THE ECOFEMINIST DESIRE FOR NATURE
deployed
by
white
feminists
at
the
time.
This
understanding
45
of
a
“domestic/public split” can be traced back to Simone de Beauvoir’s 1958
publication of The Second Sex; which rooted the universal cause of women’s
oppression to be their ghettoization within the ‘embodied’ realm of domestic
sphere and their exclusion from the public sphere of work and culture. For de
Beauvoir, women’s liberation would follow the liberation of women from this
embodied domestic realm into the public sphere enjoyed by men.
As bell hooks articulated in her 1984 essay ‘Rethinking the Nature of
Work,” the idea that “all women” would be liberated by moving beyond the
domestic sphere was based on a classist and racist set of assumptions:
Attitudes towards work in much feminist writings reflect bourgeois
class biases. Middle-class women shaping feminist thought assumed
that the most pressing problem for women was the need to get
outside the home and work—to cease being “just” housewives...They
were so blinded by their own experiences that they ignored the fact
that a vast majority of women were already working outside the
home, working in jobs that neither liberated them from dependence
on men nor made them economically self-sufficient. 5
In this way, questions of race and class complexified previously universal
notions of gender and the body tied to the feminist project. No longer was
“woman” a universal subject tapped within a timeless domestic sphere, the
escape from which would provide universal liberation. Indeed, for poor
women of color who had been “working” outside the home for centuries,
there had clearly been no such liberation.
As the writers in This' Bridge illustrated, the body politic, originally
intended to counter the abstract politics of men in the New Left, had given rise
to a cultural feminism that presented a new set of abstractions. Just as the New
Left had organized its political agenda within liberal and universal categories of
‘man’, and ‘justice’ generalized from a particular privileged group of white men,
the radical feminist movement had organized its agenda around universal
categories of ‘woman’ and “domesticity” generalized from a privileged group of
white women. By failing to sufficiently articulate issues of race, class, and
ethnicity, radical feminists were unable to fully clarify the many social factors
that determine the particular ways in which women experience and resist
oppression. Audre Lorde, again, in her letter to Mary Daly, questioned Daly on
the white bias surrounding her body politics, stating:
You fail to recognize that, as women, there are (vital) differences
which we do not all share. For instance, breast cancer; three times the
number of unnecessary eventrations, hysterectomies and sterilizations
' as for white women; three times as many chances of being raped,