tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/germaine-greer-7706/articlesGermaine Greer – The Conversation2024-03-13T19:14:48Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2227522024-03-13T19:14:48Z2024-03-13T19:14:48ZSex, zips and feminism: Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying has a joyful abandon rarely found in today’s sad girl novels<p><em>In our feminist classics series, we look at influential books.</em></p>
<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9654.Fear_of_Flying">Fear of Flying</a>, Erica Jong’s 1973 blockbuster novel, begins with an ingenious opening line. </p>
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<p>There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them. </p>
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<p>In those 21 words Jong introduces her book’s droll, wisecracking tone, suggesting a journey that will transport her narrator’s mind <em>and</em> body. The reference to a post-war Vienna foreshadows the book’s more serious themes. But another three words Jong coined, “the zipless fuck”, are most often credited for Fear of Flying’s <a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/fear-of-flying-erica-jong-50-essay-elaine-showalter/">reported 35 million plus sales</a> (and more on this later).</p>
<p>We soon learn the novel’s heroine, Isadora Wing, is accompanying Bennett, her Chinese-American psychiatrist husband, to an international congress in honour of Freud. A couple of years earlier, the newly married couple had lived on a US army base in Heidelberg, and Isadora is alert to the antisemitism still thriving in Europe. She imagines the reception awaiting them in Vienna, from the people “who invented schmaltz (and crematoria)”:</p>
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<p>Welcome back! Welcome Back! At least those of you who survived Auschwitz, Belsen, the London Blitz, and the co-optation of America.</p>
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<p>Isadora (as Jong was in the early 1970s) is a 29-year-old writer from an artistic New York Jewish family who has recently published a book of erotic poetry. She is also terrified of flying (understandable in the 1970s, an era when plane crashes and hijackings were not uncommon):</p>
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<p>My fingers (and toes) turn to ice, my stomach leaps upwards into my ribcage, the temperature in the tip of my nose drops to the same level as the temperature of my fingers, my nipples stand up and salute the inside of my bra (or in this case, dress – since I’m not wearing a bra).</p>
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<p>Isadora’s fear of flight seems to contradict her surname: marriage, she says, has given her a safe nest, the quietude she needs to create. But she can’t stop thinking about using her wings, about other lives she could lead. It’s no coincidence this story begins on a plane, a space suggesting new possibilities, charged with erotic potential as well as the distant prospect of being extinguished.</p>
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Read more:
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<h2>Id versus ego</h2>
<p>In Vienna, where Isadora is writing about the conference for Voyeur magazine, she meets analyst Adrian Goodlove. A paunchy Englishman with dirty toenails, shaggy blond hair and a pipe “hanging out of his face”, he looks at her “the way a man smiles when he’s lying on top of you after a particularly good lay”. And he delivers the first of what will be many backhanded compliments: “If you’d stop being paranoid for a minute and use charm instead of main force, I’m sure nobody could resist you”.</p>
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<p>Between his flattery and his accusations that she is leading a dishonest life, Goodlove presses all Isadora’s buttons. That night he grabs her “plump ass” while they talk about new trends in psychotherapy. “In general,” she declares, “I seem to like men who can make that quick transition from spirit to matter.”</p>
<p>Our narrator’s dilemma is how to resolve the contradictions of a pleasure-seeking id that wants to live without planning or expectations, and a rational ego that tells her the more paternal and nurturing Bennett, the man who helped her overcome writer’s block, is her safest bet. (Even his name – if you delete a “t” – suggests a happy-ever-after <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bennet-family">Jane Austen novel</a>.)</p>
<p>Fear of Flying was released soon after the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Roe-v-Wade">Roe vs Wade</a> legalising abortion. Jong was writing as second wave feminism was in the ascendancy and her novel often reads like a feminist manifesto: </p>
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<p>Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead.</p>
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<p>After a less than satisfying first sexual encounter with Goodlove, Isadora muses on the asymmetry of sexual relations in a world where men may turn limp, but women are considered eternally ready: </p>
