Political Science · Political Theory
UGC NET January 2025 Political Science
Who wrote the book 'The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution'?
ACarolyn Merchant ✓ Correct
BJudith Butler
CGermaine Greer
DSavita Singh
Correct answer: (A) Carolyn Merchant — The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (1980) was written by Carolyn Merchant, an American ecofeminist historian of science.
Explanation
★The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (1980) was written by Carolyn Merchant, an American ecofeminist historian of science.
★Her thesis: before the Scientific Revolution, nature was imagined as a living, nurturing mother, an image that restrained exploitation.
★The Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with Francis Bacon as her chief exhibit, replaced this organic worldview with a mechanistic one that pictured nature as a machine to be mastered.
★That shift, Merchant argues, sanctioned the joint domination of nature and of women, which is why the book is a founding text of ecofeminist scholarship.
★Judith Butler is the author of Gender Trouble (1990) and the theory of gender performativity; Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch (1970); neither wrote on the Scientific Revolution.
★Syllabus bridge: the ecofeminist chain NET tests runs Francoise d'Eaubonne (coined ecofeminism, 1974), Carolyn Merchant (The Death of Nature, 1980), Vandana Shiva (Staying Alive, 1988), and Maria Mies with Shiva (Ecofeminism, 1993).
★Spotting cue: 'Scientific Revolution plus women plus ecology' in one title can only be Merchant.
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