the special perceptions they brought to the study of birds were more valuable in giving instruction than in providing inspiration; they bestowed the gift of sight rather than insight.”⁴² Of course, the question such a comment raises is to whom, and in what context, these women were writing.

Between the publication of Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours in 1850 and Florence Merriam's A-Birding on a Bronco in 1896, the nature essay had become standard fare in many popular magazines. Specialized journals for nature lovers were common. With the appearance of Henry David Thoreau's Walden and John Burroughs' Wake-Robin, literary writing about nature entered the mainstream.⁴³ Thoreau and Burroughs developed the same theme Susan Cooper mined in writing about the American environment as home. These men and women shared a preference for the rural life, an anti-materialist bias, a strong sense of the respect due to all life, and more interest in the ecological system than in tales of struggle and dominance. The men's images of home, however, are less focused on the domestic round than the representations of Cooper and the other women considered here.

Men and women developed somewhat different voices for writing about nature, but one wonders if, to the readership of the time, one voice was any less inspirational than the other. Certainly, the women were successful: they published a great deal and their texts enjoyed many printings. There is little in male naturalists' comments of the period to suggest that they found women less capable; in fact, in certain instances men cited women's works to settle public debates.⁴⁴ The reason for women's tenuous rank in the canon of literary nature writers probably lies in particular trends in the literary world and the scientific establishment during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As Ann Douglas has shown, Victorian literary fashion was in many ways defined by the combined forces of middle-class women and the clergy. Disturbed by the feminization of culture, some writers criticized what they saw as excessive sentimentalism in women's literature, while more popular male novelists turned to producing works supportive of a burgeoning “crusade for masculinity.”⁴⁵ As Margaret Rossiter has shown, the newly emerging scientific establishment was grappling with a concurrent explosion of women seeking and finding training in various fields. Certain areas, such as botany, appeared completely feminized. Reflecting this incursion of women into previously male domains was their membership in naturalist groups like the Audubon societies. As well as their work in these activist organizations, women sought entrance into scientific societies and edited scientific journals. The scientific establishment began a series of efforts to limit control and predominant membership in such institutions to men. For example, Florence Merriam became the first female member of the American Ornithological Union in 1885, but she was listed only as an associate.⁴⁶

For the nature essayists, such a climate produced predictable results. On the literary side, the home-based tradition established by Gilbert White and carried on in America by Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, Olive Thorne Miller, and Florence Merriam was eclipsed by more virile tales of the wilderness challenge popularized by Teddy Roosevelt, Jack London, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Thrilling stories of wild animal hunting expeditions (with either gun or camera) held more interest than women's domestic tales of patient watching by the nest of a common yard bird. Although men and women had written the first nature essays, the privilege granted heroic exploration effectively silenced women's voices, while prominent men in the home-based tradition were rehabilitated and lauded for those aspects of their work that fit the new mold.⁴⁷ In the developing hierarchy of the scientific professions, women's names disappeared from the leadership; assigned associate roles, they appeared less influential—capable of “sight but not insight.” Thus, the disappearance of women's voices from the canon was more a function of the end-of-the-century effort to reestablish masculine control of scientific and literary culture than any generalized defect in their ability as observers and writers.

Nothing in the accounts of women nature writers during this period suggests that they either repudiated their traditional form or recognized the threats to their status. In fact, the tradition begun by Cooper, Treat, Miller, Merriam, and others continued into the twentieth century and flourishes today. Throughout this century, writers have produced books in which their individual round as women in a country setting exemplifies a mode of living in keeping with the natural environment. Around the turn of the century, women more directly connected to agricultural or backcountry life began to publish. The narratives of these women continue Susan Cooper's belief that rural life avoids the excesses of materialism. Cooper looked to farm women as models of modesty and frugality; the chronicles of twentieth-century farm women repeat her theme. Martha McCulloch-Williams's Next to the Ground (1902), Louise Rich's We Took to the Woods (1942), Sue Hubbell's A Country Year (1986), and Maxine Kumin's In Deep (1987) all echo Cooper's practical interest in what the environment yields for human survival and how women may use and preserve nature's bounty.

