Fiche de lecture- "Le féminisme ou la mort", Françoise D'Eaubonne

Le Féminisme ou la Mort (Feminism or death) was written by the French essayist and philosopher Françoise D’Eaubonne (1920-2005), between 1971 and 1974. Radical libertarian feminist and theorist of the ecofeminism, D’Eaubonne co-founded the Women’s Liberation Movement, an autonomous and non-mixed movement that protest for the free disposal of women’s bodies and challenges the patriarchal society, at the end of the 1960s- in a global context of the expansion of the second wave feminism and the politics ideals of libertarian movements. The essay has also been written in the wake of the May 68 events and the new concerns for ecology, born from the birth of political ecology and the oil shocks, or the Meadows Report of 1972.

After a first part focused on the specificity of oppression against women and on the explanation of all the dimensions of the phallocratic (1) system - she mentions, among other, household work, invisible and free but indispensable to the construction of paid and "productive" work; the control of women's fertility by males; or the continuum of women's economic-sexual exchange and the oppression of the Eros – the book's second part focuses on "The time of ecofeminism" (p.275). This reading note will be more interested in this second part, even if I will embed several elements of the whole book. Thus, the author has the specificity of intersecting the feminist struggle with the ecological struggle very early.

Firstly, let’s begin with the explanation of the author’s thesis in this book and the explanation of the title. The book allows us to perceive the patriarchal character of the generalized murder of the environment. It rejects reformism and instead calls for a mutation to revolutionize the very foundations of a system she calls 'phallocratic'. D'Eaubonne argues that the whole humanity is in crisis and if the world does not mutate to new foundations, based on “Feminine” values (as a socially constructed category), thereby bringing down phallocratism, it is the life of the whole planet that is condemned, hence her assert "feminism or death". Noting the danger of the planet's death due to demographic insanity and the destruction of resources, she appeals to the entire responsibility of the Male System for these two perils, the logical outcome of two parallel discoveries that gave power to men 50 centuries ago: its ability to sow the earth as well as women. His seizure of fertility and fecundity would then explain the over-exploitation, through extractivism and women's fertility. In other words, she proposes a feminist re-reading of history in which she explains that the destruction of the environment is the consequence of a phallocratic system originating in male agricultural techniques.

In this context, D'Eaubonnne calls for the transfer of power to women and then its direct destruction by them, to achieve an anti-authoritarian organization of society and the collective provision of the sources of production. Her ideas overlap with those of Murray Bookchin and his libertarian social ecology, the only possibility to “still have a future" (p.280). She thus calls for the destruction of power by women for an egalitarian management of a world to be reborn.

For the author, it is logical that ecology, as "the science that studies the relationship between living beings and the physical environment in which they evolve"(p.212), necessarily intersects with gender relations. The main subject of ecofeminism is therefore not women but all living beings that die from patriarchy, from the immigrant prostitute to the murdered trans person, from the tree in the Amazon Forest to the cow in the slaughterhouse. Far from putting forward the claims of a homogeneous group, they bring together the diversity of conditions and identities, responding to all the struggles’parcelization. In fact, ecofeminism posits that social relations against gender, race and class are inseparable from our attitude towards the environment around us, thus anchoring it in the debates on environmental philosophy that criticizes social Darwinism. Besides, we could think about (among other: Susan Griffin, Starhawk, Margot Adler etc) Carolyn Merchant who demonstrated that the historical shift from seeing Earth as a living organism to seeing it as a machine was consequently mobilized to justify domination over both women and nature (Merchant, 1980).

Besides, at the political level, the book points out that capitalism and the struggle of class is not a sufficient matrix in order to explain the systemic domination of women and nature. In this vein, the Afro-American writter and poter Audre Lorde said, "The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house"; or also Hubertine Auclert who, during her speech at the third Labor Congress (1879), underlining the paradox when socialist class are fighting against the ruling class when they oppress themselves class of population : women. Also, the author's anti-authoritarian vision invites us to question, in a larger point of view, the anarchist and libertarian traditions; whose contributions to the modern environmental debate are particularly highlighted today (2); as political philosophy that argue that at the very base of the ecological problem are the structures of a certain power. Indeed, it is interesting to return to Godwin's, Bakunin's or Kropotkin's criticism of the formation of the modern state, dangerously concentrating force and power in the hands of a privileged minority of a given epoch (priests, nobles, aristocrats, bourgeois and then bureaucrats, and then financiers), and anarchist philosophy generally maintains that it is the hierarchical sensibility that developed the dominion of nature.

