ABSTRACT
Women are less unhappy amongst pastoral peoples, in Diderot's view, for the greater ease such peoples have in securing the means of subsistence entails that they also have greater leisure and this, in turn, makes for the conditions in which beauty arises. One need only open Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution – influential in North America and to a lesser degree also – to find the notion of nature and that of womanhood as if tied together by an indissoluble bond. 'Women and nature', its first sentence tells us, 'have an age-old association – an affiliation that has persisted throughout culture, language and history'. The extent of the convergence between critiques of civilisation and the history of women does not stop with the realisation that it is in the rise of individualism – for want of a better phrase – that the table between men and women is turned.
