ABSTRACT
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution is one of the most successful and influential books of feminist scholarship ever written. The Death of Nature is commonly considered to be one of the founding texts – perhaps the founding text – for the articulation of ecofeminism, particularly in Anglo-American circles. This chapter explains the enduring importance of Merchant's ambitious text for the field of gender and environment in general and ecological feminism in particular. Merchant argues persuasively in The Death of Nature for a view that subsequently became one of the core tenets of ecofeminism: that the domination of women and the domination of nature are structurally linked. Yet The Death of Nature works against the kind of externalism Merton usually employed as much as against the narrow internalism of the majority of the history of science.
