Was there ecofeminism before Françoise d’Eaubonne coined the term in 1974? If ecofeminism makes visible the intimate connection and mutual reinforcement of the “domination of women and the domination of nature,” can we apply this term retroactively to cultural production by women who denounced this intertwined patriarchal control of women and nature? This chapter asserts the existence of an early form of ecofeminist cultural practice in two texts from before the Spanish Civil War: El metal de los muertos (1920) by Concha Espina, and Mineros (1932– 1937; published 2018) co-authored by Carmen Conde and María Cegarra. A well-known social novel and a recently recovered play, these two texts pioneered environmental and social outlooks on the predatory extractive activities unleashed by the liberal regimes of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in the southern peripheries of Huelva and Cartagena. These two areas of Southern Spain were two of the largest terrestrial repositories of copper and silver-rich lead respectively, and have been mined over thousands of years. In these two regions, industrial activity has generated environmental and social wastelands that could be fittingly described as “sacrifice zones,” a term first developed to “designate areas dangerously contaminated as a result of … mining.” Both texts seek to represent the entangled suffering of humans and the earth in the mining sites of Río Tinto and the Sierra Minera and tackle the long histories of resistance to social and ecocidal depredations with literary responses that seek to expose these struggles. I argue that the denunciation of patriarchal abuses over the bodies of other humans and of the environment, the outlining of capitalist extractivism as a gendered form of violence, and the emergence of feminist outlooks on the interrelated issues of environmental and social injustice are some of the elements that allow us to think of an early form of ecofeminism from the Southern trenches that predates its Northern academic definitions in the 1970s in France and the US.

These two texts not only broadcast the active role of women as leading characters within their fictional figurations; their female authors also demonstrate the agency of women writers in Spain in the first half of the twentieth century and their consciously ecofeminist ideological analyses of capitalistic patriarchy as a destructive force that needed to be opposed.