Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her

By Susan Griffin

Book Overview

In this famously provocative cornerstone of feminist literature, Susan Griffin explores the identification of women with the earth--both as sustenance for humanity and as victim of male rage. Starting from Plato's fateful division of the world into spirit and matter, her analysis of how patriarchal Western philosophy and religion have used language and science to bolster their power over both women and nature is brilliant and persuasive, coming alive in poetic prose.
Griffin draws on an astonishing range of sources--from timbering manuals to medical texts to Scripture and classical literature--in showing how destructive has been the impulse to disembody the human soul, and how the long separated might once more be rejoined. Poet Adrienne Rich calls Woman and Nature "perhaps the most extraordinary nonfiction work to have merged from the matrix of contemporary female consciousness--a fusion of patriarchal science, ecology, female history and feminism, written by a poet who has created a new form for her vision. ...The book has the impact of a great film or a fresco; yet it is intimately personal, touching to the quick of woman's experience."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1619028379
• ISBN13: 9781619028371
• Release Date: September 2016
• Publisher: Counterpoint LLC
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Thank you Susan Griffin

This is one of the most important books of 'eco-feminism' in existence (although I would rather call it truth than feminism). This book inspired me to be courageous with my own thoughts and to enact a spoken word piece that I had been sitting on for weeks. Thank you Susan Griffin for exposing the truths of the oppression of women. I will be reading this book again and again. Paige Doughty

not just for women

Reading this book 15 years ago was like putting on my first pair of glasses -- everything was still there, but the details were SO much clearer! Every written record, every thought put to paper, is only a slant on reality, and should never be mistaken for reality itself. Thank you, Ms. Griffin, from a male reader.

I can't believe only two people have reviewed this book.

I can't believe only two people have reviewed this extraordinary and extraordinarily beautiful book. It is one of the most important books I've ever read. Using the words of scientific philosophers themselves (but putting them into a beautifully-written, poetic context) Susan Griffin brilliantly shows how the logic of science is fundamentally anti-life, and anti-woman. She juxtaposes this to some of the most wonderful embodied prose you could ever hope to read, and moves the reader from this alienated state of modern civilized people and back into our bodies. Words cannot do this book justice.

Making the Connections

This book is one of feminism's most unread classics. Griffin made the connections before Lacan and Butler to all the uses Western religion and philosophy has used language and dichotomies to bolster the power of men over women and nature. Her analysis is brilliant, clear, and persuasive. Read in conjunction with eco-feminist analysis, Griffin shows the necessary connections between the abuse of nature and the abuse of women through a rhetorical analysis that remains unmatched in its creativity, prose, and pertinance.