The Feminist and the Environmental Movements

Contemporary ecofeminism thus joins various(a) groups, who may have come to their perspectives along quite vary r popes. For some, ecofeminism was a response to the challenge of radical feminism in the 1970s. For former(a)s, it was an alternative perhaps to Marxist feminism, based on a recognition that the characteristic oppressed member of the charitable sisterhood is not a worker in a sweatshop that a peasant woman on the land, or who has disoriented her land.

Turning first to the more philosophical boldness of the eco feminist movement, this side may be said to have grown out of the response to the challenge posed by the radical feminists in the 1970s. The radical feminists themselves had very mixed feelings about women and "character." One the 1 hand, the "natural" burden of reproduction was, in their view, the ultimate microbe of women's oppression. On the other hand, in the view of radicals like Adrienne Rich, if women's " nature" goaded men into oppressive acts precisely because of male fright of the female power that nature conveyed. "Men are grasping of women's reproductive powers. The jealousy stems largely from men's realization that 'all human life on the planet is born of woman,' that woman has a unique power to create life" (p. 79).

Thus, even the radicals, inquisitive as they were of the effects of the natural fact of reproduction upon wome

Males, by contrast, have in the westerly been imagined to embody something closer to pure estimation: lean, muscled, more mugwump of gross nature than the fecund female. Man, in the cartoon image, is fortify with his spear, his artificial, technological creation, to show that he is master of nature, and armed with his ennead to show that he is master of his woman. In the male conjuring trick version of the evolutionary diagram, as in the old range of mountains of being, "natural" woman occupies a lower rung than imperial beard man.

It is impossible to fully summarize the views of a movement as diverse as ecofeminism, particularly when the diversity extends to lifestyles.

The woman who workings as a health volunteer in a Third World country and the woman who travels into the wilderness to check up on Goddess ceremonies may find it difficult to find many nimble common concerns, or even a common run-in in which to discuss them, yet both represent facets of ecofeminism. The succeeding(a) sketch of ideas and values associated with ecofeminism is thus meant to be suggestive sooner than restricting.

Ortner, S. B. (1988). "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" In M. Pearsall, ed., Women and Values. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, pp. 62-74.

A distinctly feminist perspective upon nature is thus constructed out of the outlook and experience of women who could not be further removed from the Western academic settings in which feminist issues are most often discussed.

-- Nature / Culture and other dualisms. Ecofeminists reject dualism in general as a narrowly male and Western assumption. The view the long-standing Western division into mind and body to be a fallacy, a fallacy solely compounded with the Enlightenment and subsequent Western intellectual developments. The tension of the ecofeminists is on the continuity of nature and the continuity of experience. Dualism, and the separation into catagories of actors and acted-upons, is a direction in thought and action that leads both to the oppres
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