The feminist books that formed me 2: Greer, French, and beyond.

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Elegantly-written and authoritative, The Female Eunuch is rooted in a deep and broad scholarship that distracts attention from Germaine Greer’s more outrageous claims such as the famous one about women having very little idea how much men hate them. But she even backs that one up robustly with evidence of men’s disgust of women taken as much from mainstream fiction as from pornography, and she denounces Hugh Hefner as the ‘master ponce of western society’ at a time (1970) when he was viewed by many as a benign benefactor of the sexual revolution. She demolishes romantic fiction with glee – the hero who will not ‘trust himself’ to kiss his girlfriend, the moral tutor kissing the woman’s hem. Yet she defends Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew , claiming that he wants to make Kate his equal, not his subordinate, letting her love of Shakespeare override her feminism – and I like and trust her all the more for this. She is on firmer ground when she attacks the small, isolated claustrophobic nuclear family and the economically and emotionally dependent wife, although she never acknowledges the female-on-female power struggles of the extended families she idealises as an alternative. (I’m trying, and failing, to imagine her knuckling under a mother-in-law.). Her startling claim that ‘the sterilized parent is the eunuch in his (sic) children’s harem’ is typical of her overstatement. But picking out quotable quotes – always a temptation with Greer – obscures the book’s wide-ranging scholarship and reading, and its in-depth discussions of work, medicine, sex, motherhood, trade unionism and nearly every aspect of female life. Unlike Friedan, she acknowledges that child-rearing and housework are necessary, worthwhile labour, and tries to come up with solutions to the problem of who should do it. She urges more co-operation between families (including the sharing of some household goods but not household spaces), more learning from each others’ experiences and less dogmatism. Above all she urges women of all classes to talk and to listen to one another; ‘equality of opportunity’, she points out, only makes sense if women desire these opportunities in the first place, and who sets the agenda of desirable life-goals? So this is, ultimately, a very optimistic but also a challenging book. I was about 20, 21 when I read it and passed it around the flatmates and friends – I still have that copy, but the (rather repellent) cover has long ago fallen off.

I can’t remember which of us brought The Wise Wound into our flat on Rahoon Road in Galway in 1980-81 but it was published 8 years after Greer’s book. I knew very little about the authors, Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle, but Wikipedia tells me they were (maybe still are) husband and wife, and that she’s a poet as well. That is no surprise. I haven’t the book by me – I haven’t actually seen it since then – but it had a profound effect on me. It discussed menstruation, or periods, as something to be proud of, arguing that the menstrual cycle gives women valuable insights into the way their minds and bodies work, alternating times of great creativity and insight with times of reflection and recreation. The authors don’t gloss over the hardships, and they acknowledge that painful periods can happen and need medical attention, but in a book where scientific facts are bolstered by poetry and literature, they reinforced a vague feeling of specialness about periods that I’d already got from home and friends. The popular expression ‘the curse’ was one I never heard growing up, not at home nor at school. We called periods ‘my friend’. (‘I can’t go swimming/do sports/be bothered, I have my friend.’)

We also passed around Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (first published in 1978) at this time, in its shiny-silver and yellow cover (if I remember rightly), and it was like a fictional development of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. There’s an ‘I’ throughout the narrative and we are supposed to be surprised at the end when Mira emerges as the first-person narrator , but who else would it be? Mira’s early marriage to Norm and the early days of motherhood and all the tasks that had to be done are described in excruciating and painstaking detail, and going back to the book having reared four, I appreciate the trouble taken. But they were my kids so I didn’t mind, and French insists that Mira doesn’t actually mind either – these things have to be done and at least she has running water and electricity and not too long after, a nice house with a garden and good neighbours. And she loves her kids. Herding children all day, getting to drink coffee and tea with the other wives in the garden or the kitchen is hard at times, but it’s better than taking coins at a tollbooth, French comments. She’s brilliant on the friendships between those neighbours, although it’s a bit unrealistic that the husbands all (without exception) turn out to be shits. And some of the women are downright cruel – Natalie is horrible, and Bliss is sly and unprincipled, ‘framing’ Mira for an affair she is having herself and breaking up a friendship. The admirable Samantha pulls herself and her children out of poverty without her husband, but I think we are meant to sympathise with Natalie and Bliss too – because if women behave badly, society and the institution of marriage must be at fault, not the women. I’m not buying that. Martha, middle-class, educated and happily married with kids, has a passionate affair with David, also married with a young child, whose wife she scorns. I felt like cheering when David eventually dumped Martha but I wasn’t supposed to feel like that because poor Martha only took up with David because her otherwise good husband George couldn’t give her an orgasm. French sees any kind of sexual frustration (for males or females)as inevitably having far-reaching consequences, and this kind of ’70s self-indulgence dates the book. Then, I found it a great read, now I find it is far too long and detailed. It is also shamefully judgmental of the males of Italian-American and Hispanic minorities – African-Americans hardly feature at all. But all the white Anglo males are unrelievedly awful too, so there’s that.

