Betty Friedan, who died this weekend aged 85, was widely considered to be the founder of modern feminism. Was she really as pivotal as she thought she was, asks Germaine Greer
GERMAIN GREER
Tuesday 7 February 2006
Friedan's The Feminine Mystique spoke to American women loud and clear.
Betty Friedan "changed the course of human history almost single-handedly". Her ex-husband, Carl Friedan, believes this; Betty believed it too. This belief was the key to a good deal of Betty's behaviour; she would become breathless with outrage if she didn't get the deference she thought she deserved. Though her behaviour was often tiresome, I figured that she had a point. Women don't get the respect they deserve unless they are wielding male-shaped power; if they represent women they will be called "love" and expected to clear up after themselves. Betty wanted to change that for ever. She wanted women to be a force to be reckoned with, and yet she let Carl Friedan have all the income from The Feminine Mystique. Or so she told me, sotto voce, in 1971. Something to do with community property, I guess. She was not yet divorced from him then.
From The Second Sex to The Beauty Myth: 10 of the best feminist texts
Twentieth-century polemical writing that changed the way we think about gender Barbara Ellen Monday 9 October 2017 06.00 BST
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
To ask what influence this book had on gender politics is akin to wondering what the sun ever did for the earth. The answer? Everything. Today, The Second Sex is still hailed as the mothership of feminist philosophy. “One is not born, but rather becomes (a) woman,” muses De Beauvoir (the quote varying, according to the translation). Exploring topics from sex, work and family to prostitution, abortion and the history of female subordination, De Beauvoir challenges the notion of men as the default (the ideal), and women as “other”. For many, The Second Sexrepresents not just key feminist reading, but rather essential feminist thinking and being.
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)
This book was no mere pity-party for dissatisfied 1950s/60s Valium-gobbling US housewives. It was a call to arms, demystifying what became known as “second-wave feminism” for ordinary women all over the world. Friedan also identified “the problem that has no name”, probing the lack of fulfilment in women’s lives – where everything “domestic” and trivial was deemed theirs, and everything important was “men only”. With a precision and defiance that still resonates today, The Feminine Mystique challenged the notion that, for women, anatomy was destiny.
Sexual Politics by Kate Millett (1970)
Sexual Politics brought the fizz of iconoclasm to gender politics, tackling how women were routinely diminished and over-sexualised in literature and wider culture. Calling out the likes of Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and DH Lawrence, for what might be politely termed patriarchal/male dominant gender bias, and impolitely, literary macho dick-swinging, Millett set the benchmark for in-depth, no-holds-barred feminist critique. Her book remains relevant today because it encouraged readers to question not just the topics cited, but everything around them and tounderstand better how sexism could be systematically ingrained, culturally as well as politically.
1970 and 2006 editions of The Female Eunuch, featuring the iconic cover art by John Holmes, and Germaine Greer photographed for the Observer magazine in 1970. Composite: Sandra Lousada for the Observer
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
This work marked Greer out as a taboo-busting feminist punk, before punk was even invented. The tone was set by the provocative female body-suit on the cover, while the text counselled women to break free in all ways from male-prescribed gendered “normality”, including monogamy. The Female Eunuch remains a feminist classic and while truly a book of its time (women were advised to taste their menstrual blood), the author’s sabre-rattling intellect hasn’t dated.
Against Our Will: Men. Women and Rape by Susan Brownmiller (1975)
Anyone who cares about those who are raped, and how they are treated afterwards by society, owes a debt of thanks to Brownmiller’s book. A ground-breaking text on sexual assault, it correctly identified rape as a crime “not of lust, but of violence and power”, arguing against the widespread fallacy that those who were raped “deserved” it. Brownmiller’s book was widely credited with helping to transform the public view of rape globally, even influencing changes in law. More than 40 years since its publication, anyone who fights against the still-thriving culture of “victim blaming” is echoing the work of Brownmiller and Against Our Will.
Beyond the Fragments by Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, Hilary Wainwright (1979)
First a pamphlet, then a conference, then a book, with three authors, Beyond the Fragments applied “socialist feminist” ideologies to the complex problems of an unequal society. While some of the issues and terminology were very much of the era (it was updated in 2012), the book was highly influential, arguing for greater cohesion among disparate left-leaning groups. The text not only examined the relationship between women and the state, it also honoured the whole feminist experience, from the personal to the political, and back again.
