Our Mothers- EDIT

Though today in most household there is a patriarchal system in place with a man on top, there is typically a woman right below him on the totem pole. Over the past 50 years women have gained respect by proving themselves; in the workforce as professionals and in the home as mothers. In 2008 Hillary Clinton ran in the democratic presidential primary and came quite close to winning. At the same time Sarah Palin ran as the Vice Presidential Candidate for the republican party. 


The Care2 article "House Budget Would Decimate Women's Health Care in Cities and Rural Areas" Jodi Jacobson discusses the resolution that passed in the House of Representatives last week that takes away all funding to Planned Parenthood and the Governors of Vermont and Connecticut and the Mayor of New York City's reaction. Jacobson states that more than 90% of Planned Parenthood's services are preventative measures ie; breast and cervical exams and STD testing, yet a vote has passed for funding to cease, for political reasons. Women in society today can run for president or vice president and have gained so much respect, yet still basic rights are taken away from them. 


Overtime, the master narrative of the world has changed. In "Radical Ecology" Carolyn Merchant states that previous cultures had an

"image of the earth as a living organism and nurturing mother [which] served as a cultural constraint restricting the actions of human beings"(43). 

With the rise of capitalism after the renaissance there was also a rise in commercial and industrial development, which lead to the destruction of the "nurturing mother". The earths metaphor was changing. She was previously viewed similar to a human, now he was seen as a profit, in the form of coal and gold. Today nature is seen as a machine: "matter is made up of atoms, colors occur by the reflection of light waves of differing lengths, bodies obey the law of inertia, and the sun is the center of our solar system". 


Just as the treatment of "mother earth" changes over time in "Radical Ecology", so changes the way humans treat our human mothers today in politics and government. This brings us back to Val Plumwood's dualism from "Feminism and the Mastery of Nature" , of masculine/feminine with the government; the decision making body being the reasonable, masculine one looking down on the the emotional, feminine one. 

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