ABSTRACT
In Western countries, the 1980s saw the crisis-ridden end of the long post-war economic boom. The era of housewives, with stable marriages of male breadwinners and female homemakers began to be slowly transformed. Women's movements were part of the storm which had shaken up the social sciences. The emphasis on patriarchy as a source of harmful ideas and systems of thought is shared by a number of leading feminist environmentalist philosophers and activists, particularly those close to radical feminist thought. In contrast to philosophical and ecofeminist work emphasising continuity of patriarchal systems of thought, the 1980s and 1990s also saw a number of publications focused on profound discontinuities in patriarchal ideas. In the 1970s, even those feminists who saw patriarchy as one transhistorical system noted that it looked a bit different in different times and places. The difficult issues feminists in the 1970s tackled by thinking with patriarchy cut across deeply held convictions and the fabric of people's everyday lives.
