"Nature" and its presumed opposite, "culture" are central categories when examining the modern order of the sexes. A central argument has long been that what is supposedly "natural" might actually be entirely "cultural" and that the "natural" gender order and even gender itself is, indeed, socially constructed. Any reference to "nature" has thus been fundamentally subjected to a suspicion of essentialism, leading to to harsh feminist critiques of intellectual currents such as "ecofeminism" or "feminism of difference". This binary way of thinking, however, seems to bear in it an unproductive limitation of research. It becomes impossible to ask what historical actors are doing when they use the term "nature" and it makes the concept of nature absolute, rather than showing it to be the subject to considerable historical change. This issue discusses questions of the contingency of nature and its relationship with gender along various historical settings, thus making an important contribution to our current debate on "nature", culture and the gendered order of society.