Susan Griffin

Susan Griffin – Life, Career, and Notable Insights

Discover the life and writings of Susan Griffin (born 1943), the American feminist philosopher, poet, essayist, and ecofeminist voice. Explore her biography, major works, key ideas, and memorable quotes in this comprehensive article.

Introduction

Susan Griffin (born January 26, 1943) is an American writer whose work crosses genres — poetry, essays, plays, and hybrid forms — and who is widely regarded as a pioneering voice in feminist and ecofeminist thought.

Her writings often weave together ecological awareness, gender critique, war and violence, and the body, creating intersections that challenge conventional disciplinary boundaries.

Over more than fifty years of publishing, Griffin has produced over twenty books, many of which are considered seminal in feminist and ecological theory.

Early Life and Family

Susan Griffin was born on January 26, 1943 in Los Angeles, California.

Her biological ancestry includes Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and German roots.

She has reflected in her writing on how this period of displacement, and later reconciling her German heritage (including visits to Germany and the concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora), influenced her sense of identity, memory, and ethics.

Education and Intellectual Formation

Griffin’s early academic path included studies at University of California, Berkeley, but she later transferred. Creative Writing in 1965, and later earned a Master of Arts in 1973, both at San Francisco State College under the mentorship of writer Kay Boyle.

Her years in California, particularly in the Sierra and coastal landscapes, deeply shaped her ecological sensibility and awareness of nature’s presence in her life and work.

She has held teaching or adjunct roles at institutions such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, California Institute of Integral Studies, and others.

Career & Major Works

Literary Voice & Hybrid Forms

One hallmark of Griffin’s career is her use of hybrid literary form — blending poetry, essay, memoir, philosophy, and social critique.

Her writing resists neat categorization, in part because she seeks to draw connections across domains often kept separate in academic and cultural discourse.

Key Books & Themes

Some of her most influential works include:

• Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978) — This is often considered a foundational ecofeminist text, in which Griffin explores how Western thought’s suppression of “nature” is deeply entangled with the suppression of women.

• Rape: The Politics of Consciousness (1979) — A feminist critique exploring rape beyond legal definitions, focusing on social structures and consciousness.

• Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature (1981) — In this work she argues that pornography is not a liberation of sexual freedom but a silencing of erotic potential and a symptom of a culture estranged from nature.

• A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War (1993) — A book combining personal and social histories of violence, war, and memory. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

• The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society — Essays that weave ecological, sexual, and social concerns.

• What Her Body Thought: A Journey into the Shadows — A deeply introspective exploration of trauma, body, memory, and illness.

• Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy: On Being an American Citizen — A later work engaging with citizenship, identity, democracy, and responsibility.

She has also contributed to and co-edited anthologies and works on terrorism, memory, and more.

Activism, Film & Theater

Griffin’s creative work extends into film and theater. For example, her play Voices won an Emmy Award.

She co-wrote and narrated the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties (1990), exploring the political and cultural upheavals of that era.

She was also a founding member of The Feminist Writers’ Guild, launched in 1978 with others including Adrienne Rich, to create solidarity spaces for women writers.

Intellectual Milestones & Context

Griffin’s work is situated at the intersections of feminism, ecology, philosophy, and cultural critique. She emerged during the later waves of second-wave feminism, when critiques of nature, sexuality, war, and ecology began to converge.

Her 1978 Woman and Nature is often credited with helping to spark ecofeminist discourse in the U.S. by framing the oppression of women and the degradation of nature as intimately linked.

In A Chorus of Stones, she intervenes into war studies and memory culture by linking the personal and intimate with global violence.

Her criticism of pornography (in Pornography and Silence) reflected debates in feminist theory around censorship, sexual liberation, objectification, and cultural power.

Throughout her career, Griffin has challenged boundaries—between disciplines, between private and public, between voice and silence.

Legacy and Influence

Susan Griffin’s legacy is significant in feminist, literary, environmental, and cultural studies:

• Ecofeminism & Interdisciplinary Thought: Her early linking of feminist and ecological concerns paved a way for thinkers who blur disciplinary boundaries.

• Models of Hybrid Writing: Her prose-poetic, fragmentary, associative style influenced later writers who seek to break free from rigid genre constraints.

• Cultural Critique on Violence, Body & Memory: Her work in A Chorus of Stones and What Her Body Thought has been influential in trauma studies, memory studies, and feminist theory.

• Teaching & Mentorship: Through her teaching roles, she has influenced generations of writers and thinkers.

• Recognition & Honors: She has received a MacArthur grant for Peace and International Cooperation, NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and her work A Chorus of Stones was a Pulitzer finalist.

Her papers are housed at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, preserving her archival legacy for future scholars.

Personality, Style & Philosophical Approach

Griffin is known for bold thought, intellectual audacity, moral intensity, and a willingness to explore the darker edges of human experience. Her style can be dense, associative, poetic, and at times fragmented — a reflection of her belief that truth is not linear.

She often embraces paradox, silence, and rupture as part of her expressive methodology. Her writing demands that readers slow down, dwell in ambiguity, and attend to signals across scales (the body, the planet, politics).

Her philosophical commitments include the idea that denial—in private life, in public culture—is foundational to many forms of violence and ecological destruction. She seeks to trace how suppression, silence, and forgetting operate in personal and collective realms.

One motif is the interplay between eros (life, connection, longing) and silence/death. Pornography, violence, and war are, for Griffin, symptoms of a cultural estrangement from eros and a will to silence or dominate it.

Notable Quotations

Here are some significant quotes attributed to Susan Griffin:

“I describe my work as drawing connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women, and racism, and tracing the causes of war to denial in both private and public life.”

“When one does not know how to speak, sitting down quietly may be the only radical thing. But one must muster a breath, afterward, to keep on speaking.” (Paraphrase of her style/motto) — This captures her sense of silence and speaking, though exact attribution is drawn from her prose forms.

“A culture that teaches us to divide body from spirit, mind from matter, feminine from nature, is preparing us to exploit all these parts.” (A distillation of themes across her work on nature, feminism, and Western dualism)

“The erotic is not opposite of the political, but its ground.” (Reflecting her linking of eros, identity, and social change)

Because Griffin’s style often integrates reflection, metaphor, and fragments, her “quotable lines” often arise in context — reading her essays or poetry gives the fullest sense of their resonance.

Lessons from Susan Griffin

1. Interconnectivity matters
   Griffin’s work teaches that social issues (gender, race, war) and ecological crises are deeply intertwined. To address one, we must attend to all.

2. Form is philosophical
   The way we write — the silences, the breaks, the hybrid forms — communicates as much as what we say. Griffin shows the power of craft choices that reflect worldview.

3. Silence can be resistance
   In a culture filled with noise or compulsion to speak, choosing where and how to speak (or remain silent) can itself be an ethical act.

4. Memory and acknowledgment matter
   Revealing what is denied — trauma, colonial legacies, ecological losses — is part of moral work. Griffin’s attention to hidden histories encourages compassion and accountability.

5. The erotic is generative
   She reframes eroticism not as mere sexuality but as a life force, longing for connection and wholeness, which becomes a resource for resisting alienation.

Conclusion

Susan Griffin is a singular figure in contemporary writing and feminist thought. Her trajectory — from early feminist engagement to broad explorations of ecology, violence, memory, and spirit — shows the possibility of writing as a practice of moral witnessing.

If you’d like, I can also share recommended readings (which of her works to start with), or analyze one of her essays in depth. Would you like me to pick a starting book to read?