These authors also reiterate the conservationist role that Cooper and Miller saw as women's responsibility, including pointed messages about women's duty to preserve and protect the plants and animals of home. McCulloch-Williams's protagonist in 1902 was given the task of nursing injured birds brought in from the field while her brother and father went shooting. Eighty years later Kumin argues that women, because of gender socialization, are more successful than men at working with problem horses.⁴⁸ Like Cooper, the twentieth-century writers believe that the city and, later, the suburbs trivialize women's lives. Both Rich in 1942 and Hubbell in 1986 argue that scraping out a living in the backcountry is preferable to the consumerist existence each had led as urban women.⁴⁹ And, finally, although these books from the farmlands speak consciously from within a woman's round, that sphere also offers a corrective to the public excesses of the day—be they the terrors of world war in Rich's 1942 narrative or the problems of “survival, of hunger and genocide” in Kumin's account.⁵⁰ As did Susan Cooper in 1850, the contemporary nature essayists have found room to write from within the private domestic spaces of their lives about public, political issues facing Americans.

By the turn of the century, women were also immersed in conservation and preservation efforts developing out of the Progressive Era's reformist agenda. Reflecting the broadening national interest in safeguarding America's wilderness landscapes, key figures in this movement came from all over the country. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, Mary Hunter Austin, a midwesterner transplanted to the deserts of the Southwest, served as a leading female voice in the effort to protect arid regions from overdevelopment. Inspired in part by John Muir's call to preserve natural landscapes, Austin worked on political campaigns to conserve and appropriately use water in the West. Her talent as a nature writer, however, made more impact on American environmental values. Following in Cooper's tradition, Austin tracked seasonal variations in the flora and fauna around her homes in the California and Nevada deserts and the mountains of New Mexico. She earned her reputation as the most famous female nature writer of the period from such books as The Land of Little Rain (1903), The Flock (1906), and The Land of Journey's Ending (1924). Austin forms a link between the nineteenth-century birders and the women nature essayists who published in the 1960s and 1970s.⁵¹

Mary Austin and her literary daughters champion ways of living holistically in keeping with nature, seeking a way back into the endangered wild landscape. In Austin's Land of Little Rain, Helen Hoover's The Gift of the Deer (1965), Josephine Johnson's The Inland Island (1969), and Ann Zwinger's Beyond the Aspen Grove (1970), women naturalists have picked up the thread Cooper began in her pleas for the preservation of native forests and their plants and animals. The late twentieth-century reader of Rural Hours is struck by the devastation of animal populations more than one hundred years ago, particularly when Cooper recounts the sad death of one of the last deer in the area or the almost mythical sightings of an elusive “panther” near Otsego (240-44, 422). In the century since publication of Cooper's work, public concern for the preservation of wilderness areas has blossomed; with that concern has come an interest in living in the shadow of the forest (or, in Austin's case, on the edge of the desert).⁵² Whereas Cooper and her family retired to a semidomesticated, rural landscape, this more contemporary group of female writers locates itself beyond the agricultural fringe, in the last pockets of American wilderness. Here its members seek an experience, however, much akin to that of Cooper, Treat, Miller, Merriam, and their more recent agricultural sisters. They establish a domestic life that makes room for the native plants and animals of the land.

Although twentieth-century writers do not share the nineteenth-century burden of constantly demonstrating the propriety of their work on the public stage by emphasizing their ties to home, their voices are clearly female. Sometimes being female in the twentieth century mirrors the ninetenth-century experience; at other times it does not. Hoover presents “Pretty,” a female deer of the herd, in proper women's makeup. Zwinger writes about flora as though they are children and her daughters as though they are fauna. Johnson finds herself engrossed in a female passion to “tidy, tidy, tidy, tidy—lives … leaves … trees … emotions … house … endless sweeping, clipping, washing, arranging.”⁵³ Whereas Cooper replaced the wild with the native in order to make indigenous plants preferable to the fancy hothouse flower, modern writers reinvest the native with connotations of the wild. Links between natural women and native landscape remain, but they have begun to reflect less gentility and more ambiguity than in Cooper's day.

