Mellower Greer shares credit for 1970s feminism

Mar 8, 2010, 1:58 GMT

Sydney - Rampant materialism not righteous indignation was the kindling for the women's liberation movement in the 1970s, Australian spitfire Germaine Greer said Monday on the 40th anniversary of the publication of her seminal work on feminism.

'If women had not been changing in 1970, my book The Female Eunuch would have sunk without trace,' the 70-year-old author and academic wrote in Melbourne's The Age newspaper.

'The most important change in the past 40 years is the gradual and apparently irreversible collapse of the patriarchal family. This was not triggered by a book but by economic change.'

Greer, who has lived in Britain rather than Australia since The Female Eunuch became a worldwide bestseller, argued that the 'hire purchase of vehicles, white goods, furnishings and the other trappings of the good life increased the burden of debt on every household.'

This indebtedness forced married women back into the workforce, where they learned to handle money for themselves and got a taste for economic independence.

'Eventually single women began buying homes for themselves,' she said. 'With every gradual increase in economic activity, the appeal of economic dependency shrank.'

Greer's rejection of the 'mother of feminism' tag comes as tributes mounted for a book translated into 12 languages that is still in print and yet was expected to sell just 2,500 copies.

Author and businesswoman Anne Summers, founder of feminist magazine Ms, said Greer's book launched the role of women into the issue of the decade.

'Sometimes, a book changes everything, and this was such a book,' she said, arguing Greer's polemic 'created and defined the emerging women's liberation movement, a gathering storm of female protest that eventually morphed into the more sedate equality-seeking feminism that still battles on today.'

In the book, hell-raiser Greer famously invited women to 'taste their menstrual blood' and celebrate their femininity rather than feel ashamed of it. She urged women to explore their sexuality with lots of men and railed against the unfair bargain she believed marriage offered.

'She gave us our idea of feminism,' said Pru Goward, a former sex- discrimination commissioner and now a member of the New South Wales state parliament. 'While we all knew her particular idea was barmy, Greer's Eunuch taught women sufficient political self-consciousness to see ourselves as a group with unmet needs and entitlements.'

University of Sydney gender studies lecturer Fiona Allon said she shared Greer's concerns about women enslaving themselves to material wealth for themselves and their families.

'I share these concerns, and they are concerns that I believe are probably as important today as they were 40 years ago,' Allon said.

Greer, a renowned Shakespeare scholar and emeritus professor of English literature at Britain's Warwick University, said she was happy to cede leadership of the liberation movement and hoped to see a new vanguard put on the 'muscle that will be necessary if we are to vanquish corporate power' and right the gender imbalance.

'There is no need for today's women to march to a 40-year-old feminist drum,' she wrote in The Age. 'The feminist revolution has not failed. It has yet to begin.'