"In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism." -- Susan Griffin
Susan Griffin is an eco-feminist author. She describes her work as "draw[ing] connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women and racism, and trac[ing] the causes of war to denial in both private and public life." She received a MacArthur grant for Peace and International Cooperation, an NEA Fellowship, and an Emmy Award for the play Voices.
Susan Griffin was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1943 and has resided in California since then.
"A story is told as much by silence as by speech.""Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.""I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves.""I think we actually punish children out of their relationship with their bodies... we categorically separate mind and body and emotion and intellect.""Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female.""Philosophy means nothing unless it is connected to birth, death, and the continuance of life. Anytime you are going to build a society that works, you have to begin from nature and the body.""What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim."
A Chorus of Stones: the Private Life of War (1993) Psychological aspects of violence, war, womanhood
The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society (1995)
Bending Home: Selected New Poems, 1967-1998 (Copper Canyon Press, 1998)
What Her Body Thought: a Journey into the Shadows (1999)
The Book of the Courtesans: a Catalogue of Their Virtues (2001) An unprecedented, provocative look at the extraordinary world of the great courtesans, from Veronica Franco, who graced the palazzi of sixteenth-century Venice, and Madame de Pompadour, the arbiter of all things fashionable at Versailles, to La Belle Otero of the Grand Boulevards of fin-de-siecle Paris, who frequently sported jewel-encrusted garters, and Marion Davies who took Hollywood by storm. The Book of the Courtesans enticingly illustrates the intricacies of their lavish lifestyles and their incredible life stories and further reveals how these cunning women seized the opportunity to become the West's first female liberators, free to choose their own lovers and command remarkable respect.
Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy: On Being an American Citizen (2008)