ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
48
part of an emerging radical feminist/ecological cannon, was influential in
revealing the socially constructed correspondence between ideas of "woman’
and ‘nature’ within capitalist patriarchy. In 1980, Carolyn Merchant published
an
important
feminist perspective
on
the
scientific
revolution,
further
contributing to this newly developing feminist ecological literature. Merchant’s
book, The Death of Nature, discussed the historical relationship between
capitalism, modem science, and women’s oppression.11 Merchant, a socialist
feminist, articulated how patriarchy and capitalism functioned together to
control both ‘woman’ and ‘nature’.
During these years, the body politic expanded to address not only
understandings of women’s physical survival and vitality, but ideas of ‘global’
survival in general. Once early feminists asserted that ‘patriarchy5 had invaded
their very bodies, it wasn’t a big leap for them to assert that the same system
had invaded the rest of the natural world as well. However, the ways in which
women articulated the causes of ecological problems varied immensely. In
both the WITCH movement and in the writings of Merchant, there is a critique
of capitalism that names capitalism in particular, not just ‘patriarchy’ in general,
as a primary cause of ecological malaise. In contrast, Susan Griffin’s book
displays the ‘universalizing tendency’ that marked much of 1970s radical
feminism; a tendency to identify ‘man’ in the abstract as the cause of ecological
injustice:
The fact that man does not consider himself a part of nature, but
indeed considers himself superior to matter, seemed to me to gain
significance when placed against man’s attitude that woman is both
inferior to him and closer to nature. Hence this book called Woman
and Nature grew.12
Yet while Griffin reproduces the essentialist tendency that had emerged within
cultural feminism, she does extend a radical feminist analysis of social
hierarchy to an exploration of ecological concerns. According to Griffin,
problems of sexism and ecological malaise are caused by men who regard
themselves as ‘superior to’, rather than ‘part of, nature. Thus in Woman and
Nature, Griffin suggests the idea of a potentially complementary relationship
between society and nature, given the right social conditions.
By the early eighties, feminists began to define the organic sensibility
latent within radical feminist body politics in more explicitly ecological terms.13
Radical feminists began to develop the idea of a time that was prior to social
and ecological injustice, a time in which ‘women’ had more power and control
over their everyday relationships with each other and with nature. Women
began to cultivate a desire for nature that conveyed a yearning for a more
cooperative way of life free of sexism and ecological degradation.