In fact, the advocates of People's Park had asserted another version of what is probably America's oldest and most cherished fantasy: a daily reality of harmony between man and nature based on an experience of the land land as essentially feminine - that is not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratification - enclosing the individual in an environment of receptivity, repose, and painless and integral satisfaction.
Annette Kolodny, Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters
ecocritism, ecofeminism, environment, environmental-history, literary-criticism, nature