Loved or hated, but still Germaine
THE year was 1972, and Judy Lattas was a 16-year-old schoolgirl, reading, for the first time, a new book by Australian feminist, Germaine Greer. It was called The Female Eunuch.
"I remember vividly the shiver of delicious shock that it gave me," says Lattas, who is now director of the gender studies program in the department of Sociology at Macquarie University.
"To read how she had tasted her own menstrual blood; how could someone be so daring as to write such a thing? It was a mind-opening moment . . . Germaine Greer was a fearless thinker and she had a reckless enthusiasm for living her life on her terms."
Like many women, Lattas finds it hard to believe that 40 years have passed since Greer, who was then just 30, wrote The Female Eunuch, but it's true: the book was first published in London in October 1970. The work immediately became a sensation, in part because Greer was so outrageous and smart and dazzling.
As Greer this year celebrates the 40th anniversary of its publication, she can lay claim to rare success: The Female Eunuch has never been out of print.
What, though, of the book's ideas? Have they stood the test of time? And what of Greer? How well has she handled the opportunities and pitfalls of fame?
Helene Bowen Raddeker, senior lecturer in the School of History and Philosophy at the University of NSW, was one of many women who read The Female Eunuch in the 70s and was inspired by it: "so inspired, in fact, that I was soon involved in the liberation movement. Perhaps today I would find more to disagree with than I did then, but not central aspects of her critique of patriarchy and its bed partner, capitalism."
Pru Goward, who has served as sex discrimination commissioner and is now an MP in the NSW parliament, says the book -- owning it, or knowing of it, if not actually reading every word -- was pretty soon compulsory for a certain kind of middle-class Australian woman. "She gave us our idea of feminism," she says.
"While we all knew her particular idea was barmy, Greer's eunuch taught women sufficient political self-consciousness to see ourselves as a group with unmet needs and entitlements.
"Until then most of us hadn't thought of ourselves as oppressed," she says.
Among other things, Greer's book imagined society as it might be run by women. She thought it would be more peaceful and communal. She also urged women to give up their "fripperies" -- make-up, shoes -- and encouraged them to explore their sexuality, with many men.
As writer Christine Wallace said in her biography of Greer, many women took the message to heart. Some left their husbands. Some joined communes, or set up women's refuges, or went back to work, or stood for parliament. In the process, they changed the world (if you really want to know how much life has changed for women in the past 40 years, rent the DVDs of Mad Men, and see how women lived and worked in the 60s).
On the other hand, much remains the same: women have not given up marriage, or the day-to-day care of homes and children. They live in nuclear families, in the suburbs. Their orientation is capitalist. They certainly haven't given up life's "fripperies".
Fiona Allon, of the department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney says many of the key arguments in The Female Eunuch are nevertheless worth restating, precisely because so little has changed.
"The good life is now seen as achievable only through consumption, and we are now encouraged to improve our lives through consumption above all else," Allon says. "Like Greer, I find this a depressing prospect. One of Greer's main concerns, though, is what happens to women who are in a sense consumed by consumerism, and whose capacity for action, for doing, thinking, and behaving in ways not defined by consumerism, is exceptionally limited. I share these concerns, and they are concerns that I believe are probably as important today as they were 40 years ago."
To celebrate the anniversary of the publication of The Female Eunuch, the March issue of the independent The Monthly magazine published an essay by playwright Louis Nowra, who argues that Greer must be disappointed in the world of contemporary women, given that it does not resemble the model she envisioned.
Nowra did not stop there, however. He said Greer, 70, now resembles nothing so much as a "befuddled and exhausted" old woman, like his own "demented grandmother". And, he says, she has become seduced by her fame, noting that Greer has, in recent years, appeared on "cheap, often degrading" reality programs such as Celebrity Big Brother on the BBC; that she enraged many in her home country in 2006 when she mocked the death of popular outback adventurer Steve Irwin, who was killed by a stingray barb, by saying "the animal world has finally taken its revenge"; and she left some in the Aboriginal community confused when she said in 2000 that she never visits Australia without first seeking permission of the traditional owners (local groups said this was not so).
On the other hand, she remains emeritus professor of literature at the University of Warwick (her passion has always been Shakespeare; she received her PhD with a study of love and marriage in Shakespeare's comedies) and she has continued to publish, including, most recently, Shakespeare's Wife, an account of what life may have been like for the woman married to William.
