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Susan R. Schrepfer's Nature's Altars is a thoughtful and provocative reassessment of how the American wilderness, especially the mountains of the American West, was perceived from the late nineteenth century through the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964. More precisely, Schrepfer shows how gender played an important role in “shap[ing] the American experience of the natural world” (p. 4). She thus builds on and expands the pathbreaking work of Annette Kolodny, whose The Lay of the Land (1975) and The Land before Her (1984) dramatically introduced an idea that was radical at the time but is now nearly universally accepted: people perceive and act on the natural world in ways that reflect the confluence of experience and culture, including gender.

Based on prodigious archival and secondary research in Sierra Club and other collections, this clearly written book examines the documentary record for metaphors, tropes, and rhetorics of perception. For both men and women, the Burkean concept of the sublime in nature played an important role. For men this manifested itself in the masculine sublime, an almost obsessive understanding of the western mountains as rugged, harsh, and accessible only to stereotypically male aggression and conquest. To women who hiked, climbed, and enjoyed the mountains (and there were many of these, Schrepfer shows), a search for a domestic sublime led to discovery of communities of life, especially immanent in birds and wildflowers. In the late nineteenth century, women writing of their experiences in the mountains found “transcendence, awe, joy, pleasure, and occasionally apprehension” (p. 80), while men commonly emphasized conquest, male prowess, fear, and even anger.

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