Protesters hold their fists in the air during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in New York on 10 July 2016. Photograph: Seth Wenig/AP
Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks (1981)
This text dealt with the socioeconomic, educational and sexual devaluation of black women. As evidenced by her other books, including Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, hooks writes for all women, particularly the poor and marginalised. However, Ain’t I a Woman gave them a powerful voice at a time when they were barely heard, and when the idea of a black US First Lady remained about as feasible as a Martian president. With the book’s essence still infusing the spirit of modern movements such as Black Lives Matter, hooks is acknowledged as one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from feminist America.
Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin (1987)
As radical as other works by Dworkin, such as Pornography, Intercoursefocused on how heterosexual sex was too frequently based on the subordination, “occupation” and degradation of women. (although the famous quote – that all heterosexual sex was rape – wasn’t explicitly made in the book). It further stereotyped Dworkin as a cartoon “man hater” in the public imagination, and her ideas may still be too strong for many. However, there could be no serious debate on matters such as sexual violence or consent without acknowledging the unflinching courage. and originality of her thinking. Arguably, Dworkin’s work is “feminist Ribena” – providing the concentrate to the mainstream dilution of now-accepted feminist thought.
The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1990)
Wolf’s work recognised the dark truth that however clever, funny and dynamic women might be, there was always something trying to make them feel bad about the size of their thighs. Worse, that this relentless external message (that a woman’s desirability was paramount)was internalising, and getting worse, even as modern women’s power and prominence outwardly increased. Wolf is viewed by some as controversial, sometimes inconsistent but her skilful analysis of female oppression (and the fact that they never really went away) makes The Beauty Myth all too relevant today.
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay (2014)
Already viewed as a classic of fourth-wave feminism, Gay’s book examines race, weight, sex, gender, violence and popular culture. She blends the observational with the devastatingly confessional (Gay’s gang rape; over-eating). Her deceptively low-key writing style doesn’t mask her core message: in a contradictory world, the modern feminist is more useful being expressive and engaged than being rigidly “observant”.
This is part of the Observer’s 100 political classics that shaped the modern era. Please leave suggestions below of books that inspired and shaped your political consciousness and we’ll round up the best in next week’s Observer
The 100 best nonfiction books: No 13 – The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
The Australian feminist’s famous polemic remains a masterpiece of passionate free expression Robert McCrum Mon 25 Apr 2016
S
ome of the outstanding books in this series will be polemical and rhetorical as much as revolutionary. In the literature of gender identity, The Female Eunuch is already a classic, a bestselling masterpiece of passionate free expression by a writer steeped in the English literary tradition. Australia’s Germaine Greer, the woman who has described herself as “an anarchist, basically”, was captured in an Observer profile of 2003: “She has been in the business of shaking up a complacent establishment for nearly 40 years now, and was employing the most elemental shock tactic of getting naked in public both long before and long after it ever crossed Madonna’s mind. Indeed, she has never shied away from exposing herself; whether photographically, in counterculture periodicals such as Oz and the unambiguously titled Suck, or in memoirs such as her 1990 book Daddy, We Hardly Knew You. She has repeatedly written about her own experiences of lesbian sex, rape, abortion, infertility, failed marriage (in the 1960s she was married to a construction worker for three weeks) and the menopause, thereby leaving herself open to claims that she shamelessly extrapolates from her own condition to the rest of womankind and calls it a theory. She is the original mother of reinvention.”
A point to prove: Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian
Greer is always her own best material. It’s her voice that sets her work apart, and her inimitable tone – earthy erudition spliced with abrasive advocacy – that gives The Female Eunuch its unique narrative power. When he reviewed The Female Eunuch in the Observer, Kenneth Tynan recognised this. He wrote that Greer “has converted me to women’s lib, as much by her bawdy sense of humour as by the bite of her polemic”.
From first publication, this liberating, sometimes intimidating, book soon became mythologised. As a revolutionary manifesto, there are many things it’s not: principally, it’s not about sexual equality for women of the world, though that may have been a message her readers took away. Greer’s explicit liberation struggle focuses on the self, not the collective. She wants a new society in which women write their own script, set their own agenda, and make their own deep personal choices. The “women” Greer addresses are not the majority of womenkind – she concedes that she does not “know” poor people – but people like herself, university graduates, the comparatively privileged members of the western democracies. The books her work complements are Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, both of which are less accessible, and more earnestly part of the women’s movement in its early days. From that springboard Greer, the self-confessed “anarchist” (elsewhere, a “privileged escapee”), was able to vault over a lot of tedious barricade-building before establishing her own risky and raucous front line in the sex wars of the late 20th century.