Jane-Maree Maher, director of the Women's Studies Centre at Monash University finds it interesting that Nowra criticises Greer for appearing on shows such as Grumpy Old Women (has a man yet been criticised for appearing on Grumpy Old Men, or is that simply amusing?) while also condemning her for being out of date. She also notes that it was Greer who railed against the pressure on women to "present themselves according to the prevailing norms of fashion and style and youth", only to be criticised by Nowra for being old, exhausted and befuddled.
Australia's other leading feminist, Eva Cox, knew Greer from way back, as part of the Sydney Push, a movement of intellectuals and bohemians that frequented pubs in the 60s. She, too, fought at the coal face of the women's liberation movement. As a single mother in the 60s, she established the first government-funded childcare centre. She has been a member of the Women's Electoral Lobby for more than 40 years.
Cox rejects both Nowra's essay, and its author. "The truth is, Germaine said a lot of things in the 1970s that needed to be said. No, we haven't got the society we wanted, but that is not her failing. Capitalism was a lot tougher to dismantle than we thought it would be," Cox says.
She derides The Monthly's editor Ben Naparstek for commissioning a man to write about Australia's seminal feminist text.
Naparstek defends the decision, saying Nowra is a "leading public intellectual" and it doesn't matter that he is male. But one of the key arguments of the women's movement has always been that women are not allowed to speak for themselves; that their opinions matter less than the opinions of men; that their stories and experiences are not told.
"First up, to say that Louis Nowra is a leading public intellectual is false," Cox says. "He is a writer, and frankly I detect envy in his piece. His ideas have never captured the audience that Germaine has captured. The editor says it's irrelevant that he's a man, but wouldn't it have been better to ask somebody with the appropriate understanding of feminist theory?"
Alison Bartlett, director of the Centre for Women's Studies at the University of Western Australia, notes that one of Greer's more radical platforms in The Female Eunuch was that women don't realise how much men hate them. "And when we read personal comments like these about Greer, what are we to think?" she says.
"Is it no longer misogynist to demean a woman on the basis of her gender? It seems the ultimate crime is still to be an old woman. And what is the crime in presenting a vision for society that doesn't eventuate? How do we know Greer was wrong about how power would be wielded and things organised if women ruled the world? I can't remember when women have had the opportunity to rule. Oh, I guess he's wheeling out Margaret Thatcher, the only woman allowed to rule because she did it like a man and then gets criticised for it because she's a woman."
Bartlett says Greer was right, in that global corporations do "peddle and profit on women's desire to belong, and to be loved".
"Nowra's condemnation indicates that Greer's ideas are as provocative and inflammatory as they were 40 years ago," she says. "I think we should all go back and read them."
Barbara Baird, who is associate professor at the Women's Studies department at Flinders University, says Nowra's "poor opinion [of Greer] seems mostly cruel
hyperbole: one of the crosses she must bear as the price of fame as a feminist.
"Many of his criticisms are ridiculous and he should know this," she says. "He leaves out the forces that feminism was up against in 1970 and is still up against: global capitalism, environmental crisis, poverty, racism and the intransigence of many men.
"Many men still don't even share the housework."
Bowen Raddeker notes how Nowra uses offensive language about an older woman whose key idea has always been how much men enjoy deriding women.
"He apparently feels that the fact that Professor Greer is now an `old woman' is a licence to be offensive about an individual who is obviously, in many quarters, a respected public intellectual," she says. (For the record, Nowra is but 10 years younger than Greer.) Besides, "Germaine doesn't need to say and do anything to get noticed, as Nowra put it. She does, however, like to stir, and has a habit of voicing uncomfortable truths."
Then, too, it should also be said that Greer didn't ever want equality with men. She was after genuine economic, social and emotional freedom for women and, in the 40 years since The Female Eunuch was published, she has led by magnificent example.
Greer has put her intelligence, her wit, and her talent to good use. She married only once, for three weeks. She has her own financial security. She has never had to rely on a man, or indeed, on anyone other than herself. She says whatever she pleases, and is beholden to nobody. In that sense, at least, Greer is, at 70, precisely what she hoped all women would one day be: entirely, blissfully free.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/loved-or-hated-but-still-germaine/story-e6frg6z6-1225837963254
