Comment on Eco-feminism (150 words) (2017, 10 Marks)
Eco-feminism holds that the domination of women and the domination of nature spring from one patriarchal logic, so neither can end without the other. The term was coined by Françoise d’Eaubonne in Le Féminisme ou la mort (1974), and the idea joins feminism to environmentalism.
Core arguments
- Conceptual. Western thought runs on paired oppositions — culture/nature, reason/emotion, man/woman — in which the first term rules and the second serves. Carolyn Merchant (The Death of Nature, 1980) traced how the scientific revolution recast nature from living organism to machine, licensing its mastery.
- Southern and materialist. Vandana Shiva (Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India, 1988) calls Western development maldevelopment. It violates the feminine principle (prakriti), displaces subsistence economies and devalues women’s ecological knowledge. Maria Mies (Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, 1986) showed capitalism resting on the unpaid work of women and colonies. With Shiva she co-wrote Ecofeminism (1993), arguing for a subsistence perspective.
- Illustration. In Chipko, women of Reni village led by Gaura Devi (1974) hugged trees to stop commercial felling. Degradation reaches rural women first as longer hours fetching water, fuel and fodder.
Two strands
Cultural or spiritual eco-feminism celebrates women’s supposed closeness to nature. Social or materialist eco-feminism locates the link in the work women are assigned.
Critique
- Essentialism. If women are naturally nurturing and men destructive, feminism has revived the argument from nature it exists to refute. Idealising women as nature’s guardians can also load conservation on to their unpaid labour.
- Feminist environmentalism. Bina Agarwal (“The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India”, 1992) grounds women’s stake in the gendered division of labour and property, not biology. Class and caste divide women’s interests. Her Gender and Green Governance (2010) found that community forest groups with more women on their executive committees tended to show better forest outcomes. The lesson is that rights and presence matter, not essence.
- Romanticism. Ramachandra Guha (The Unquiet Woods, 1989) read Chipko chiefly as a peasant struggle over forest rights. Critics also fault Shiva for idealising pre-colonial rural life.
Conclusion
Eco-feminism rightly shows that ecological and gender injustice share a structure and fall hardest on poor rural women. Its defensible form is materialist, not mystical: secure women’s land and forest rights and their voice in resource governance, rather than cast them as nature’s custodians by birth.