tic oppressed member of the human sisterhood is not a worker in a sweatshop but a peasant woman on the land, or who has lost her land.
Turning first to the more philosophical side of the ecofeminist 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 "nature." One the one hand, the "natural" burden of reproduction was, in their view, the ultimate source 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 fear of the female power that nature conveyed. "Men are jealous 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, skeptical as they were of the effects of the natural fact of reproduction upon women, could acknowledge the power of this imagery by using it themselves. Their opponents, more sympathatic to reproduction as a facet of female identity, were even more draw a positive connection between women and nature. Carol. P. Christ does not speak directly of the ecofeminist interpretation of nature in her argument for "why women need the Goddess" (1988), but she is surely touching on the same issue that Adrienne Rich was, though from a veary different perspective, when she writes that "the denigration of the female body and its powers is ... expressed in Western culture's attitudes toward childbirth" (1988, p. 215).
If the debate over reproduction was one source for a specifically ecological interpretation of feminism (and feminist interpretation of ecology), another was the condition of women in the Third World. Marxist feminism led the way toward a recog
...