Early ecofeminist debates of the seventies and eighties in Barcelona: Translations and reception

Abstract

In 1974, the French libertarian thinker Françoise d'Eaubonne (1920-2005) coined the term "ecofeminism" in Le feminisme ou la mort. She argues that, once a woman owns her own body, a new non-consumer, environmentalist and feminist path will begin. Despite not thriving in France, Eaubonne's theses aroused the interest of radical American feminism in the 1970s, which questioned the medicalization of women's health. In Catalonia, after the publication of Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir in the sixties, other influential voices from abroad would follow, including those of radical stamp, which, within the framework of the Consciousness-Raising (CR) groups, introduced the first ecofeminist debates. After contextualizing the origin of ecofeminism and its relationship with the American radical feminist movement, as well as introducing post-Franco feminist intellectual spaces, this paper focuses on the reception of various works related to a new philosophy of women's bodies, as opposed to the National-Catholic conception under Francoism: from translations such as the anthology Hablan las Women's Lib (movimiento de liberación de la mujer) (1972), edited by Maria Josep Ragué, and the manual of alternative gynecology, translated into more than thirty languages, Nuestros cuerpos, nuestras vidas. Colectivo del libro de Salud de las Mujeres de Boston (1982), to the series Manuales de Salud (1981-1989) published by laSal, Edicions de les Dones.