THE ECOEEMINIST DESIRE FOR NATURE
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often advised to wait for the ‘greater liberation of humanity’ at which time
women’s liberation would inevitably follow.
The women of the New Left soon grew tired of waiting. They began to
recognize the contradictions between their own private, embodied struggles
and the public, political ideals of larger struggles for social justice. Standing
together in kitchens, or while licking envelopes, women began to engage in
informal discussions regarding contradictions such as the irony of fighting
against U.S. aggression in Vietnam during the day while often being abused
physically at night by the same men who opposed the war. In a speech given
at a city-wide meeting of radical women’s groups in New York City in 1968,
AnnE Koedt expressed women’s dissatisfaction with leftist movements:
Within the last year many radical women’s groups have sprung up
throughout the country. This was caused by the fact that movement
women found themselves playing secondary roles on every level—be
it in terms of leadership, or simply in terms of being listened to. They
found themselves afraid to speak up because of self-doubts when in
the presence of men. They ended up concentrating on food-making,
typing, mimeographing, general assistance work, and serving as a
sexual supply for their male comrades after hours. 1
Women from all over he country formed groups where hey could discuss
heir experiences in he movement and talk about he embodied details of their
everyday lives. Some of these groups emerged into formal “consciousness
raising groups” in which women began to see hat insights and experiences
once thought of as idiosyncratic or purely personal were shared by many
others as well. Soon, like astronomers linking a seemingly random scattering of
stars into a constellation, women began to link disparate personal experiences
into a constellation of oppressions, which hey referred to as ‘patriarchy’, hat
was highly political and historical in nature. Issues such as sexuality,
relationships, healh, work, family, and violence in he home and street, all
once seen as women’s personal bodily5 issues not to be considered or
discussed in public, now were examined and understood through a distinctly
political lens.
Out of this analysis was bom a ‘body politic,” an attempt to understand
he political implications of women’s experience of male domination in heir
everyday lives. From this analysis came a radical feminist movement hat
created counter institutions to address he bodily dimension of women’s
oppression.
Women had begun to invoke new understandings of a ‘biological’
dimension of social life. All activities relegated to he domestic realm, he daily
‘reproductive’ biological activities such as cooking, cleaning, caring for he side,