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<p>No wonder men hated women. No wonder men invented the myth of female sexual inadequacy.</p>
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<p>But the twice-married Isadora is also a pragmatic realist. She believes in matrimony because: </p>
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<p>It was necessary to have one best friend in a hostile world, one person you’d be loyal to no matter what, one person who’d always be loyal to you.</p>
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<p>Still, what is she to do with the restlessness that can maroon long-term relationships? With the, </p>
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<p>thump in the c..t, the longing to be filled up […] the yearning for dry champagne and wet kisses, for the smell of peonies in a penthouse on a June night […] </p>
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<p>Jong was aligned with the second wave’s pro-sex feminism. Germaine Greer, for instance, had argued in The Female Eunuch that women’s liberation should begin with their sexual liberation.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-female-eunuch-at-50-germaine-greers-fearless-feminist-masterpiece-147437">Friday essay: The Female Eunuch at 50, Germaine Greer's fearless, feminist masterpiece</a>
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<p>But sexual ecstasy isn’t really all Isadora wants either. It’s her <em>imagination</em> that excites her. At a conference talk, she and Goodlove stare at each other: </p>
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<p>He sucks on his pipe as if he were sucking on me […] He drags on his pipe. I drag on his phantom prick […] Little heat waves seem to connect our pelvises as if in some pornographic comic.</p>
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<p>Her taste in men might be “questionable” Isadora admits (she loves Goodlove’s sweat and tobacco smells and doesn’t even mind his “exuberant public farting”) but “who can debate taste anyway?”, she rightly points out.</p>
<h2>A liberal time</h2>
<p>When Fear of Flying was released in Australia, censorship laws were relaxing, Dolly Doctor had begun giving teen girls advice about sexual health, actor Jack Thompson had <a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1364234744/view?sectionId=nla.obj-1631636761&partId=nla.obj-1364359741#page/n57/mode/1up">stripped for a Cleo magazine centrefold</a> and the full frontal nudity of Tim Burstall’s 1973 film <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Purple">Alvin Purple</a> was filling cinemas. </p>
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<p>As historian Michelle Arrow <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/seventies/">has written</a>, in the 1970s the personal was becoming political, and Australians’ attitudes to sex and sexuality were rapidly liberalising. Many children of the 1970s will, like me, remember Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex on their family’s bookshelves alongside copies of National Geographic. Fear of Flying was a part of this new landscape.</p>
<p>Jong’s story can also be read in the context of a world emerging from the senselessness of the two world wars, with the US digging into another war in Vietnam. In Heidelberg, Isadora had written columns about dishonesty of German guidebooks which tied a “fig leaf” over their recent history of fascism and gas chambers. Now her target is middle-class sexual morality. When Goodlove gives her a lift to her hotel, she thinks:</p>
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<p>How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don’t want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don’t want to fuck while pretending he’s the one you do. That’s called fidelity. That’s called monogamy. That’s called civilisation and its discontents.</p>
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<p>When the conference ends, Isadora leaves with Goodlove to criss-cross Europe while making love, a quest that seems to give a symbolic middle finger to all the forces that made war on that continent. And she embraces the intellectual movements trying to find meaning in humanity’s absurdity.</p>
<p>She introduces the two of them to clueless travellers as “Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre”. Camping by roadsides at night, they discuss how: </p>
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<p>We’d learn to do away with silly things like jealousy. We’d fuck each other and all our friends. We’d live without worrying about possessions or possessiveness. Eventually someday, we’d establish a commune for schizophrenics, poets, and radical shrinks.</p>
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<p>The novel slips between musings about history and philosophy and flashbacks to Isadora’s childhood and earlier relationships, to fragments of poetry and humorous lists. The writing is sometimes beautifully evocative. A woman looking out a train window is “staring at each olive tree as if she were God and had just made them and were wondering what to call them”.</p>
