Susan Griffin

Griffin has received a MacArthur grant for Peace and International Cooperation, NEA and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, and an Emmy Award for the play Voices. She is featured in the 2014 feminist history film She's Beautiful When She's Angry. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1993 for A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War.

In a 1994 review by Carol H. Cantrell, Griffins' Woman and Nature is dubbed "hard to describe. Most of it looks like prose on the page but the thought is fragmented, metaphorical, and discontinuous; there are plenty of stories, but they too are often elliptical and metaphorical." In a review of What Her Body Thought: A Journey into the Shadows, Susan Dion of The Women's Review of Books wrote, "...Griffin is not merely reiterating old themes in feminist scholarship or the history of medicine; rather, she probes, ponders, and suggests different ways of considering many interrelated issues...Griffin's musings and hypotheses are fresh, smart, and instructive, if not always convincing."

Griffin articulated her anti-pornography feminism in Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature (1981). In this work she makes the case that although the pursuit of freedom of speech, could lead to a position against the censorship of pornography, in the case of pornography the freedom to create pornography leads to a compromise of "human liberation" when this term includes liberation for all of humankind including the emancipation of women. She argues against the elision of pornography and eros, arguing that they are separate and opposing ideas. According to Griffin, pornography's origins are rooted in a widespread fear of nature, and in a pornographic culture, men are told to take on the role of the "Killer", while women become the "victims". This, according to Griffin, teaches women to self-deprecate, and fuels an unhealthy, perverted culture. In contrast, Griffin argues that "real sexual liberation requires a reconciliation with nature, a healing between body and spirit". Critics largely responded to Pornography and Culture with contempt, many complaining that it came off as more of a rant than realistic philosophical discussion.

Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978) has sold more than 100,000 copies, and draws connections between ecological destruction, sexism, and racism. Considered a form of prose-poetry, this work is believed to have launched ecofeminism in the United States. Griffin attributes her connection to ecofeminism to her upbringing along the Pacific Coast, which she believes cultivated her awareness of ecology.

"Rape: The All-American Crime" (1971), an article published in Ramparts, was one of the first publications about rape from a feminist perspective.

Susan Griffin (born January 26, 1943) is a radical feminist philosopher, essayist and playwright particularly known for her innovative, hybrid-form ecofeminist works.

Griffin was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1943 and has resided in California since then. Following her father's death when she was 16, she bounced around the family but ended up with a Jewish family. Her biological family were of Irish, Scottish, Welsh and German ancestry. Having spent a year in a post-War Jewish home, her German heritage wasn't openly spoken of and she initially demonized Germans, but later made several trips to Germany (including to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp) to reconcile her Jewish and German heritages. She attended the University of California, Berkeley for two years, then transferred to San Francisco State College, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing (1965) and her Master of Arts degree (1973), both degrees under the tutelage of Kay Boyle. She has taught as an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley as well as at Stanford University and California Institute of Integral Studies. Griffin has taught at the California Institute for Integral Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute, the Wright Institute, and the University of California.