While she struggled in her own life with early twentieth-century feminism, Austin created a free, sensuous female landscape and desert women invigorated by contact with the wilderness. Austin was of the same generation as Florence Merriam. Like Merriam and the other female nature writers of her day, the message she heard in nature reinforced her understanding of women's proper role. But Austin also spoke in the voice of the second wave of New Women who more openly questioned the meaning of women's sexuality. Her sensitivity to emerging women's issues rendered hers a lone female voice among the nature essayists in the early twentieth century when she suggested that there were connections between male domination of nature and women's oppression. Wilderness offered a clear lesson of the true freedom at the heart of both the natural world and women's nature: “If the desert were a woman, I know well what like she would be: deep breasted, broad in the hips, tawny … eyes sane and steady as the polished jewel of her skies … passionate, but not necessitous, patient—and you could not move her, not if you had all the earth to give, so much as one tawny hair's breadth beyond her own desires. If you cut very deeply into the soul that has the mark of the land on it, you find such qualities as these.”⁵⁴

Austin's sensitivity to female oppression was not picked up in women's nature essays until much later in the twentieth century. As inheritors of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary writers often question some of the constraints in their domestic inheritance. Reminding her readers of the distance of middle-class nineteenth-century women from the sexual content of nature, Maxine Kumin finds her own delicate aversion to intimate knowledge of horse foaling offensive and proudly celebrates her initiation into “a hardy band, a secret cell” of those able to attend such a birth.⁵⁵ Nineteenth-century women located positive reinforcement for their domesticity in images of middle-class animal families; Josephine Johnson performs an ironic twist on that tradition when she describes her meeting with a female fox. Recognizing that few female animals, whether fox or human, lead a life of ease and tranquility, she faced a vixen whose imagined life symbolized freedom to Johnson and discovered “her as she really was—small, thin, harried, heavily burdened—not really free at all. Bound by instinct as I am bound by custom and concern.”⁵⁶ In such imagery, twentieth-century naturalists reinvest native plants and animals with a wildness suppressed by the domestic cults of the nineteenth century. However, as nineteenth-century women located messages about human gender codes in the nesting habits of birds, so twentieth-century women continue to find models of their own female lives in the other animals with whom they live.

Over time, female nature writers have continually resisted constraints on women's round that artificially separated them from nature. The definition of appropriate limits has, of course, changed from 1850 to the present. As women's sphere has broadened, so too has their understanding of nature's domestic round and their image of the landscape of home. Throughout, however, women nature writers have warned against forces that would diminish or falsify the moral quotient of woman's sphere. If Susan Cooper located the threat in women's relegation to the hothouse and Maxine Kumin saw it in their exclusion from the barn, both did so in the belief that the domestic life, fully experienced, offered a necessary corrective to the social dislocations of their time.

In twentieth-century authors' identification of their own nature with the natural round, they too find a reason to act as conservators and protectors of the environment. In The Land of Little Rain, Mary Austin criticized the arrogant development of arid landscapes. Her home and its surrounding fields appear literally at the center of her book, critiquing by example domination of the land. She contrasts her attempt to coax various wild plants and animals into her yard from a neglected field next door with her neighbor's plan to turn the field into town lots. Austin, better acquainted with the field than he, argues: “though the field may serve a good turn in those days it will hardly be happier. No, certainly not happier.”⁵⁷The Land of Little Rain served as a cautionary tale to twentieth-century settlers in the Southwest, and the narrator achieved the right to speak as a result of her own adaptation to the place. Ann Zwinger built a cabin in the rugged Colorado mountains so she might learn how to fit her life into the ecology of the terrain, teach her daughters to do the same, and write books in support of public appreciation of the web of life. Similar to the bird writers before her, Helen Hoover became a spokesperson for the rights of deer, using as her weapon highly charged accounts of their family life in the forest around her Minnesota cabin.

Josephine Johnson, whose Inland Island is one of the finest nature essays ever written, captures perfectly (and with some humor) the role of female protector each of these twentieth-century writers embodies. Johnson and her husband lived outside Cincinnati on farmland that they encouraged the native plants and animals to reclaim: “This place, with all its layers of life, from the eggs of snails to the eyes of buzzards, is my home, as surely as it is the wild bird's or the woodchuck's home. I'll defend it if I have to patrol it with a bow and arrow—an old lady, like a big woodchuck in a brown coat, booting up and down these knife-cut hills, shouting at the dogs and hunters, making a path through that encroaching ecology we were told would come inevitably as the tides, and faster.”⁵⁸ It may seem a long way from Susan Fenimore Cooper, planning for the salvation of old stands of pine as she strolls through the countryside of Otsego, to Josephine Johnson, angrily defending her island from destructive humans. However, the urge to preserve a native landscape contains the same appeal to women's special responsibility as wives, mothers, and teachers of the moral lessons derived from the domestic round. The most basic thread running from Susan Cooper's Rural Hours in 1850 to Ann Zwinger's Beyond the Aspen Grove in 1970 is the act of homing in on one spot, living with it through the seasons until the rocks, flowers, trees, insects, birds, deer, panthers, and coyotes are family. Enfolded within women's family, carrying the emotional weight of home, American flora and fauna are due the same consideration as human members of the household.

