ABSTRACT
This chapter presents one of ecofeminism's early manifestations, in the antimilitarist movement, in ways that include its being an intervention into radical environmentalisms, but that also explore the development of ecofeminism as a process of coalescing different movements. It suggests that this coalescence is implicated in various essentialist elements of antimilitarist ecofeminisms. Antimilitarist ecofeminists in the 1980s were attempting to create unity between very different kinds of women and to connect radical analyses from a number of disparate, though related, social movements. The chapter explores the uses of essentialist formulations for feminist peace activism and at the same time point to the ways in which radically democratic movements constantly revise and contest political identities. Early ecofeminism struggled to move women from being a fulcrum of militarist ideology to a position of resistance to militarism, to which women are particularly vulnerable in a patriarchal society.
