47
THE ECOEEMINIST DESIRE FOR NATURE
non-hierarchical, and heir style was theatrical, humorous, and passionately
strident. They expressed a brilliance of wit in heir ever-changing acronyms
ranging from Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, and
Women Infuriated at Taking Care of Hoodlums, to Women Interested in
Toppling Consumption Holidays.
A coven in New York City leafleted a
statement hat would anticipate later ecofeminist writings:
WITCH is an all-woman Everything. It’s heater, revolution, magic,
terror, joy, garlic flowers, spells. It’s an awareness hat witches and
Gypsies were he original guerrillas and resistance fighters against
oppression—particularly he oppression of women—down through
he ages. Witches have always been women who dared to be:
groovy,
courageous,
aggressive,
intelligent,
non-conformist,
explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary.
(This possibly explains why nine million of hem have been burned.)
Witches
were
he
first
Friendly Heads
and
Dealers,
he
first
birth-control practitioners and abortionists, he first alchemists (turn
dross into gold and you devalue he whole idea of money!). They
bowed to no man, being he living remnants of he oldest culture of
all—one in which men and women were equal sharers in a truly
cooperative society, before he death-dealing sexual, economic and
spiritual repression of he Imperialist Phallic Society took over and
began to destroy nature and human society. 8
In one action, a coven in Washington D.C. ‘hexed5 he United Fruit Company
because of their “oppressive policy on he Third World and on secretaries in its
offices at home.55 A leaflet distributed at he demonstration contained he spell:
Bananas and rifles, sugar and deah,
war for profit, tarantulas5 breath,
United Fruit makes lots of loot,
he CIA is in its boot.9
As early as 1969, women were beginning to bring together an analysis of
militarism, capitalism, sexism, and colonialism that was regarded as destroying
“nature and human society.55 In this action we see a light-hearted, yet
significant, backward-looking5 impulse that will mark both cultural feminism
and later forms of ‘cultural5 ecofeminism. The witty and romantic appeal to a
Witch culture5 of he past represents an attempt by a group of mainly white
suburban youth to invoke he idea of an era that was more cooperative and
ecological.
In 1978, Susan Griffin wrote Woman and Nature}0 a book-length prose
poem that juxtaposed objectified representations of women with managerial
writings about plant and animal ‘nature5. Griffin’s book, which soon became