On Seminar papers, luck and context.

Attention all Women's Studies folks: You are part of a discipline that values context, depth, and complicated questions over simple solutions. My favorite part of Women's Studies seminars (and as of the end of next week, I have taken part in two) is that you never know what you're going to get and you can never fail to learn something new. Our readings this semester focused on the 19th century women's experience, but covered everything from imperialism, abuse, early science, and marriage law to how to eat an orange, and why it's a bad idea to cross-dress in Cranford. Although I have several things that I could reflect upon over the course of this year, I would like to tie this seminar and last semester's Gender and Technology seminar together and talk about my paper. I am talking about the significance of the railway in Middlemarch and Cranford as a multi-layered metaphor and a mark of masculinized history in the text. As a major source I wanted to use a very difficult book I reviewed last semester in Dr. Edwards' Gender and Technology seminar called
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and The Scientific Revolution (1980) by Carolyn Merchant.
Compiled during the tumult of the second wave feminist and environmental movements of the 70s, Merchant frames the historical developments of modern industry, science, and capitalism in reference to increasing amounts of environmental damage and curtailing of womens representations in the public sphere-- saying that these developments were made possible by modes of thought which, by objectifying nature and the nature-identified woman, made both inert, passive, and mechanical and set the scientific (coded masculine) establishment on the road toward the 20th centuries dual crises of environmental and social justice.
This was not a fun, easy read. Each chapter is a layer and the equivalent of five history course's worth of material on early modern science, culture, economy, and philosophy that never seems to have an endpoint or a moral-- mostly themes or ideas that circle around one another and appeal to intuitive connection. It's a book I never thought I would use again after my brief review about it, however-- to refer to my first sentence: Womens studies is a discipline without easy answers, but in which everything is connected.