Having established a continuous, coherent tradition in women's writing on nature, I wondered why the century-old story these women composed has gone for so long unnoticed. Ann Zwinger provided one answer in a speech to the Thoreau Society in 1983. Her talk responded to a comment Thoreau made about a young woman's attempt to live alone in a cabin in the woods. In Thoreau's opinion, “her own sex, so tamely bred, only jeer at her for entertaining such an idea.”⁵⁹ Based on this and other disparaging remarks about women in Thoreau's Journals, Zwinger concluded that he believed women were incapable of writing well about nature. She then refuted his finding by pairing quotations from various women naturalists with similar writings by men, proving that the women were as skilled as the men.

Zwinger is singular among nature writers in suggesting that, almost from the beginning, male writers subordinated women's work to their own and did not (contrary to Susan Cooper's hope) listen with equal attention to women. Although female nature essayists consistently pose women's images of nature as a critique of certain male behaviors, they have done so in the full confidence that they and their male compatriots ultimately share the same public stage and often have the same goals. Their history of joint endeavors suggests a large degree of overlap in nature study and appreciation. Cooper helped popularize Knapp, Treat did the same with Darwin, Florence Merriam worked companionably alongside her husband Vernon Bailey, Mary Austin supported John Muir's preservationist agenda, and Ann Zwinger returned to Thoreau's rivers in the company of Edwin Way Teale.⁶⁰ The happy congruence of Gilbert White's seasonal journal with Susan Cooper's daily diary set the stage for such male-female collaboration and for a flourishing nature writing tradition among American women. But the genre was White's to begin with; it developed out of the male-controlled naturalist tradition. As the history of women's disappearance from the literary naturalist canon after the turn of the century suggests, men have continued to control the field. It is as though a door of opportunity opened with the ornithologists in the nineteenth century and quickly closed again as the pantheon of nature essayists firmly cohered around a select group of men. Signifying the effectiveness of that canon, not only men but also women have neglected the work of writers like Susan Fenimore Cooper, Mary Treat, Florence Merriam Bailey, and Josephine Johnson.⁶¹ Ann Zwinger is the first female nature writer to recognize the loss and speak for those who have been silenced. With her encouragement, the door once more opens and we discover that, in fact, the natural round has provided much inspiration to women who “recorded for their own or another's pleasure the tilt of the earth and the slant of the sky.”⁶²

Notes

1. On the early history of the nature essay, see Hanley, Natural History in America, 16-31, 103-19, 176-92, 224-38; Huth, Nature, 14-54, 87-105; Welker, Birds and Men, 91-149.

2. Margaret Fuller's account of her own travels through the West, Summer on the Lakes, contained much nature description, but nature study was secondary to Fuller's narrative of human society on the frontier.

3. On the cult of domesticity, see Cott, Bonds of Womanhood; Welter, Dimity Convictions.

4. On James's attitudes toward women as evidenced in his fiction, see Bradsher, “Women in the Works of James Fenimore Cooper.” The standard biography of Susan is Cunningham, “Susan Fenimore Cooper.” On the strong influence of her father on her life and work, see Maddox, “Susan Fenimore Cooper.”

5. The primary source for information on Susan's family history is her “Small Family Memories,” in J. F. Cooper, Correspondence, 1:9-72. William Cooper's Guide in the Wilderness, although not a natural history, contains much information on the lay of the land around Cooperstown. On the landscape aesthetic of Downing, see Leighton, American Gardens, 163-72. Susan thanks “Dr. De Kay and Mr. Downing … for their kindness in directing her course on several occasions” (Rural Hours, 406). All further references to Rural Hours are cited parenthetically in the text.

6. Kelley, Private Woman, xi, 248.

7. Her father's role in the publication of Rural Hours, and Bryant's and Irving's responses to the book, are documented in two published sets of correspondence: J. F. Cooper, Letters and Journals, 6:131, 216-17, 232, 234, and Correspondence, 3:640-41, 671-72, 681, 685-86, 690-92. Thoreau's interest in the book is reported by David Jones in his introduction to the 1968 reprint of Rural Hours (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press), xxxvii. On Downing's suggestion to Bremer, see the first chapter of this book.

