What Is Shared Oppression

Women and the Environment: The Shared Oppression

Today, earth is associated with women and titled “Mother Earth”. It has been done so because it makes it easier to turn this non-human object into a human object and gives it a personality. By making earth as a mother, a nurturing woman, we give earth a new meaning. We try then to use that to gain respect for our earth and to have people rethink their damaging ways to our earth. Though there are negative and positive consequences for placing a title on our earth, it brings up the question, can we equally break the oppression on women and on our earth together? Though there are down falls to using the earth as a ‘Mother Earth’ the positive effects out way the negative. Women are central when …show more content…
Women make up 70% of the population under the poverty belt and it is the people in poverty who face food shortages first, have no education on what is going on, and don’t always have shelter or lose shelter due to weather from climate change. Women are also most likely to give up eating and drinking water during shortages to provide for the family since her role isn’t valued. In Staying Alive, Shiva touches on this in why climate change needs to target all people including women, “this poverty crisis touches women most severely, first because they are the poorest among the poor, and then because, with nature, they are the primary sustainers of society,” (5, Shiva). Clearly, women and environmental issues go hand in hand. Many organizations such as, Women’s Environmental Network and Women’s Earth & Climate Action Network, use this as their base for why climate change is important and why women are targeted for helping fight. By making the earth ‘Mother earth’ then we are creating more space for women to feel connected to this fight for oppression to end, not only for us but for the earth. This helps bring cause to both issues. Both must be faced together in many key areas that can’t stand by themselves to be faced without each …show more content…
Why do men feel the need to exploit the earth and “conquer” it? These questions can be answered with social construction, that general observations have been exploded to extremes for expectations of the rest of the population. Shiva brings this conversation to colonization, “development was thus reduced to a continuation of the process of colonization; it became an extension of the project of wealth creation in modern western patriarchy’s economic vision, which was based on the exploitation or exclusion of women (of the west and non-west), on the exploitation and degradation of nature, and on the exploitation and erosion of other cultures,” (3, Shiva). Someone had to rule, men thought of themselves as above women because, generally, they were seen as being more capable of the work needed in a community. These men who think higher of themselves and disregard women are a part of the problem and critique the thinking of the earth as a mother. When the earth is seen as a mother, some feel that they can ruin her just as if it was another women that they don’t see worthy. They put their already horrid views of women and mothers onto the earth that weren’t on the earth before. Many men, though not all do and not all are okay with this, feel that ‘raping’ our mother earth isn’t bad because women get raped all the time. False! Though it is wrong, many people feel that women don’t matter, therefore the earth doesn’t matter as our mother. While it