Écoféminisme
Coined by Françoise d'Eaubonne in 1974 in *Le Féminisme ou la mort*, where it names the convergence of two struggles previously considered separate: that of women and that of ecology. The thesis: the domination of women and the destruction of nature are not two distinct evils but the two logical faces of the same power—what she calls the *« male System »*, which has seized both the earth (hence overexploitation and resource depletion) and women’s bodies (hence overpopulation). Escaping ecological peril thus requires dismantling this system, not “adjusting” growth.
un peu moins connaissent l’entière responsabilité du Système mâle, en tant que mâle (et non pas capitaliste ou socialiste) dans ces deux périls
The word appears at the end of the book, in the chapter that lends it its name. D’Eaubonne presents it as “an attempt to synthesize two struggles previously seen as separate: feminism and ecology.” The inspiration comes notably from Shulamith Firestone, whom she cites; the project takes shape in an “Ecology-Feminism Center,” and d’Eaubonne sees in it the seed of “a new humanism born with the irreversible end of male society.”
Her argument ties together the two threats she deems most urgent—overpopulation and resource destruction—to a single historical act. By seizing “the land, and thus fertility (later industry) and the womb of women (and thus fecundity),” male power has driven “the overexploitation of both,” giving rise to this “twin, parallel peril.” The way out is neither “matriarchy” nor “power to women,” but “the destruction of power by women”—a transformation, not a succession.
D’Eaubonne’s ecofeminism ≠ the essentialism that would cast women as “natural” allies of nature, intrinsically close to it. The text explicitly rejects any “essential woman”: “there is no more an ‘essential’ woman than there is a proletarian predisposed to be one.” What she challenges is a system—a social and productivist order dating back “fifty centuries”—not feminine essence. The responsibility she points to is that of “the male System, as male (and not capitalist or socialist)”: a relation of domination, not a nature.