8. Huth, Nature, 34, 48, 51, 89. For a focused study on the meaning of this sort of middle-landscape life during the century, see Stilgoe, Borderland. Stilgoe is one of the first commentators to emphasize Susan Fenimore Cooper's contribution to the celebration of country life (24).

9. Knapp, Country Rambles, 11. For an excellent discussion of Gilbert White's work and influence in mid-nineteenth-century America, see Worster, Nature's Economy, 3-25.

10. On the development of a middle-class ideal of domestic retirement and its connections to maternal associations, see Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 149-59. In 1870 Cooper published an antisuffrage article, “Female Suffrage: A Letter to the Christian Women of America.” On her later charitable work, see Cunningham, “Susan Fenimore Cooper.” Here Cooper parted company with many of the most popular literary domestics, who, Kelley argues, felt “mocked” by their culture, found women “betrayed” in the home, and supported the call to women's rights (Private Woman, 309, 335).

11. Kurth notes that in the 1887 edition of Rural Hours, Cooper deleted a good deal of this moralizing, religious material in deference to different reader preferences of the day (“Susan Fenimore Cooper,” 137-38).

12. Knapp, Country Rambles, 18.

13. On the influence of Thomson on Cooper's text, see Kurth, “Susan Fenimore Cooper,” 144.

14. Her role here fits into a similar sort of “noblesse oblige” that Kelley identifies among the literary domestics who shared Cooper's station in life (Private Woman, 295).

15. Of course, the Euro-Americans had not been the first to domesticate the region, although they presented themselves as doing so. For accounts of the American Indians' impact on land in the Northeast, see Cronon, Changes in the Land; Merchant, Ecological Revolutions.

16. Stilgoe, Borderland, 115.

17. Huth pinpoints the rise of the conservationist impulse in America in the publication, in 1864, of George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature, noting that prior to this date conservationist voices were isolated and few (Nature, 167-69).

18. J. F. Cooper, Letters and Journals, 6:149.

19. On the rise of Arbor Day in America in the early 1870s, see Huth, Nature, 171. On the development of the bird essay, see Welker, Birds and Men, 177-99; Brooks, Speaking for Nature, 133-81.

20. S. F. Cooper, Elinor Wyllys, 7-8.

21. On the search for privacy and seclusion from the city in the suburbs, and the restricted size of the grounds in the less expensive subdivisions, see G. Wright, Building the Dream, 98-113; Stilgoe, Borderland, 152-53. Wright comments on the urge in the last half of the century to bring nature indoors and open the house to the out-of-doors with added windows and living rooms decorated with dried leaves, but women engaged in such an endeavor were still restricted to the space inside or directly contiguous to their home. The suburbs of the majority did not contain within their round the varied natural landscape just outside Susan Cooper's door.

22. Susan shared this landscape aesthetic with her father. For a description of his views on the subject, see Nevius, Cooper's Landscapes.

23. The sentiment expressed here both reflects and extends the distinctions Victorian middle-class women made between “conspicuous housekeeping” and “homekeeping.” Gillian Brown argues that such women converted market commodities purchased for the home into personal possessions through family use, building up emotional attachments to objects over time (Domestic Individualism, 47). Cooper suggests that the best such possessions are those that draw us closer to nature by modeling organic forms. She here contrasts frivolous consumerism to responsible domesticity. Her lack of interest in her home's interior amenities also forms a subtle critique of women who would spend more time arranging the parlor furniture than admiring nature's artifacts out in the fresh air.

24. For Wilson's influence on bird lore, see Huth, Nature, 25. Cooper had read Wilson and mentions him in Rural Hours, 347.

25. On the upholsterer bee, see Knapp, Country Rambles, 53, 284-85. On hedgehogs, see ibid., 97-98, 296-97. In support of her description of the bee, Cooper quoted from “Acheta Domestica,” the name Miss L. M. Budgen used in publishing her Episodes of Insect Life, 3:86-88. Budgen explained that the purpose of her book was to build sympathy for insects by associating “them as much as possible with our domestic habits,—the summer's stroll,—the winter's walk” (vii). Her text includes charming illustrations of insects behaving as humans, offered in part to teach moral lessons through close observation. She often presents herself—the male “Acheta Domestica”—as a well-dressed grasshopper or cricket studying the habits of insects.

