Woman and Nature – next meeting

For our next meeting, we are reading part of Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (see below for descriptions of it).  At our last meeting, we read up to page 62, so for the next meeting we’ll read up to page 121.  You can download a pdf of the full book here.  The time/location of our next meeting will be Thursday, 5:30pm, at Heather’s house (aka ‘the danger zone’) at 3500 Harriet Ave., Minneapolis.

“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 poetry 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

“In Woman and Nature, Susan Griffin reveals the connection between feminism and ecology. Among the first to explore this subject, she probes the patterns of thought and behavior that have led to the destruction of nature, the oppression of women and the diminishment of both in the Western imagination. She elucidates the association of women with matter in European culture in the work of seminal thinkers from Plato to Freud, and shows how this prejudicial assumption is an influence on and a consequence of religious ideas, the development of science and reductive views of the material world. The book includes references to diverse events, the witch burnings, 19th century attempts to control female sexuality, strip mining, clear cutting and secretary pools, employed both as realistic examples but also as symbols of a culture that divides spirit from matter, emotion from intellect, nature from consciousness, while inventing ideas of masculinity and femininity that embody these divisions. Now considered a classic of both environmental and feminist literature, the book is at once lyrical, playful and unsparing in its critical perceptions.”