Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature argues that ecological crisis cannot be understood apart from the master rationality through which Western culture has defined reason against nature, masculinity against femininity, culture against subsistence, and humanity against animality. Her intervention refuses both romantic ecofeminism, which sanctifies women as innately closer to nature, and equality feminism, which seeks women’s admission into an unreconstructed model of rational mastery. Instead, Plumwood develops a critical ecological feminism able to connect gender, race, class and species domination within a shared logic of colonising dualism. The decisive case study is the woman–nature association itself: historically used to inferiorise women as passive, bodily and reproductive, it also reveals how “nature” has been constructed as the silent background enabling dominant achievements. This process of backgrounding renders both women’s labour and biospheric dependency invisible, thereby licensing exploitation while denying indebtedness. Plumwood’s synthesis is therefore philosophical and political: the problem is not reason as such, but a dominator model of reason that disavows dependency, difference and mutuality. Her conclusion demands neither merger with nature nor continued separation from it, but a non-hierarchical recognition of continuity and alterity. The master story must be rewritten because survival now depends upon replacing domination with ecological reciprocity.
