Susan Griffin, an influential poet, playwright and prolific feminist author who pioneered a unique form of creative nonfiction, blending propulsive, poetic prose with history, memoir and myth in books like “Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her,” a touchstone of ecofeminism, died on Sep. 30 at her home in Berkeley, Calif. She was 82.
The cause was advanced Parkinson’s disease, her friend Nina Wise said.
Ms. Griffin’s themes were the pernicious effects of a Western belief system — a patriarchal system, in her view — that explored how capitalism, science, religion and even the porn industry have subjugated the natural world to its detriment and ours, and how that subjugation is a gendered one.
Like other feminists of her generation, she saw discrimination and violence against women as akin to the ravaging of the environment, through strip mining, agricultural practices, the clear-cutting of old-growth timber and pollution. Hence the term ecofeminism, of which she was a leading voice.
She was also a Berkeley personage, among those who contributed to the city’s intellectual life through their writings, activism, bookstores (like Cody’s Books, a hub for the counterculture and free-speech activists) and restaurants (Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse, among others).
Ms. Griffin wrote for Ramparts, the provocative leftist magazine that published Susan Sontag, Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky, and for Scanlan’s Monthly, the even scrappier muckraking periodical that lasted less than a year but managed to irritate President Richard M. Nixon by calling for his impeachment two years before Watergate. For Ramparts, Ms. Griffin wrote a lengthy essay on rape; for Scanlan’s Monthly, she interviewed women who had had illegal abortions.
Ms. Griffin was among the first poets published by Shameless Hussy Press, the upstart — and possibly the country’s first — feminist press run by Alta, a salty poet who was herself a Berkeley fixture. And in 1975, Ms. Griffin won an Emmy Award for “Voices,” a play about the experiences of five woman that was presented on public television and later staged around the world.
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The post Susan Griffin, a Leading Voice of Ecofeminism, Is Dead at 82 appeared first on New York Times.
