Poet, playwright, and author Susan Griffin was a feminist above all else.
“Poetry is like music,” Griffin told The New York Times in 2024, a year before she died at the age of 82. “It expresses things you haven’t quite integrated into your rational mind. It’s the cutting edge of social change. Things would come out in poetry that later could be articulated in policy or ideas.”
Throughout her storied career, Griffin published 21 books, tackling far-ranging subjects from war and inherited trauma (“A Chorus of Stones,” 1992, a Pulitzer finalist) to ecofeminism (“Woman and Nature,” 1978).
The latter likened male violence against women to the environmental destruction of the planet by capitalist means.
Tying together science, ecology, and women’s history, “Woman and Nature” would go on to become a touchstone for the feminist movement, inspiring the next generation of women to embrace environmentalism as interchangeable with women’s rights.
“He says that woman speaks with nature. That she hears voices from under the earth,” Griffin wrote in 1978. “That wind blows in her ears and trees whisper to her. That the dead sing through her mouth and the cries of infants are clear to her. But for him this dialogue is over.”
“He says he is not part of this world, that he was set on this world as a stranger,” she continued. “He sets himself apart from woman and nature.”
“And so it is Goldilocks who goes to the home of the three bears, Little Red Riding Hood who converses with the wolf, Dorothy who befriends a lion, Snow White who talks to the birds, Cinderella with mice as her allies, the Mermaid who is half fish, Thumbelina courted by a mole.”
“We are the bird’s eggs. Bird’s eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep; we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and sprigs of wallflower.”
“We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak.”
“But we hear.”
After Griffin passed away from Parkinson’s disease in 2025, feminist author Rebecca Solnit memorialized her, saying that her work married complex ideas and magical prose with ease.
“I can’t think of anyone else who brought that kind of poetics and visionary quality to writing about intensely political subjects,” Solnit praised.
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Featured Image: Mark Sarfati for the East Bay Express, Berkeley, CA (CC BY-SA 4.0)
