In 1971 Germaine Greer caused a storm with her book The Female Eunuch. Now she has decided to write a sequel. Katherine Viner asks why
It has taken 27 years, but it looks like we’ve got it: the sequel to The Female Eunuch. It was announced recently that Germaine Greer has received an $800 000 advance for the book she never thought she’d write: the Eunuch’s follow-up, called The Whole Woman – likely to be a feminist polemic on the brutal truths, as she sees them, of women’s lives today.
But while the air is still alive with discussions about the new, Nineties-style feminism, what relevance can the most important feminist of the Seventies have today? And has Germaine Greer anything to say to the women who are young enough to be her grandchildren?
The early thoughts for Greer’s new book were laid out in a speech she gave at the Melbourne Book Festival last year. The crux of her thesis is that women’s sexuality is still a battleground; that although she and other Seventies feminists may have fought for women to be able to have sex freely and without shame, Nineties women feel they’re unacceptable if they don’t have sex.
“In 1968, women had the right to say no, without apology,” she said. “What they didn’t have was the right to say yes. Now they have a duty to say yes to whatever their partners may desire, no holds are barred. Women cannot admit to feeling disgust or to not enjoying the stuff that is going on – not if they want to seem cool, even if they have to take muscle relaxants to do it.”
She claims that sex has been both elevated, so that it has greater importance than anything else, and emptied of meaning, and she claims that female attributes such as the womb and ovaries have come to be seen as irrelevant extras. “Where once women were nothing but reproductive organs and reproductiveness explained most of their behaviours,” she writes, “they may now claim no specifically female organs and no specifically female functions.
“The 1969 female eunuch was nothing but a womb; the 1997 woman eunuch has no womb.” Thus, Greer says, men who believe they are women trapped in men’s bodies are given breasts and a cleft and thus become “female”; motherhood is not venerated; and the breast has ceased to be a “food-giver” and has instead become an “erotic fetish”.
To remind us that some things don’t change, Greer reasserts that our culture’s dependence on penetration – away from “necking, petting, foreplay by whatever name” – helps to keep women submissive, which is why “the majority of men … refuse to allow their body’s outline to be breached”. She says that, for men, even a doctor’s probe is too much of a violation. “The penetratee, regardless of sex, cannot rule, okay? The person on the receiving end is fucked, finished, unserviceable, degraded.”
Her comments, which will form the starting point for her new book, are both radical and up-to-date, and suggest that The Whole Woman will not be a rehash of The Female Eunuch but an important new polemic in its own right. Her book is being eagerly awaited as a radical, challenging voice – a relief in a world where placating men seems more important than anything else. If Greer’s ideas could make the kind of splash today that they did in 1971, we are in for exciting times.
Greer says that the idea to write a follow-up to The Female Eunuch came when she was researching a book about women and medicine. “I was thinking about why they can pull people in for cervical smears when they’re medically a very dodgy process. I was thinking of someone I know who went to Harley Street to have a hysterectomy because she’d been recalled six times for her smear tests and she was terrified. It’s because there’s a climate of sheer terror – and I realised that, whatever happens, women get the worst of it.”
Other feminists have disappointed her, too. “I couldn’t believe that Betty Friedan said Clinton hasn’t done anything wrong. Here he is fucking the faces of little girls and she says she doesn’t care! She says Clinton’s good on women’s issues. Like access to abortion? Gee, thanks, that’s all we ever wanted, to be scraped out.”
She is similarly dismissive about the so-called new feminism in Britain. “Life is more difficult than these new feminists suggest,” she says. “We’re not all young career girls who are pleased to wear little strappy sandals.” In a review of Natasha Walter’s book The New Feminism in the Times Educational Supplement, Greer wrote: “Walter’s book seems above all to reassure the faint-hearted that there is nothing to fear from feminism.
“If the next generation of feminists adopts her brand of unenlightened complacency, there will be nothing to hope for either.”
Walter meanwhile thinks Greer is mistaken; that the world for women has changed for the better, not the worse. “Women’s lives simply aren’t the same any more, and that’s partly because of The Female Eunuch,” she says. “But I think Greer is coming from the perspective of someone who’s lived through the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, and she was hoping for a big revolution that didn’t happen. Whereas we can say as young women that it is possible to be optimistic. In a way, The Female Eunuch was a very young woman’s book, in that it put the enjoyment of sexuality centre stage. Perhaps Greer is writing from a different perspective now and maybe she considers that the enjoyment of sex isn’t as relevant today.”
Walter also believes that Greer’s focus on sex and the body is no longer as relevant as she suggests. “The personal and the political are not identical any more.”
When The Female Eunuch was published in 1971, the idea that the personal is political – that what we do in our personal lives is governed, or at least influenced, by political factors – was largely unheard of. It is impossible to overestimate the impact the book had, and indeed still has – it has sold a million copies worldwide, been translated into more than 12 languages and never been out of print.
“The Female Eunuch had a widespread influence – especially on people who were not already involved in radical politics,” says Sheila Rowbotham, veteran of Seventies’ feminism and most recently author of A Century of Women. “It took the ideas of women having a different destiny as something that could get women involved.”
However, Rowbotham believes Greer’s current line on sexuality – that where once women could not say yes, today they cannot say no – is in part due to Greer’s own influence. “The women’s movement as a whole was always rather worried about Germaine’s stress on sex in any circumstances,” she says.
Controversy seems to follow Greer – be it spats with fellow feminists or inviting the homeless into her home – but that’s largely because she is so uncensorious of her own words. The bottom line is that when she speaks, people listen; and she speaks with a ferocity often lost from contemporary feminism.
Ann Oakley, who most recently co-edited Who’s Afraid of Feminism?, believes that we are in a phase of re-evaluation of what has happened to women since the Sixties. “There seems to be a whole new wave of feminism looking at the backlash and looking at where women have got to. I think Greer’s book is part of that. Her original book was extremely important, and I think it’s a very good thing that she’s following it up.”
Greer meanwhile is putting passion into this project. “I spent six weeks solid just writing, getting up in the middle of the night,” she says. “It was exhausting. I think that really good writing, especially political writing, is done fast, so that you’ve got to jump up and run around in tears, so that it provokes energy.” In other people as well as herself? “Well, I must be going through this for something,” she says. “I want the book to be white hot and tense and quivering.”
Will this be the defining feminist text of the Nineties as The Female Eunuch was of the Seventies? There’s a year to wait to find out.
It was also, she says, provoked by the British Government’s new women MPs. “Just what the fuck are all these women doing in fucking Parliament?” she says. “Who was opposing all this ridiculous behaviour in the Gulf? It was old men, not women. Have the women been told by the Blair machinery to keep their lipsticky mouths shut? The Government has done nothing … about women’s issues. They’ve just got the girls in the background in their little suits going woo-woo.”