Compelling, If Sloppy, Feminist Manifesto

Germaine Greer may be a lunatic. But after years of cautious, tepid yuppie-feminism--of being told that women do, or at least can, have it all, and that “it” is well worth having--a lunatic may be just what we need. Many of Greer’s more bizarre opinions will probably bewilder, if not appall, large groups of readers. (While she considers mammogram programs sadistic, she supports female genital mutilation.) Yet though too much of “The Whole Woman”--Greer’s follow-up to her 1970 manifesto “The Female Eunuch”--is sloppily argued, badly sourced and easy to mock, it is, in its essentials, right on.

First, a rightfully angry Greer argues, feminism is international and egalitarian, or it is nothing; the prosperity of a few select women in developed countries cannot rest on the poverty of others.

“A ‘new feminism’ that celebrates the right (i.e. duty) to be pretty in . . . little suits put together for starvation wages by adolescent girls in Asian sweatshops is not feminism at all,” Greer writes. “Lifestyle feminism has been a sideshow. The main event, the worldwide feminization of poverty, is a tragedy that is moving inexorably and unseen to an unimaginably terrible denouement.”

Second, Greer argues, feminism must be pro-mother and pro-child. But Greer severs the welfare of mothers and children from that of the nuclear family, an institution that in her view is clearly failing. All children must be guaranteed a decent standard of living regardless of whether they live with one or two (or no) parents, and regardless of the economic situation of those parents. Governments and their constituents must make an unbreakable commitment--not just ideological, but financial too--to every child’s education, health and safety.

Third, Greer insists that feminism always assumed a radical critique, and radical transformation, of the repressed, inegalitarian, violent, compartmentalized world that men have created.

“If we accept that men are not free, and that masculinity is as partial an account of maleness as femininity is of femaleness, then equality must be seen to be a poor substitute for liberation. . . . If women can see no future beyond joining the masculinist elite on its own terms, our civilization will become more destructive than ever.”

Greer reminds us of several other things that are usually ignored in popular-press discussions of feminism. It is true that more and more women have paid jobs, but it is to “the deconstructed work force of the ‘90s”--characterized by low-paid, part-time jobs with zero security--that women have been so warmly welcomed. And all over the world it is women who perform the bulk of unseen, unappreciated, unpaid work--from shopping to raising children--upon which every culture depends. “Women are worker bees; males are drones,” Greer writes. “Yet somehow the human male has convinced the human female that he, not she, is the worker. His work is real work; her work is vicarious leisure.”

As the above quote suggests, Greer does not feel particularly cuddly toward men. But in response to charges of man-hating, she points out that it is woman-hating--sexism, patriarchy, call it what you will--that’s the real problem and, furthermore, that this problem is systemic. Individual women may hate individual men, but nowhere in the world do women as a group physically or sexually terrorize men; nowhere in the world do women control wealth and deprive men of it; nowhere in the world do women deny men economic, reproductive or legal rights.

Greer’s outlook is neither pessimistic nor triumphal; “The Whole Woman” seeks not to depress women (a clearly redundant task) but to alert them to how and why things are still so bad.

“On every side we see women troubled, exhausted . . . lonely, guilty, mocked by the headlined success of the few,” she writes. “Every day we are told that there is nothing left to fight for. We have come a long way, but the way has got steeper, rockier, more dangerous, and we have taken many casualties.”