For the one in 25 teenage girls in Britain who are already anorexic, the one in four British women who experience domestic violence or the half million outworkers in the UK who earn less than £56 a week, feminism has definitely not gone too far – it hasn’t gone far enough! In her introduction, Greer states that “in a world system that creates billions of losers for every handful of winners, it’s time to get angry again.” Getting angry isn’t difficult. Greer’s writing style is “In Ya Face.” It is full of real women, real stories, real lives. But the book is not a compendium of faceless statistics. The 35 chapters, each with an enticing one-word title, present abundant and meticulous research about women’s oppression in the ‘90s. She reveals the source of her passion and takes aim at the likes of Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique : “It was not until feminists of my own generation began to assert with apparent seriousness that feminism had gone too far that the fire flared up in my belly.” Greer is similarly scornful of one-time feminists caught up in the backlash. It demolishes narcissistic claims by an elite group of lifestyle feminist that women now have it all – money, sex and fashion. The Whole Woman is a sequel to The Female Eunuch, one of several books which inspired a generation of women in the ‘70s. Greer wrote the book she said she’d never write. A friend of mine has a clever T-shirt which reads “I’ll be a post-feminist in post-patriarchy.” Germaine Greer’s new book, The Whole Woman, is a book version of the T-shirt.
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