In-vitro fertilization, for example, is a process leading to “man-made mothers.” Mammography is particularly perverse, in Britain because it is free only to women over the age of fifty, elsewhere because it is painful, especially for younger women.
And sometimes it is technology-that is, male technology. Sometimes the problem as she sees it is simply the continuation of an old evil, like women’s male-imposed obsession with their own bodies, a/k/a “beauty.” But sometimes the problem is the new rights that women have fought for and now think they enjoy, like the right to be soldiers, which turns out to be only the right to one long course of abuse by men (except, Greer is quick to add, in guerrilla armies, which provide women with the requisite political “education” to understand why armed struggle is necessary). Although she explicitly forswore any sequel to her first book-on the grounds that, when the time came, a younger woman would have to write it-now, like a congressional supporter of term limits discovering the virtues of experience, she has decided that “it’s time to get angry again.” And so The Whole Woman-a title that invites confusion with Marabel Morgan’s antithetical The Total Woman (Morgan advises doting on one’s husband 24 hours a day)-picks up where The Female Eunuch left off. This clearly could not be allowed to continue. Greer has been reasonably prolific over the past 30 years, but other authors have come along to shock while she has gradually acquired the patina of an object surviving more or less unaltered from a previous age. The radical, erudite, witty Greer was then, as she is now, a sui-generis feminist- mutatis mutandis, a kind of Camille Paglia of the 70’s. Three decades ago, the English writer Germaine Greer erupted into the world with The Female Eunuch, a cleverly titled book whose core argument, as she recently summarized it, was that “every girl child is conceived as a whole woman but from the time of her birth to her death she is progressively disabled.” As summary, that is accurate enough, but it fails to capture the qualities in the book that provoked such a remarkable mixture of admiration and outrage when it was published.
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