With its lucid and elegant prose, Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur had an electric effect when it was published in 1976, addressing the question that was driving a generation: women are despised by men and by women, Dinnerstein said, because women give birth and become the sole nurturers of infants. We have internalized a grotesque image of the female as the revered giver and the despised taker of life.
Dorothy’s solution to the misogynist dilemma this creates was practical: let men take an equal role in caring for babies and children. New generations will grow up feeling and committed to inherent equality, in full possession of both the nurturing and aggressive sides of themselves. To an extent, she has been proven correct. As more men become intimately involved in childrearing, sexism is chipped away generation by generation.
But another essential part of Dorothy’s argument - that which concerned our species’ ability to sustain a future on planet earth - got lost in the flurry of praise surrounding Mermaid and was never properly transmitted to the wider culture. Instead, her prescient fears about looming nuclear and ecological destruction lodged themselves among like-minded thinkers and activists in a vital part of the feminist movement called ‘ecofeminism.’
