Synopses & Reviews
In this famously provocative cornerstone of feminist literature, Susan Griffin explores the identification of women with the earthboth as sustenance for humanity and as victim of male rage. Starting from Platos 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 sourcesfrom timbering manuals to medical texts to Scripture and classical literaturein 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 consciousnessa 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 womans experience.”
Synopsis
"Woman and Nature is about memory and mutilation, female anger as power, female presence as transforming force...Griffin has collected here the most apparently disparate materials [from lumbering manuals to gynecology texts] into an extraordinary collage which, for all the research and hard intellectual work underlying it, becomes an intense physical experience."--Adrienne Rich
"My journey through the strange and familiar worlds of Woman and Nature has been strengthening and enspiriting. It is a book which I will read and re-read, assign to classes, give to friends. It is a work of great and daring vision."--Mary Daly
Synopsis
In this famously provocative cornerstone of feminist literature, Susan Griffin brilliantly ponders the place and role of women in a predominantly patriarchal society. Her evocative explorations of far-ranging elements of human experience expose the hypocrisy of standard assumptions about gender and the environment.