Woman the Hunter

by Mary Zeiss Stange

Overview

Over two million American women hunt. By taking up weapons for the explicit purpose of killing, they are shattering one of Western culture's oldest and most firmly entrenched taboos. The image of a woman 'armed and dangerous' is profoundly threatening to our collective psyche—and it is rejected by macho males and radical feminists alike.

Woman the Hunter juxtaposes unsettlingly beautiful accounts of the author's own experiences hunting deer, antelope, and elk with an argument that builds on the work of thinkers from Aldo Leopold to Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Exploring how women and men relate to nature and violence, Mary Zeiss Stange demonstrates how false assumptions about women and about hunting permeate contemporary thought. Her book is a profound critique of our society's evasion of issues that make us uncomfortable, and it culminates in a surprising claim: that only by appreciating the value of hunting can we come to understand what it means to be human.

Controversial and original, defying easy stereotypes,Woman the Hunter is sure to provoke strong reactions in almost every reader.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807046395
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	07/01/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

MARY ZEISS STANGE teaches religion and women's studies at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. An experienced hunter, she makes her home in Montana when she is not teaching.

Editorial Reviews

A moving, disturbing, and bold retelling of the myth of Diana for the late twentieth century that deftly turns around our assumptions about women's relationships to life, death, and the call of the wild. —Ruth Behar, author of The Vulnerable Observer

"Heartfelt, powerful, and scholarly, Woman the Hunter torches two of the oldest myths of our culture: the aggressive male who destroys nature and the passive female who nurtures it. What Mary Zeiss Stange erects in their place—woman who don't shirk from participating in nature's cycles of life and death—is surely one of the saner paths toward a healthier earth." — Ted Kerasote, author of Bloodties: Nature, Culture, and the Hunt

From the Publisher

A recent New York Times article reported that archeologists have uncovered burial sites of what are thought to be Sarmatian warriors from about the sixth to the second century B.C.and that the bodies uncovered are women's. This is a timely article for Stange, an instructor of religion and women's studies at Skidmore College, who argues that women, too, possess a natural hunting instinct that "has more to do with a mode of awareness, a discreet style of engagement, than with pulling a trigger." Writing as a feminist, Stange attacks the theories and arguments of radical eco-feminists, who oppose women's participation "in such male-identified activities as hunting," and argues that such a position assumes "a close connection between women and the landscape" that "not only reinforces familiar stereotypes of women as creatures of emotion, rather than reason, it also establishes for women an essentially privileged relation to nature and animals." Throughout the book, which is written in two stylesone scholarly, the other memoiristicStange maintains that when approached ethically and responsibly, hunting does not destroy or change nature nearly as much as farming does; in fact, she argues, "[i]t is the farmer, not the hunter, who approaches the world of nature as something over which he must seize control." Stange can write, and she can make convincing arguments; unfortunately she doesn't do both at the same time. The chapters about her hunts are well written but rarely go beyond the impressionistic. And while the chapters containing her arguments are strong and insightful, they are also burdened by an earnest, clotted, graduate-school style. When she unites reasoning and writing, she will be ready for a broad trade audience. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Mixing autobiographical reflection and scholarly analysis, a woman hunter examines the cultural history of hunting, brilliantly challenging fundamental assumptions about femininity, masculinity, and the relation of humans to the natural world.

Noting the increase in women afield, Stange (Religion and Women's Studies/Skidmore Coll.) is less interested in explaining why they hunt than why more don't. She analyzes anthropological theories of hunting: The discredited "Man the Hunter" theory and its feminist opposite, "Woman the Gatherer," are rightly criticized for perpetuating tired gender stereotypes and minimizing woman's historical role as predator. Stange examines the stubborn grip these theories hold on popular and academic imaginations and persuasively details the well-meaning but ultimately destructive way people anthropomorphize nature. Though she claims "implications far broader than an argument with feminism," it's ecofeminism (which equates hunting with rape) with which she has the biggest bone to pick. Stange charges that ecofeminism romanticizes nature and casts women as victims, absolving them of culpability in environmental depredation, from the responsibility that all humans "are up to our elbows in blood." Hunting, on the other hand, confronts "the painful paradox of life itself: Some of us live because others die." This "blood knowledge"—a spiritual interconnectedness most often manifested as affection and respect for quarry—results in a sense of mutual obligation between people and nature that can't be bought at the grocery. One caveat: Stange's hypocritical stereotyping of men as macho males threatened by women hunters is troubling, considering many—herself included—were introduced to the sport by fathers and husbands.

Though the Field & Stream crowd might balk at extended forays into scholarly jargon and feminist theory, Stange grapples head-on with a central philosophical question largely unanswered by sporting literature: Why hunt?

Kirkus Reviews