“Forty Years On: Women Lawyers? Still on That? and Ecofeminism . . . Again?”

Forty years ago, environmentally concerned law students put hope for sustainability in two trends. First, the burgeoning number of women law-school students held promise: upon reaching professional stride in their forties and fifties (the late 1980s and 1990s), surely their influence would disabuse law and society of enough of its patriarchal, hierarchical domination—domination over nature here—to move society toward a new, sustainable course. Second—and related—the emerging philosophy of ecofeminism promised to call out the ecocrisis and push on with positive responses. But women never assumed influential roles in the important “big firms,” and ecofeminism lost focus and dissipated in a hail of infighting and misogynistic ridicule.

After the inevitable collapse of corporate-capitalism, though, the sensibilities of women lawyers and of ecofeminism will prevail.