ABSTRACT
Up until the modern era, the idea of the inequality between men and women and the subservience of women to men as ‘natural’, something ‘given’ and beyond human powers to alter was a taken-forgranted perspective. Women were held to be physically (and psychologically) weaker than men and seen as occupying a position somewhere below ‘man’ but above ‘animals’ or nature. It is these (and other) historical and conceptual connections between women and nature that makes the adoption of a gendered approach to the discussion of social theory and the environment not just interesting but absolutely essential. As will become clear in later discussion of ecofeminist social theory, social theorising about the environment is not a gender-free zone.