26. Maddox, “Susan Fenimore Cooper,” 145.

27. Worster, Nature's Economy, 11-20.

28. Knapp, Country Rambles, 97-98.

29. Cooper no doubt garnered the general values expressed here from John Ruskin and his American followers; but, as with most every other idea she had about nature, she then looked for the application to woman's sphere. On Ruskin's influence on the popularization of wildflowers, see Blunt, Art of Botanical Illustration, 231; Foshay, Reflections of Nature, 37.

30. Gillian Brown argues that a number of nineteenth-century women shared Cooper's suspicion of much such consumerist display (Domestic Individualism, 46-47).

31. Rossiter demonstrates how important the years 1870 to 1890 were for women's participation in natural history (Women Scientists, 86). For biographies of Treat, see Harshberger, Botanists of Philadelphia, 298-302; Weiss, “Mrs. Mary Treat,” 258-73. Treat groups spiders and wasps together under the general heading “insects” in Home Studies.

32. Like many scientists of the time, including Darwin in his later years, Treat was convinced that evolution could be triggered by geography. See her comments on the potential for development of a new species of cow as a result of the consumption of a certain plant in Home Studies, 220. For a good history of the development of evolutionary ideas, see Eiseley, Darwin's Century. All further references to Home Studies are cited parenthetically in the text.

33. I am not suggesting that Treat was somehow ahead of her time. As Donald Worster has demonstrated, Darwin's evolutionary theory could be read two ways—one that sanctioned violence and dominance and one that saw in natural selection an image of human immersion into the web of nature. Worster argues that Darwin himself came around to this second view in his later years. My point is that, having a choice, Mary Treat, for reasons partially connected to women's culture, was in the biocentric camp at a time when many of her compatriots were not. See Worster, Nature's Economy, 178-87.

34. See Welker, Birds and Men, 178-208; Brooks, Speaking for Nature, 105; Dunlap, Saving America's Wildlife, 13-16. Ainley argues, in addition, that ornithology has been less professionalized than other branches of science, leaving an opening for women amateurs not available in other fields (“Field Work and Family,” 60). For a general history of women's work in clubs during this period, including conservation activities, see Blair, Clubwoman as Feminist, 119.

35. Schmitt discusses the general tendency of this literature, men's and women's, to engage in “Christian ornithology”—the application of moral lessons to bird behavior—but he does not discuss the women's application of such morals to lessons about gender (Back to Nature, 36-38).

36. O. T. Miller, In Nesting Time, 152. All further references are cited parenthetically in the text.

37. On the relationships between the New Woman, the True Woman, and the cult of domesticity, see Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 173-76; Blair, Clubwoman as Feminist, 99-100. Merriam married late and pursued her own research throughout her life. The most complete biography is Kofalk, No Woman Tenderfoot. Most of the women ornithologists, Miller included, drew a line between songbirds and such predators as hawks and owls. They, along with male Audubon members, advocated eradicating such destroyers of family life. In this, they were as likely to take up a gun as their male colleagues (Dunlap, Saving America's Wildlife, 15).

38. In addition to Kofalk's biography of Merriam, see Brooks, Speaking for Nature, 171-75.

39. Merriam, A-Birding on a Bronco, 218. All further references are cited parenthetically in the text.

40. Quoted in Kofalk, who also reports that Merriam published under her maiden name after her marriage (No Woman Tenderfoot, 51).

41. Smith-Rosenberg notes that those in the first wave of New Women—Merriam's generation—remained tied to Victorian romantic vocabularies in describing their own sexuality, even while the next generation was openly flaunting their sexual behavior (Disorderly Conduct, 284). Some of this reticence clearly informed what the nature writers had to say about bird behavior.

42. Welker, Birds and Men, 190. Paul Brooks is to be credited for first recognizing the women's achievements as both insightful and inspirational in Speaking for Nature, 163-81.

43. See Huth, Nature, 95-104; Welker, Birds and Men, 176-84.

44. For a history of the “nature fakers” argument between Burroughs and Earnest Thompson Seton in which Mabel Osgood Wright's observations play a key role, see Brooks, Speaking for Nature, 213. For full treatments of the nature fakers battles, see Dunlap, Saving America's Wildlife, 27-31; Schmitt, Back to Nature, 45-56.

45. Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 397. Douglas argues that the sentimental novelists were pawns of industrial society, espousing “passivity” as a virtue that ultimately denied them real power (and literary greatness). In her study she does not consider literary naturalists or discuss how their work might have been painted with the large brush of masculine dismissal that occurred near the end of the century. Gillian Brown has recently countered Douglas's image of these writers as passive consumers (of things and ideas), posing some domestic novelists as engaged in a sophisticated critique of patriarchy, including the corrupting effects of the marketplace on domestic values (Domestic Individualism, 17-18).