Two books I read in London in the summer of 1982 were Shulamith Firestone’s polemic The Dialectic of Sex and Marge Piercy’s novel, Woman on the Edge of Time. Both books posit that women’s vulnerability is rooted in child-bearing and child-rearing, so both recommend test-tube/mechanical reproduction and communal child-care (from birth) as the sure-fire solution to sexual inequality. Firestone wants to get rid of personal relationships of all kinds (except workplace friendships), seeing them as manipulative and leading to co-dependency (she doesn’t use that word, but that’s what she means) and making people unable to focus on self-realization. She believes falling in love to be something people do when they are unfulfilled: nobody , she claims, ever falls in love the week they are ‘leaving for Europe’. (She’s American.) In Piercy’s novel, the heroine Connie falls through a rip in time into a future world where all is ecological and logical and calm and happy, and all babies are born in test-tubes and reared in communes. That much I remembered without artificial aid, but I’ve just looked up the plot summary on google and I’d forgotten that this time-travel happens because of enforced brain surgery and that Connie is a poor Hispanic woman – then it all came back to me. This book, lent to me by a work colleague (Jo) at the hospital where I was working, blew my mind, as we used to say then. I had a dream one night that I was in that wonderful utopian society and I was as disappointed as the man in the Spancil Hill song waking in California when I woke up in London. It was the ‘greenness’ and ecology of the utopia (all very well-worked out) rather than its methods of reproduction that attracted me. My Women’s Press paperback of Firestone is literally falling to bits, shedding tiny pieces of paper everywhere but that’s not the only reason it’s hard to read – the writing is spiky and choppy and she jumps around a bit. Every kind of nasty socio-political ideology(even racism) is traced to sexism, in an argument that is stretched to breaking point. I’ve written a lot of dissenting comments in the margins.

Of all these books, Greer and Redgrove & Shuttle had the longest-lasting influence on me. It was partly The Wise Wound ‘s celebration of the female body that made me shrink from Firestone and Piercy’s vision of artificial reproduction. But, since Firestone and Piercy’s books were written, a warm and feelgood discourse has emerged about pregnancy, childbirth and childrearing that downplays hardship, and makes women feel bad for having pain relief or C-sections or being unable to breastfeed or preferring hospital to home birth, or just finding it all too much sometimes. So it’s no harm for somebody to at least consider an alternative to the biological reality. I would love to have put Firestone and someone like Sheila Kitzinger together on a panel discussion.

One last word: sometime around 1983-84 my father, a peaceful, gentle man who was baffled and intrigued by the strength of my feminism, randomly (I think) bought me a book, Letters From A Faint-Hearted Feminist, by journalist Jill Tweedie. It is a collection of Guardian columns consisting of letters from stay-at-home wife and mother Martha to her activist feminist friend Mary, and it is both hilarious and insightful. It highlights the irrelevance of a lot of radical feminist discourse to women at the coalface of family life but it is never untrue to fundamental feminist principles. At the time, although I recognised Mary’s maddening blindness to reality, I thought poor Martha had a terrible life, but as I grew older her life made more sense to me, so this book was a gift that kept giving and giving. The book also captures the politics and preoccupations of the Thatcher years, including the thorny problem of how to make feminist sense of a strong and authoritative non-feminist like the British Prime Minister. It acknowledges contradictions and doesn’t flee from them.

Interestingly, the Australian(British-based) writer and the two British-authored books still mean much more to me than the three American writers, whose works have dated quite dramatically. I think it was around the 1980s that I began to pay real attention to feminists on this side of the Atlantic, including in my own country. Stay tuned.

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London 1970: Paladin).

Peter Redgrove & Penelope Shuttle, The Wise Wound:menstruation and everywoman (London: Penguin 1978).

Marilyn French, The Women’s Room (London: Andre Deutsch 1978.) I don’t know who published the yellow and silver paperback. My most recent edition, which has survived several culls of my books, is a London: Abacus 1993 one with an afterword by Susan Faludi, then the dernier cri due to her overstated diatribe Backlash: the undeclared war against American women (1991). This was published on this side of the Atlantic with a slightly altered title (American was left out) but largely unaltered content, much of it irrelevant to European women.

Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: the case for feminist revolution(London: The Women’s Press 1980; originally U.S.A, 1970). With a rather ‘explainy’ introduction by Rosalind Delmar which suggests that she shares some of my misgivings about the book.

Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time . First published USA 1976; the edition I read was a 1979 London: The Women’s Press one.

Jill Tweedie, Letters From A Faint-Hearted Feminist (London: Picador 1983).