SOURCE: Littenberg, Marcia B. “Gender and Genre: A New Perspective on Nineteenth-Century Women's Nature Writing.” In Such News of the Land: U. S. Women Nature Writers, edited by Thomas S. Edwards and Elizabeth A. DeWolfe, pp. 59-67. Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England, 2001.

In the following essay, Littenberg discusses the conditions surrounding the flourishing of women's nature writing in the late nineteenth century.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, American popular culture embraced nature and nature study in a number of important ways that encouraged women writers. Women writers published in a wide variety of popular magazines, as well as in scholarly journals, ranging from the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's New Monthly Magazine to Nature, Scientific Monthly, Audubon, and the American Naturalist.¹ As this partial list indicates, a distinction was not always made between scholarly, scientific nature writing, and popular writing; the genre of...