46. Rossiter, Women Scientists, 79; Welker, Birds and Men, 206.

47. Nash chronicles the rise of the “cult of wilderness” in America (Wilderness, 141-60). He includes Burroughs and Thoreau as precursors to this masculinized cult. My reading of their contribution suggests that, at different points in their careers (and to fit different needs in cultural history), they have been claimed by both camps.

48. McCulloch-Williams, Next to the Ground, 139-40; Kumin, In Deep, 75.

49. Rich, We Took to the Woods, 319-20; Hubbell, Country Year, 120-21.

50. Kumin, In Deep, 178.

51. Merchant, “Women of the Progressive Conservation Movement.” The standard biography of Austin is Stineman, Mary Austin. On her reputation as a nature essayist and her work as a conservationist, see Brooks, Speaking for Nature, 183-92; Blend, “Mary Austin.” Austin admired Muir. In Land of Little Rain (152), she contrasted his approach to nature with that of scientific professionals who fail to see the moral precepts in their developing understanding of the biophysical environment.

52. Nash, Wilderness, 200-271.

53. Hoover, Gift of the Deer, 114; Zwinger, Beyond the Aspen Grove, 68, 80; J. Johnson, Inland Island, 53.

54. The quotation is from Austin's stories of women's lives in the Mojave (Lost Borders, 10-11). On her contradictory attitudes toward feminism, see Stineman, Mary Austin, 129-30. On her support for the younger generation's struggle for a female sexual vocabulary, see Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 284-85. On her differences with other Progressive Era women (including naturalists) on the meanings of home and domesticity, see Blend, “Mary Austin,” 14, 31-32. For a full discussion of female imagery in her work, see Norwood, “The Photographer and the Naturalist.”

55. Kumin, In Deep, 87.

56. J. Johnson, Inland Island, 90.

57. Austin, Land of Little Rain, 88.

58. J. Johnson, Inland Island, 9.

59. Zwinger, “Thoreau on Women,” 3 (Thoreau's quotation).

60. See Zwinger and Teale's account of their journey in A Conscious Stillness.

61. Women (and men) who write about nature refer primarily to male authorities, both for scientific proof and for sensitive evocations of flora and fauna. That I chose not to include Annie Dillard in my discussion of contemporary female nature essayists shows how effectively such silencing sometimes works. Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has earned more recognition than any of the books discussed in this chapter. Dillard is a skilled nature writer, but no more so than Josephine Johnson. That Dillard is female enters rarely into her account of the seasonal round of her cabin. Nor does the cabin itself bear the emotional meanings of home. Dillard has stated that she wrote Tinker Creek off 1,103 note cards in a library carrel. Rachel Carson receives a brief mention, in a chapter including references to Joseph Wood Krutch, Rutherford Platt, Edwin Way Teale, and Arthur Stanley Eddington (162-84). Describing the books she reads as including men and women, Dillard names only the men: “Knud Rasmussen, Sir John Franklin, Peter Freuchen, Scott, Peary, and Bird; Jedediah Smith, Peter Skene Ogden, and Milton Sublette; or Daniel Boone” (43). Based as it is in Dillard's education, Tinker Creek reflects our contemporary inheritance of that late nineteenth-century effort to remasculinize science and nature writing. Tinker Creek's fame rests in part on its appeal to that tradition. On her writing method, see Major, “Pilgrim of the Absolute,” 363.

62. Zwinger, “Thoreau on Women,” 3.

Bibliography

Ainley, Marianne Goszwingertonyi. “Field Work and Family: North American Women Ornithologists, 1900-1950.” In Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives, edited by Pnina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram, 60-77.

Austin, Mary. The Land of Little Rain. 1903. Reprint. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974.

———. Lost Borders. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1909.

Blair, Karen J. The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980.

Blend, Benay. “Mary Austin and the Western Conservation Movement: 1900-1927.” Journal of the Southwest 30 (Spring 1988): 12-34.

Blunt, Wilfrid. The Art of Botanical Illustration. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951.

Bradsher, Frieda Katherine. “Women in the Works of James Fenimore Cooper.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona, 1979.

Bremer, Fredrika. The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America. 2 vols. Translated by Mary Howitt. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853.