Greer herself was under no illusions about her place in the maelstrom of socio-cultural change that exploded around her in the late 1960s. Her work, she declared on the first page of The Female Eunuch, was just “part of the second feminist wave”. This, for some, was about the forging of a classless society and the withering away of the state. Not Greer. Where once, in suffragette days, genteel middle-class ladies had clamoured for reform, the Greer of circa 1970 wanted one thing: freedom. “Freedom to be a person, with the dignity, integrity, nobility, passion, and pride that constitute personhood. Freedom to run, shout, to talk loudly and sit with your knees apart.”
In retrospect, perhaps disingenuously, she hoped her book would “quickly date and disappear” as the feminist revolution swept all before it. The movement, of course, did no such thing, and Greer’s bright hopes for “a new breed of women” for whom her analysis of “sex oppression in the developed world in the second half of the 20th century would be utterly irrelevant” still remain unfulfilled. But the temptation now to read The Female Eunuch as outmoded, suffering the fate of all polemical literature, would be to overlook its staying power as an inspiring beacon amid a hurricane of social change.
The incandescent energy that promoted The Female Eunuch’s ecstatic iconoclasm, especially to the new generation of the 1970s, came from a young woman who was just 31 on publication, craving freedom from the suffocations and cruelties of patriarchy, freedom from condescension, casual humiliation and abuse. Greer’s was a manifesto for a showdown with the opposite sex. “Most of the women in the world,” she writes, “are still afraid, still hungry, still mute and loaded by religion with all kinds of fetters, masked, muzzled, mutilated and beaten”. However, the argument she makes about female submission in a patriarchal society is framed in terms of “liberation”, not “equality”. Despite occasional references to the new left, there is a striking absence of class war in The Female Eunuch.
She opens with a section on the body, because it is impossible, she declares, “to argue a case for female liberation if there is no certainty about the degree of inferiority or natural dependence which is unalterably female... We know what we are, but know not what we may be, or what we might have been.”
Juxtaposed with the body is not the mind, as one might expect, but the soul, which is enslaved to the subtle tyranny of all-pervasive male fantasies, anatomised in a passionate sequence entitled “the stereotype”. It’s here that the narrative and many of its more fervent declarations (“I am sick of the Powder Room”) now read like a first draft for its author’s autobiography, and sometimes even like a fragment of literary criticism.
The second half of The Female Eunuch delves first into love (and its paradoxes), and then segues, with the decibels rising, into hate (“women have very little idea of how much men hate them”). Greer’s chapter on abuse is prescient and literary, devolving into a brilliant passage of linguistic analysis leavened with quotations from King Lear, Frank Zappa and Schopenhauer. This, unequivocally, is a book of its time and its place, a book whose subject young Dr Greer would have debated in many Cambridge postgraduate seminars during the 1960s.
The Female Eunuch closes with a call to arms, a passionate but vague appeal for revolution, a rhetorical flourish which must, to any committed 21st century feminist, seem almost comically thin. “The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women must take,” instructs Greer in her closing pages, “is joy in the struggle”. What might that be ? “Revolution,” she declares, “is the festival of the oppressed. For a long time there may be no perceptible reward for women other than their new sense of purpose and integrity. Joy does not mean riotous glee, but it does mean the purposive employment of energy in a self-chosen enterprise.” These words might almost be a definition of Germaine Greer’s subsequent career path.
Social earthquakes of any consequence have their absurdities and confusions. Going over the top is part of every revolutionary’s job description. The radical feminism of the 1970s has worn about as well as the radical socialism that preceded the Thatcher counter-revolution, which is to say: quite badly. Nevertheless women’s lib, combined with the new left, did achieve lasting social and cultural change. The Female Eunuch was one of many catalysts in that ferment, with Germaine Greer its merry, and dazzling provocateur, a mischievous hybrid of lab assistant and sorcerer’s apprentice. Nearly 50 years on, who could not find it in their hearts to salute the queen of such revels?
A signature sentence
“The first significant discovery we shall make as we racket along our female road to freedom is that men are not free, and they will seek to make this an argument why nobody should be free.”