In early 2022 Verso Books printed, under the title Feminism or Death, a translation by Ruth Hottell of Françoise d'Eaubonne's 1974 manifesto, Le féminisme ou la mort. The left-wing publisher heralded the release as a major event. D'Eaubonne is widely credited for the term ecofeminism and, far less credibly from Black and Indigenous vantage points, for the very politics of ecofeminism.1 The long-awaited translation, delivered in a time of great challenges for environmentalism and feminism alike, promised ecofeminists proficient in English but not in French at once a new resource and an origin story. This narrative, like any that locates solutions to the problems of the present in a hitherto untranslated past, does not culminate in a happy or unhappy ending but peters out. No object is entirely adequate to the fantasy of recovering lost foundations.
This is what Feminism or Death supplies: a document, and a...
