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ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
bearing and nurturing children, and sexuality were now considered worthy of
political attention. The great wall between the public and private realm
shattered as women began to examine the organic dimension of their own
work, lives, and ways of being in the world. In developing the dialectical body
politic, women began to examine an organic dimension to social life
unexplored by the wider New Left. It would not be long before the
contradictions between the body and the rest of the natural world would be
pressed to give way to an understanding of an ecological body that stands in
direct relationship to a political, social world. Phrases including ‘the personal is
political,’ ‘sexual politics,’ or ‘body politics,’ all reflected this new tendency to
recognize the interconnections between the body and the political, shifting
political discussion to include issues deemed ‘organic’ or ‘embodied’, reflecting
an implicit ecological impulse.
To further contextualize this ecological impulse, it is crucial to locate
radical feminism within the wider context of the New Left in which a new
ecological movement was steadily emerging during the late 1960s. Indeed,
during these years, an ecological sensibility had developed, reflecting a
rejection of middle-class suburban values, aesthetics, and cultural practices. The
publication of the Whole Earth Catalogue in 1968 heralded the arrival of a
generation of youth seeking a new quality of everyday life deemed more
organic, immediate, and “natural.” The catalogue’s pages offered “earthy”
advice ranging from homesteading in the country to making natural soap in a
spirit of ecology and “do it yourself’ self-sufficiency. As a feminist correlate,
Our Bodies, Owselves, published in 1973 by the Boston Women’s Llealth
Collective, offered lay knowledge to women seeking self-sufficiency in the
domain of reproductive health. The publication of both books signaled a time
in which people sought asylum from a world they perceived as sterile,
impersonal, and disempowering. The U.S. ecology movement spoke to these
desires, providing “natural” alternatives for people striving to reconstitute a
more healthful and self-determined quality of everyday life.
Along with this new ecological sensibility, there emerged within radical
feminism an implicit anarchist sensibility as well: a critique of hierarchy in
general that flowed from a specific critique of male domination. Seeking to
incorporate this spirit of non-hierarchy into feminist projects and organizations,
women adopted cooperative ways of working and relating together. By the
beginning of the 1970s, a flourishing women’s movement had emerged,
creating collectives, cooperatives, and consciousness raising groups, many of
which were organized according to principles of non-hierarchy. Women had
developed distinctively “feminist’’ styles of organization and action, instituting
small non-hierarchical groups such as the consciousness raising group, as the