THE ECOFEMINIST DESIRE FOR NATURE
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TIhe Ant^NucIear Movement AncI EcofEMiNiST AcTivisM Of JUe EarIy 1 9 80s:
BRiNqiNq ToqEilHER Peace AncI Ecoloqy
During this time, another movement had been gaining steam. In the seventies,
anti-nuclear activism emerged as one of the most potent political forces within
the New Left. In particular, the nuclear issue brought together both radical
feminists involved in feminist peace politics and women interested in ecology.
While nuclear militarism resonated with concerns of feminists peace activists,
nuclear power became the focus for feminists concerned with problems of
ecology and health. Continuing to utilize the domestic/public framework
introduced in the 1960s, many radical feminists extended their critique of
“domestic” acts of male violence such as rape and battering, to include a
critique of “public” and institutional acts of male violence such as militarism. It
was in this context that many women began to make connections between the
domination of women in the domestic sphere (within personal, sexual
relationships) and the destruction of the natural world by public institutions
such as the military and the nuclear industry.
The feminist peace movement, emerging out of radical feminism and the
civil rights and anti-war movements, greatly informed a newly emerging
ecofeminist activism. Inspired by the philosophy of anti-racist peace activists
such as Barbara Deming, feminists had been developing an anti-militarist
movement in response to mounting U.S. aggression. Learning of the nuclear
testing in Nevada in the fifties and the subsequent rise in birth defects and
gynecological cancers, they also discovered the cunent problem of nuclear
waste for which there was no safe means of disposal. And while appreciating
the ecological implications of nuclear energy, feminists also addressed the
military implications' of an industry that produced plutonium necessary for
nuclear warheads. The issues of militarism, male violence, and ecology came
together to form a truly ecological, broad-based body politic.
In 1980, the crisis at the nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island served as
the catalyst for a beginning of ecofeminist direct action. This first major
ecofeminist event was initiated by feminist activists Ynestra Ring and Celeste
Wesson during an interview on WBAI radio in New York in which they
discussed the crisis from a specifically ecofeminist perspective. The following
April, Ring and Wesson, along with a group of other feminist, peace, and
environmental activists, organized “The Conference on Women and life on
Earth: Ecofeminism in the 80s” in which 800 women gathered in Amherst,
Massachusetts to address the nuclear question. Many of the conference
organizers and attendees identified as social anarchists who had been involved
in the anti-nuclear movement.
Out of this conference emerged an ecofeminist network that, in 1981,
planned he first ecofeminist action: he “Women’s Pentagon Action” (WPA) in