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ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
often struggled, particularly in the early years, with questions such as how to
avoid the tendency to invoke universal notions of gender, nature, and culture,
or how to fit into a wider multicultural feminist movement.
This chapter explores a few of die primary trajectories by which
ecofeminism originally unfolded in the 1980s. These “originating influences,”
radical feminism, social ecology, environmental justice and international
environmental movements, reflect only several of the many movements that
informed the development of contemporary ecofeminism. Yet by studying
these tendencies, we may gain a general appreciation for the wider context in
which women were beginning to approach the question of ecology in the
1980s, providing insight into the problems and possibilities that emerge as
groups link questions of nature to issues of social, cultural, and political justice.
RAdio\[ FEMiNisM AncI TliE EiviERqENCE Of TFe Body Politic
Within the radical feminism of the late sixties and early seventies, an organic
sensibility began to germinate, eventually finding its expression within many
ecofeminist writings today. This organic sensibility emerged within an
exploration of the ‘embodied persona! that found its first seeds within the
context of the New Left.
Since the late 1960s, the body has become a touchstone to which many
feminists return in order to measure the ‘groundedness’ of feminist theory. The
body politic, developed by radical feminists, attempted to render feminist
theory resonant with women’s lived experience as flesh and blood in the
world, providing a palpable praxis that corresponded with women’s bodily
reality. Ecological politics has also played a role in grounding feminist politics.
Ecology, like the body, offers feminism an organic dimension by which to
explore women’s survival not as abstract ‘sisters in patriarchy5, but as women
addressing the concrete and visceral dimensions of social and ecological
injustice. And as we shall see, radical feminist body politics contains a latent
ecological sensibility that, in turn, gives way to what would soon be called
“ecofeminism,”
In the late sixties and early seventies, thousands of women were
involved in political organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society
and the anti-war and civil rights movements. While participating in these
struggles, many women brought to light glaring contradictions between the
abstract principles and goals of political movements and their own personal,
embodied experiences as women in the world. While men spoke of goals of
liberty, freedom, and equality for ‘humanity’, movement women were often
cloistered in the kitchen doing the mailings and making coffee for movement
men. When women attempted to focus on their own liberation, they were