D'Eaubonne's feminist anarchism thus adds a matrix here: the fact that these privileged minorities are each time men. Finally, I would like to stress out the fact that if ecofeminist movements mostly stay away from organized power (except maybe Sandrine Rousseau this year) and come from civil society (we could think about the Chipko movement in India, the environmental justice movements in New Orléans after Katrina’s hurricane, or women mobilizing against the sitting of a landfill where they live in Latin America), it does not take away from their very essence, which is political, drawing rather the contours of the expression of new forms of politics.

Now, let’s put the book onto contemporary political debates. In a society tired of systemic warfare, witnessing the rise of surveillance capitalism (Soshana, 2020) or the life-saving technology ideology, it seems urgent to completely reinvent our political imaginations and I believe that eco-feminism is a fascinating entry point. It is true that the phallocratic core of the domination of man over woman resists any reshuffling of the order and new development of oppressive structures involving a certain type of thinking, belief in power and technology are witnessed in history.

Therefore, why not evaluate the relationship of man to man, and of man to the environment, in relation to the relationship of man to woman? However, the way in which ecology divides us today invites us to get out of Manichaeism because there are not two clearly identifiable camps: the earth-livings against the destroyers, the life against the economy, nor even men against women.

Besides, the criticism that could be made for this book is that it does not really consider a de-colonial perspective of the subject and the author's status as a white Western feminist. Indeed, D’Eaubonne calls women to a "strike of the bellies" but the demographic preoccupations of the author can hide an ordinary racism, criticizing the high birth rate of the countries of the "South". We could see a somewhat paternalistic vision of the countries of the "Third World", backward or who have not yet woken up, while however, the eco-feminism (even if not necessarily called like that) is developing widely throughout the world, as evidenced by the documentary Ni Las Mujeres Ni La Tierra (by Marine Allard, Lucie Assemat, Coline Dhaussy) for example. Ecofeminism is intrinsically linked to anti-racist struggles and the philosopher Val Plumwood perfectly reminds it us when she analyses the colonial structures at work in Australia (and the strategies of domination of the Western colonizers over the indigenous peoples) with regard to the relationship that man maintains with nature, the "more-than-human world". In the same way, Vandana Shiva militates for a reappropriation of the land of Indian peasants by proposing an economy of reciprocity based on "feminine" values. Here, I am not affirming the existence of intrinsically feminine values, which would amount to naturalizing the relationship of domination of men over women, but rather that they are socially constructed values. The psychologist Serge Moscovici maintained that nature does not exist in itself but it is a social construction that does not exist outside society, a notion that legitimizes the social order by naturalizing it.

Ecofeminism is thus a very interesting environmental ethics: its late (and slow) media diffusion in France and in the French political field, as well as the recent republication of D’Eubonnne invites us to look back at theories dating from the 1970s, while still being extremely topical.

(1) Phallocratism: The term refers to a misogynistic and patriarchal social structure in which dominance is exercised by related men. A mental structure and a historically dated political and social fact, D'Eaubonne dates phallocratism to 3000 BC, when the male realized that he had the power to control agriculture (the fertility of the land) and the fertility of the female. She speaks of the "great defeat of the female sex" when women, until then defenders of agricultural wealth against male hunters, lost control of the land. This universally sexist conduct of male society, having control over the female body, thus has its roots long before Greco-Roman times, feodlism or capitalism, all of which are systems based on the same values but where power has passed from the hands of one category of man to another. The paleoanthropologist Pascal Picq traces phallocracy even in various species of great apes and the development of such organization since the Paleolithic favored a general tendency until the Neolithic when we witness an overall devaluation of women’s activities.

Auclert Hubertine, Discours lors du 3e Congrès Ouvrier, 1879, https://www.lelivrescolaire.fr/page/6095395 Documentaire de Marine Allard, Lucie Assemat, Coline Dhaussy, 2018, http://www.film-documentaire.fr/4DACTION/w_fiche_film/56204_1

Merchant Carolyn, The death of nature: women, ecology and the scientific revolution, 1980

Thesis Project of Léo Grillet (with whom I was in contact with) , on the environmental history of anarchism and ideas developed in the paper from D.F.White, Gideon Kossof, Anarchisme, libertarisme et environmentalisme: la pensée anti-autoritaire et la quête de sociétés auto-organisée, Dans Écologie & Politique, 2011, https://www.cairn.info/revue-ecologie-et-politique1-2011-1-page-145.htm

Zuboff Soshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2020, Zulma