Françoise d´Eaubonne's Le Féminisme ou la Mort

It was not until the 1974 publication of Le Féminisme ou la Mort by French feminist author and civil rights activist Françoise d´Eaubonne (1920-2005) that a term to describe feminist efforts and attitudes towards environmental practices was coined: Ecofeminism. In her book, d´Eaubonne argues that many parallels exist between the patriarchal suppression of women and the suppression of nature, and this suppression results in environmental destruction. Since then, numerous theoretical and practical additions to d´Eaubonne’s argument have been made. Many begin by collapsing patriarchal dualisms:.male/female, nature/culture, and mind/body but come to fundamentally challege dominant epistemologies that inherently and efficiently bury other standpoints and ways of knowing. Issues such as the exploitation of nature by industrial resource consumption and Western paradigms of progress and technology have been explicitly designated as ecofeminist concerns. Furthermore, the ecofeminist movement strives for anti-oppression practices, meaning a society free of hierarchy, in which all living beings interact equally and are treated as parts of a common organism, the Earth.