feminism
Jenna Mead
Germaine Greer
The Whole Woman
Doubleday $24.95pb, 351pp, 0 385 60016 X
'THOUGH I DISAGREED with some of the strategies and was as
troubled as I should have been by some of the more fundamental
conflicts [of feminism], it was not until feminists of my
own generation began to assert with apparent seriousness that
feminists had gone too far that the fire flared up in my belly.'
Thus Germaine Greer on the origin of her latest book. For
Australian readers, this statement positions The Whole Woman as
a response to Helen Garner's book The First Stone. Greer's
response, though, owes nothing to the right-wing backlash
feminism which prevailed in the US in the early nineties and
found its way into Australian public life via a, by and large,
misinformed and naive media.
Greer, on the other hand, offers us millennial feminism UK-style:
the reflex of Britain under Thatcher, the Greenham Common women,
the pre-pubescent appeal of The Spice Girls and the dubious
credentials of Cherie Booth QC. Greer is also very clear about
'generationalism' as it was called when birth dates became a convenient, if clichéd, weapon for beating Australian feminism over the head. 'Old feminists' exist to be sneered at by young feminists, and when the young feminists, who are usually not as young as they think they are, bait them they can expect to be chastised.
Greer's contribution here to what is now recognised as a tradition of debate, about the state of feminism within feminism, is important. There is no mention of the phrase 'political correctness'. Young women, gen-X or the thirtysomethings, are neither singled out for criticism nor castigated for alleged failures. Identity politics is absent. As is the word 'punitive.' This perspective on the current state of feminism -- which is not to be confused with a lament for the `good old days' or the `good old girls' for that matter -- is contoured by a different set of feminist practices and histories.
British feminism, with its strong threads of socialist theory, welfare idealism and empirical research, has been an important influence on Australian feminism, in particular on the disciplines of History and Women's Studies. While Greer has by no means been subsumed into British feminism (in any of its varieties), this book offers Australian readers a perspective which usefully complicates and diversifies the local effects of global (read US) feminisms.
Greer's project in The Whole Woman is to oppose the 'lifestyle feminists', who assert that feminism has served its purpose by going 'just far enough in giving them the right to "have it all", i.e. money, sex and fashion' and the 'equality feminists', who are wrong in having sold out feminism's main goal. 'Unpopular feminists "fight" for liberation; popular feminists work for equality'. This book, her eighth since The Female Eunuch, takes the form of two short preliminary sections, four main sections ('body,' 'mind,' 'love' and 'power') and a set of notes to the quotations boxed in each section. Each of these sections deals with a specific area of feminist critique: 'body' engages arguments about the economics of women's bodies; 'mind' deals with various mind-sets about work, housework, shopping etc; 'love' analyses the family romance from the perspectives of present-day abuse and possible good in what remains of familial relations; 'power' is the most overtly focused on popular culture and the public domain.
Within the four main sections are further smaller parts, each offering analysis of and arguments against a prevailing orthodoxy. 'Breasts', for example, argues against the assumption that women have the right to choose whether or not to have their breasts enlarged by analysing the role of multinationals in the production of silicone and the fate of those women who have sought legal redress against such companies. Again, for Australian readers, some of this material is familiar. Kaz Cooke's book Real Gorgeous, published in 1994, offered school-aged girls (and their teachers and mothers buying the book) a thorough and snappy analysis of the economics and politics behind the beauty industry and its effects on self-esteem, good health and the bank balance.
Greer proceeds by argument in three main forms: first, set up a line of reasoning which is accepted as axiomatic with neatness, economy and clarity and then have the gall to reverse the logic. The discussion of anorexia ends:
All discussions of eating disorders focus upon the disorderly eater rather than chaotic food. No attempt is made to treat the food or the representation of food in our culture, though it is obvious that eating disorders are unlikely to arise in conditions where food is relatively scarce and hunger familiar.
You might not agree with this line of argument but Greer's move here reverses the accepted trend of pathologising the (usually) young woman's alimentary canal and seeks to read the discourse of food within which the young woman is located.
Her second mode is a determination not to be fazed by technical language or statistics. She uses the former with smooth familiarity (oestrogen is traced through its exogenous and devious synthetic forms) and rattles the latter until they confess their prejudices. (Is depressed serotonin the root case of depression, as statistics suggest, or have we got the equation back to front?) The third mode is perhaps predictable but nevertheless scintillating: textual analysis. The talent that Greer has made her profession. Or that made Greer a professional. Her reading of Blake Morrison's autobiographical account of his daughter in As If is careful and nuanced. Its power lies in its restraint: 'I am grateful to the artfulness of Morrison's writing for the insight into how the distant father and the sexualizing father can be one and the same'.
This sounds as though The Whole Woman is a set of measured arguments set out as a sustained manifesto. It is not. It is in fact a polemic. Part analysis, part argument, part sensation, a modicum of the first-person pronoun, racy prose, sections that are not too long, a certain tone -- the genius of this book is its mimicry of media discourses.
This is where Greer has spent a good deal of her time in the last thirty years: inside the media culture which pitches to a very particular aspect of the public domain in Britain. The 'quality press', pretty much unknown in Australia, uses phrases like 'the rise and rise', 'the corridors of power', 'it is a truism' and 'this phony war'. From an Australian perspective this is the book's real limitation: Greer's unselfconscious assumption of the Guardian mantle -- a born-to-rule stance bounded by the pronouns `we' and `our' -- threatens to reduce the book (almost) to an ethnography of rarefied and arcane imperialism.