ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
50
which
3,000
women
participated
demonstration in Washington DG.
in
a
massive
theatrical
ecofeminist
The WPA was an ecofeminist and
anti-militarist action whose “Unity Statement,” written collectively and arranged
by Grace Paley,
tied together issues of feminism,
capitalism,
ecology,
anti-racism, and anti-militarism:
With, that sense,
that ecological right, we oppose the financial
connections between the Pentagon and the multinational corporations
and banks that the Pentagon serves. Those connections are made of
gold and oil. We are made of blood and bone, we are made of the
sweet and finite resource, water. We will not allow these violent
games to continue. If we are here in our stubborn thousands today,
we will certainly return in the hundreds of thousands in the months
i
and years to come.
14
In the first WPA action (there was another the following year), activists used a
- style reminiscent of the WITCH actions, circling the Pentagon to express rage,
sadness, and fear about the history of male violence by performing street
theater on the Pentagon’s steps. While the WPAs echoed the sensibility of the
WITCH movement, they also echoed the domestic sensibility of an earlier
anti-nuclear movement of 1962, known as the 'Women’s Strike for Peace”
movement, in which women from across the country, identifying as 'mothers’
(rather than as feminists) demonstrated against the nuclear testing that had
taken place in the fifties.
Whereas radical feminism had been often criticized for espousing an
anti-mother sentiment (traced back to de Beauvoir’s assertion of women’s need
to transcend the maternal activities associated with the domestic sphere), early
ecofeminists reversed de Beauvoir’s assertion, arguing instead that women
must restore value to the roles of mothering and nurturing. This mofherist
sensibility (often blamed for creating yet another romantic essentialism) was
translated into the creation of a form of direct action that came to be associated
with ecofeminist actions in the future. Blending both ‘witchy’ and 'motherist’
sensibilities,
the WPAs created a new kind of distinctively ecofeminist
aesthetics. At the WPAs, women wove webs of yam containing symbols of
mothers’ everyday lives, such as aprons, clothespins, photographs of children
as well as artifacts from women’s everyday lives around fences, doors and
missile sites as described by Ynestra Ring:
We create an iconography designed to bring people to life—parading
with enormous puppets, quilting scenes from everyday life, weaving
the doors of the Pentagon closed with brilliantly colored yam,
waltzing
around
police
barricades,
shaking
down
fences,
spray-painting runways, placing photos of beloved places in nature