feminism
Laurie Clancy
Germaine Greer
The Whole Woman
Doubleday $24.95hb, 351pp, 0 385 60016 X
BACK IN THE LATE 1950s when Germaine Greer was being inducted into literary criticism by the likes of Sam Goldberg one of the
catchcries was T.S. Eliot's remark, 'The only method is to be
very intelligent.' It's arguable that The Female Eunuch,
published nearly thirty years ago, is a monument to the glories
and limitations of a literary critic's vision, thinking she can
summarise and moralise a world through her evaluation of the felt
life through which she sniffs out a world.
Well, there's more to The Female Eunuch than Leavisite criticism
even if the book includes Greer's hymn to the myth of marriage
in Shakespeare and a defence of The Taming of the Shrew. I picked
it up the other day for the first time in many years and read it
through. My short term memory of that experience has been largely
dissipated by reading The Whole Woman which portends itself as
a coda and corrective but one of the things which remains
staggering about Greer's first book is the intensity and savagery
of the critique of the false feminine woman, the castrate with
her poisonous altruism and masochism and sookiness that has
allowed the male dolt and the myth of motherhood to usurp her soul.
Greer's new book, The Whole Woman, is not like that at all. It is, for better and for worse, something of a motherhood book and its central plank is a defence of the institution of motherhood. Much of Greer's very considerable rhetorical power goes into a portrait of woman as Pietà, the sorrowing madonna, a Rachel who weeps and cannot be comforted. Greer declares at one point that if people had attended to the thesis of that 'conscientiously unacademic' book, The Female Eunuch, they would have realised that she had had it both ways by arguing that the 'female is essence and the feminine social construct'. Deciding which was which in behavioural practice only became clear after menopause. What remains when you set things to simmer and take off the scum is 'the whole woman', the phrase which gives this book its title.
What remains is the belief that the ideal of 'liberation' faded from feminism with the rhetoric of the word. Male sexuality continues to be fixated on penetration and women continue to be done down at every level, by governments who treat single mothers like layabouts and by a health system which women are driven through, Greer says, like sheep through a dip. She thinks most hysterectomies are unnecessary, that pap smears represent an epidemic of error, that women are pumped full of oestrogen as if it were the magic philtre of an age that believes in nothing but drugs and sex.
Meanwhile young girls starve and mutilate themselves in the face of a generalised narcissistic emptiness. Greer is at her least charitable with transexuals who have usurped femaleness and done their bit to have it redefined as a kind of terra nullius of the non-male. The sex change is an exorcism of the mother and when the transexual (who is like Norman Bates in Psycho) usurps female spaces he is like a rapist. Fighting words, as ever, but they are only the other side of Greer's plangent lament for the woman who battles, so often alone, with children or the need for children. The so-called victory in the matter of abortion was worse than hollow. What women won, according to Greer, was the 'right' to undergo invasive procedures in order to terminate unwanted pregnancies, pregnancies which were unwanted by a world which would not support the mothers. The whole thing made an illiberal establishment look more liberal. The true catchcry should have been 'every abortion a wanted abortion'. Greer admires Cardinal Winning for setting up a fund to allow poor women who were contemplating abortions to have children and says that feminists were wrong-footed by the media on this matter by being seen as 'pro abortion'.
What Greer seems to want to honour in The Whole Woman is the sorrow and the pity of something like the womanly apprehension of the world. Doctors attempt to 'pathologise distress' (a phrase that owes something to Bob Dylan), prescribing two thirds of psychotropic drugs to women. But why do women cry if their hearts are not overcharged? 'Women seek relief in tears where men seek relief in masturbation, which may be distinction to be valued.'
It is well Germaine Greer is so tough and so witty because the burden of The Whole Woman is heavy. There is a lot in this book about unrequited love. The love of the father, the love of the partner, the love of the child. 'All remain for most women unrequited.' Why else did women weep for Diana? Greer thinks it was a mistake to try to fuel feminism on rage: if only women had mourned their tears would have drowned the wind. She also believes that men are in flight from communicative sex as they are in flight from everything womanly. Boyish, hipless girls have left the broad hips and full bosom 'as monstrous as motherhood'. Men are in a thrall to progressively infantile pornographic ethos.
And the assault on motherhood is all the more monstrous because it is motherhood which extends the bounds of woman's suffering beyond imagining (because she can never mean to the child what the child means to her). Motherhood today, according to Greer, is regarded as a personal indulgence and children as a drain on resources and a clog to pleasure. Governments and local councils fear 'feckless girls and their bastards'. Greer says that where in The Female Eunuch she had argued that motherhood should not be seen as a substitute career in fact motherhood should be seen as a genuine career option and mothers should be paid by the state, whether to stay home and look after children or to pay for their childcare needs if they are to work.
In none of this do men lift much of a press. Greer is inclined to think the radical lesbians may have been onto something when they thought women's and men's sexuality was asymmetrical and in her 'wise old woman' stance Greer is pretty wry about genital sex. Heteros are the only people who are hung up on it, she says, as if they imagined themselves to be founding fathers 'seeking to people the earth, when that is the last thing on their minds'.