“Women are closer to nature than men.” What kind of perspective is this?

Concept: A perspective is called essentialist when it explains the characteristics of a group by an inherent, fixed “essence” that its members are said to possess by nature, rather than by history, culture or social arrangement. In gender debates an essentialist claim treats a trait as flowing from what women or men are by nature, and therefore as universal and unchanging across societies.

Application: The statement “Women are closer to nature than men” attributes an affinity with nature to women as a category, simply on the basis of being women. No historical, economic or cultural mechanism is offered; the closeness is presented as given by nature itself. That is precisely the essentialist move, so the perspective expressed in the statement is Essentialist.

How this differs from the other perspectives named:

• Realism is a claim about what exists: that objects, structures and facts are there independently of how any observer perceives or describes them. It says nothing about women possessing a natural essence.

• Feminism analyses how power, labour and value are distributed between genders. Much feminist scholarship, including a great deal of ecofeminist writing, criticises the woman–nature equation as an unexamined stereotype, so this label does not identify the kind of claim the statement makes.

• Deep ecology holds that every living being has intrinsic worth and calls for a shift from human-centred to ecosystem-centred values. It speaks of humanity as a whole and draws no distinction between women and men.

Cross-check: The test is where the trait is said to come from. A social explanation — for example, that women in many societies do most of the subsistence and care work and therefore handle natural resources more — would not be essentialist. Because the statement grounds the closeness in womanhood itself, it is classed as essentialist. Some strands of cultural ecofeminism do affirm a special woman–nature bond, but the bare statement is still classified by its logical form, and that form is essentialist.