Brooks, Paul. Speaking for Nature: How Literary Naturalists from Henry Thoreau to Rachel Carson Have Shaped America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.

Budgen, Miss L. M. Episodes of Insect Life. 3 vols. New York: J. S. Redfield, Clinton Hall; Boston: B. B. Mussey and Co., 1851-52.

Cooper, James Fenimore. Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper. Edited by his grandson, James Fenimore Cooper. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922.

———. The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper. Edited by James Franklin Beard. 6 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.

Cooper, Susan Fenimore [pseud. Amabel Penfeather]. Elinor Wyllys; or, The Young Folk of Longbridge. Anon. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1846.

———. “Female Suffrage: A Letter to the Christian Women of America.” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 41 (August, September 1870): 438-46, 594-600.

———. Rural Hours. By a Lady. New York: George P. Putnam, 1850.

Cooper, William. A Guide in the Wilderness. New York: Gilbert and Hodges, 1810.

Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman's Sphere in New England, 1780-1835. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

Cunningham, Anna K. “Susan Fenimore Cooper—Child of Genius.” New York History 25 (July 1944): 339-50.

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Bantam Books, 1975.

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.

Dunlap, Thomas R. Saving America's Wildlife. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Eiseley, Loren. Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958.

Foshay, Ella M. Reflections of Nature: Flowers in American Art. New York: Alfred A. Knopf in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984.

Fuller, Margaret. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Boston: Little and Brown, 1844.

Hanley, Wayne. Natural History in America: From Mark Catesby to Rachel Carson. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1977.

Harshberger, John W. The Botanists of Philadelphia and Their Work. Philadelphia: T. C. Davis and Son, 1899.

Hoover, Helen. The Gift of the Deer. 1965. Reprint. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

Hubbell, Sue. A Country Year: Living the Questions. New York: Random House, 1986.

Huth, Hans. Nature and the American Mind: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957.

Johnson, Josephine. The Inland Island. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1969.

Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Knapp, John Leonard. Country Rambles in England; or, Journal of a Naturalist, with notes and additions by the author of “Rural Hours.” 1829. Reprint. Edited and annotated by Susan Fenimore Cooper. Buffalo, N.Y.: Phinney and Co., 1853.

Kofalk, Harriet. No Woman Tenderfoot: Florence Merriam Bailey, Pioneer Naturalist. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989.

Kumin, Maxine. In Deep: Country Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.

Kurth, Rosaly Torna. “Susan Fenimore Cooper: A Study of Her Life and Works.” Ph.D. dissertation, Fordham University, 1974.

Leighton, Ann. American Gardens of the Nineteenth Century: “For Comfort and Affluence.” Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.

McCulloch-Williams, Martha. Next to the Ground: Chronicles of a Countryside. New York: McClure, Phillips and Co., 1902.

Maddox, Lucy B. “Susan Fenimore Cooper and the Plain Daughters of America.” American Quarterly 40 (June 1988): 131-47.

Major, Mike. “Pilgrim of the Absolute.” America 138 (May 6, 1978): 363-64.

Merchant, Carolyn. Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

———. “Women of the Progressive Conservation Movement, 1900-1916.” Environmental Review 8 (Spring 1984): 57-86.

Merriam, Florence A. A-Birding on a Bronco. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896.

Miller, Olive Thorne. In Nesting Time. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888.

Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967 (3d ed., 1982).

Nevius, Blake. Cooper's Landscapes: An Essay on the Picturesque Vision. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976.

Norwood, Vera. “The Photographer and the Naturalist: Laura Gilpin and Mary Austin in the Southwest.” Journal of American Culture 5 (Summer 1982): 1-29.

Rich, Louise Dickinson. We Took to the Woods. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1942.

Rossiter, Margaret W. Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Schmitt, Peter J. Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America. 1969. Reprint. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

Stilgoe, John R. Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Stineman, Esther Lanigan. Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Treat, Mary. Home Studies in Nature. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1885.

Welker, Robert Henry. Birds and Men: American Birds in Science, Art, Literature, and Conservation, 1800-1900. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955.

Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976.

Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981.

Zwinger, Ann. Beyond the Aspen Grove. New York: Random House, 1970.

———. “Thoreau on Women.” Thoreau Society Bulletin, no. 164 (Summer 1983): 3-7.

Zwinger, Ann, and Edwin Way Teale. A Conscious Stillness: Two Naturalists on Thoreau's Rivers. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.