Gender, environment and history: New methods and approaches in environmental history

We are far from the first, and expect we will not be the last, to wonder at the paucity of research on women, gender and sexuality in (Anglophone) environmental history. To borrow from Virginia Scharff, who was writing in 1999, environmental history still has a 'sex secret'. For all the insights of feminist scholarship, science studies, queer studies, women's history, gender history and histories of sexuality that have accumulated since then, many environmental historians still seem to find 'forest fires more fascinating than cooking fires', at least in Australia and the United States. Yet historical studies of women's garden making, environmental and animal welfare movements, domestic labour, knowledge making, 'alternative' environments and mountaineering (just to name a few areas of dynamic scholarship) show that women have indeed been agents of environmental change in ways that either conformed to or contested contemporary gender and sexual expectations. Arising from the 'Placing Gender' workshop held in Melbourne in 2018, this collection brings together four contributions that demonstrate different approaches to undertaking gender analysis in environmental history. Focusing on non-Indigenous women and men in the Anglo-world from the mid-nineteenth century, some adopt new tools to excavate familiar terrain, while others listen closely to voices that have been rarely heard in the field. Recasting the making of settler places in terms of their gendered production and experience not only enriches their own environmental history, we argue, but also broadens the historian's enquiry to encompass the other lands implicated in the production of settler places.