Germaine Greer published an article on 5 May in the Australian Literary
Review, the monthly literary magazine of The Australian newspaper.
It is supposed to be a look back at the 40 years of feminism since her book The Female Eunuch was published.
Feminism has brought many advantages for women. They can now participate freely in the workforce throughout their lives if they so choose – though economics have rendered that less a choice than a necessity for many. They can choose from the same array of careers that men do, and do not have to marry to achieve financial security. These are so accepted in society today that it is almost unthinkable that not so long ago it wasn’t so for women.
But there have also been difficulties. The chaos wrought by feminism in society in those 40 years, particularly in marriage and family life which Greer notes with some glee, is dismissed by her not just as collateral damage, but as necessary for change. Greer reveals her Marxist roots to assert that “chaos is the matrix out of which viable structures form.” She attributes the decline of life-long heterosexual marriage and stable family life to “women walk(ing) away from relationships that are at worst demeaning or dangerous, or at best unfair and unrewarding.”
This rather gobsmackingly wholesale dismissal of marriage, and the women who embrace it, is probably the most demeaning representation of women in an article filled with explicit and implicit insults to many women.
Greer shows her extremely dated view of the situation of women in the developed world throughout the article, but nowhere more than in this statement. On Germaine Greer’s planet, there are no women who do not regard marriage as an institution fundamentally demeaning and dangerous to women.
Greer has, accurately, noted that many modern western women would appear to have simply exchanged one lot of burdens and perceived injustices for another even more onerous in many ways, yet nowhere admits that her teachings might have had something to do with that.
Increasing numbers of women are making the mature assessment that they cannot succeed at both full-time motherhood and full-time career efficiently. Something has to give in their lives if they wish to attain the level of happiness that is currently eluding them. For many of them, it is the work that takes a back seat and becomes the part-time pursuit. This movement of women back to the family as a valid source of reward, satisfaction and happiness is blithely dismissed by Greer as a typical attack on feminism by male dominated bastions of power, telling stupid women “now that women could have it all, there was no need for feminist activism or even feminist attitudes”. This simplistic statement is how she explains the inconvenient truth that many of these women have not ditched the family and chosen Greer’s way of resolving their disillusion with the ‘have-it-all’ chimera. She rightly bemoans rampant prostitution, female trafficking and sexual enslavement and freely available hard pornography as terrible and degrading and harmful to women.
However, she completely fails to make any link between the objectification of women and commodification of sex inherent in the advent of available and accepted contraception, especially the Pill.
Ms Greer states facets of continuing female discontent accurately and with insight, but being a clever old stick, she then uses the same specious argument for her brand of feminism that Marxists used to justify the confusion caused in believers by its abject failure – it didn’t fail, it’s just never been tried.