![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Oct. 4th, 2007 08:38 pmI took The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer down from the shelves today, which I have always meant to read but never have, and I started reading it (I should be reading Madame Doubtfire by Anne Fine, but I am not). I was most relieved by this passage, right at the very beginning:
I want, in ten years' time, I want someone to be writing a book about my feminists, the feminists of today, and say that now we are calling for revolution. I know it can happen. I know it needs to. I hope it will.
After the ecstasy of direct action, the militant ladies... settled down..., while the main force of their energy filtered away in post-war retrenchments and the revival of frills, corsets and femininity.... Evangelism withered into eccentricity.Germaine Greer wrote that in 1971, about second-wave feminism. Today, now, everywhere are the post-feminists, women who want equal rights and equal pay but shy away from the word "feminist", roll their eyes at the mention of oppression, insist that just everything is fine, argue happily that women are paid less because they have the children (and that's O.K., because mothers aren't productive and don't deserve to be paid), are enthused about the sexual revolution but missed the part where it said that you shouldn't have to fake it and that it's still O.K. to say, actually, no, I don't want to do that with my body, are happy to beg their boyfriends to fix their computer, don't speak up when they feel uncomfortable, don't say it's not O.K. to say that, don't think female genital mutilation is their problem, don't think the education of women in the third world is their problem, don't think it's part of feminism, don't think it says anything about women today, don't think there's any difference between the way men and women are treated, don't think the media portrayal of women is a problem.
The new emphasis is different. The genteel middle-class ladies clamoured for reform, now ungenteel middle-class women are calling for revolution.
I want, in ten years' time, I want someone to be writing a book about my feminists, the feminists of today, and say that now we are calling for revolution. I know it can happen. I know it needs to. I hope it will.
