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Vol. 4, No. 3 - February 16, 2005
| Stange to Explore "Wilderness and Wild Women" in Moseley Lecture
Free and open to the public, the talk will begin at 8 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall. A reception will follow. Each year the College's faculty chooses one of its own to deliver the Moseley Lecture. Selection as the Moseley Lecturer is the highest honor the Skidmore faculty can confer upon a colleague. Stange's lecture will derive from her research over the years on female hunters and their relationship to a number of environmental and ethical issues. She is currently researching a new book, tentatively titled Sister Predator, on what it means to be part of a predator species. Explained Stange, "I'm looking constructively at the role violence plays in the natural world. We're alive because other beings are dead - and we caused their deaths. What does it mean to think about our own wildness?" She is exploring the implications of humans as a predator species and about how this wildness (which women are taught to avoid) affects various social and cultural realities. The issues are enduring ones for Stange, a self-described "eco-feminist" and hunter whose books, essays, and articles over the years have often focused on women who hunt. In her first book, Woman the Hunter (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), she presented a cultural history of hunting, challenging fundamental assumptions about femininity, masculinity, and the relation of humans to the natural world. Stange said that the forthcoming book is something of a sequel to this earlier volume. In 2000, Stange collaborated with psychologist Carol K. Oyster on Gun Women: Firearms and Feminism in Contemporary America (New York, New York University Press), which explored women's various positive relationships with firearms, including self-protection, hunting, and recreational and competitive shooting, as well as careers like law enforcement and the military. Stange edited Heart Shots: Women Write About Hunting (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2003), a critical anthology of women's writing about hunting over the past hundred years or so. The volume contains reflections "on what it means to be a woman who hunts" by such writers as Annie Oakley, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Grace Seton-Thompson, Beryl Markham, and Terry Tempest Williams. As a graduate student at Syracuse University, Stange became fascinated with the goddess Artemis, whom she said "simultaneously represents the ecosystem, hunting, and childbirth, symbolizing a kind of freedom associated with being undomesticated." Artemis is an important figure in a new religion course on powerful females titled "Goddesses and Amazons" that she is teaching this semester at Skidmore. While working on Woman the Hunter, Stange said she "became aware that I was part of a movement of a number of women who had taken up hunting as adults." Now totaling close to 3 million, female hunters account for about 10 percent of the hunting population. "No one was paying attention to this," asserts Stange, who has since become something of an expert on the subject. She moves between, and is equally at home in, two different worlds. In addition to publishing articles and reviews on feminist theory and cultural criticism in academic and scholarly journals, she writes essays and articles in national outdoor and general-interest publications on topics ranging from women, hunting, and environmental ethics to such issues as gun control and animal rights. Her essay, "Last Man Out of the Hunting Lodge, Please Turn Out the Lights," was awarded the Izaak Walton League's "Thinking Like a Mountain" prize for cutting-edge writing on environmental issues, following its publication in the spring 1999 issue of Outdoor America. Stange teaches at Skidmore during the academic year, and ranches and hunts in Montana, where she and her husband, Doug, operate the Crazy Woman Bison Ranch on 4,000 acres near Ekalaka. She is a magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Syracuse University , where she earned a bachelor's degree in English literature, and master's and doctoral degrees in religion.Skidmore
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"Wilderness, Real and Imagined, and Wild Women," is the title of this year's Edwin M. Moseley Faculty Research Lecture at Skidmore, to be presented Wednesday, Feb. 23, by Mary Zeiss Stange, associate professor of women's studies and religion.