Ask anyone to name a female environmentalist, and the odds are they’ll mention Anita Roddick. And looking at how much she’s achieved in 30 years, I think this is well deserved. Since founding the Body Shop in 1976, Dame Anita has continued to work wonders for the green cause and for women everywhere. Let's have a look at the story so far.
After traveling extensively, Roddick founded the Body Shop, which quickly became a huge success. This gave rise to what is arguably Roddick's most notable achievement: the widespread backlash against animal testing in cosmetics. As the products became more popular, so did awareness of animal cruelty in the industry, and countless companies have been forced to revise their policies.
But Roddick's work reaches much further than just cruelty-free (and rather delicious) shower gel. She campaigns on almost every issue that affects her, from globalisation to global warming and fair trade. Care for the environment is always paramount in Roddick's business models, and the Body Shop recycled its containers and bottles from the start.
Perhaps controversially, Roddick has at times allied the human impact on the environment with male values, and sees the solution as being crucially female. In one of her articles, Roddick wrote: "It is no coincidence that women's rights win the spotlight as the global environmental crisis grows more urgent. If the dominant male values (aggressive, logical, hierarchical) come on strong as part of the problem, "feminine" values (compassionate, instinctive, interactive) suggest solutions.
In 1998, Roddick took the problem of beauty-fascism head on, and created a doll named Ruby the Anti-Barbie, a more 'realistically proportioned' fashion doll that was displayed in windows of the Body Shop. The doll was met with delight from women everywhere, and with horror by Mattel, the makers of Barbie. Roddick was particularly proud of the company's reaction.
Earlier in the year, it emerged that Roddick was chronically ill with hepititis C, an incurable condition that causes most sufferers constant tiredness and bouts of incapacity. Amazingly, Roddick contracted the virus in 1971, long before the Body Shop days, while giving birth to her youngest daughter. Her reaction: "It makes me even more determined to just get on with things." Not content with the things she had got on with in the past, Roddick has now become Patron of the Hepatitis C Trust.