<p>Isadora’s road trip has a propulsive energy (she’s as much Jack Kerouac as de Beauvoir) but contemporary readers may find Jong’s writing at times unforgivably shocking in all the wrong ways. While Isadora is alive to antisemitism, a chapter covering an interlude in Beirut with her brother-in-law’s family is titled “Arabs and other animals,” (“If I were writing today, I would never say [that]” <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/14/still-flying">Jong acknowledged in 2008</a>.) In another chapter, she describes Indian writers “punjabbering away” at a writers’ festival.</p>
<p>When Isadora poses questions (“Was loneliness universal?”) I was reminded of the framing device used in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159206/">Sex and The City</a>, where Carrie Bradshaw, another magazine writer, sits at a keyboard while her voice-over begins a column. (Isadora’s sexual adventurousness also suggests a Samantha, from the same TV show – or a Jessa or Hannah from Lena Dunham’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1723816/">Girls</a>). We can also see shades of Jong’s mixing of political ponderings with descriptions of (often unsatisfying) sex in Irish author Sally Rooney’s contemporary novels.</p>
<p>But there is a joyful abandon in Jong’s story that sets it apart from today’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/03/sad-girl-novel-author-pip-finkemeyer-on-critiquing-sad-girl-novels-it-has-to-have-a-heart">sad girl novels</a>. Jong was writing at a time when radical change seemed imminent. Today’s stories are written when worldwide systems collapse appears all but certain, when technological ennui and a pandemic can reduce foreplay to the characters in a novel waiting for <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Madeleine-Gray-Green-Dot-9781761068614/">green dots</a> to appear on their messaging app.</p>
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Read more:
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<h2>Male critics</h2>
<p>One of the pleasures (for this reader, at least) of Fear of Flying is Jong’s constant shifts in register, with Isadora reflecting on existentialism and fascism and history and Shakespeare one minute then turning her attention to the sometimes squalid and often sexy stuff of life the next. Jong is funny in a quippy, sometimes punny way. (“Phallocentric, someone once said of Freud. He thought the sun revolved around the penis. And the daughter, too.”).</p>
<p>Some of the book’s earliest reviewers were, however, brutal. Jong’s “narration denigrates all women by casting them in her mold; people who don’t know what they want,” wrote <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/20/reviews/jong-flying.html">Terry Stokes in the New York Times</a>. “The male figures are portrayed as either lifeless or fall guys for Isadora’s proclamations,” he added, concluding that the book’s “whining” spoils “this otherwise energetic, bawdy, well-conceived first novel.”</p>
<p>In The Observer, Martin Amis argued Jong had merely written a memoir: “the girls [Erica/Isadora] seem to be more or less interchangeable. They are both thirtyish, both blonde and blue-eyed, and both married to Asian psychiatrists.” He ridicules her “beefs about women’s lib, creative commitment, dieting, orgasms”, adding: </p>
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<p>I neither know nor care whether all the horrible and embarrassing things in this book have actually happened to Miss Jong.</p>
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<p>In 1977, an Australian novel about another 30ish woman writer that was equally shocking in its explicit language and descriptions of a woman’s desires left male reviewers similarly non-plussed. Helen Garner eventually responded to the critics of Monkey Grip <a href="https://meanjin.com.au/essays/i/">in an essay</a> that could equally serve as a riposte to Amis’ criticisms of Jong.</p>
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<p>Why the sneer in ‘All she’s done is publish her diaries’? It’s as if this were cheating […] As if there were no work involved in keeping a diary in the first place: no thinking, no discipline, no creative energy, no focusing or directing of creative energy; no intelligent or artful ordering of material; no choosing of material, for God’s sake; no shaping of narrative; no ear for the music of human speech; no portrayal of the physical world; no free movement back and forth in time; no leaping between inner and outer; no examination of motive; no imaginative use of language. </p>
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<p>Jong seems to preempt male reviewers’ criticisms of her book when she has her character, Isadora, ponder why she’d abandoned two earlier novels. </p>
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<p>I just assumed nobody would be interested in a woman’s point of view. Besides, I didn’t want to risk being called all the things women writers (even good women writers) are called: ‘clever, witty, bright, touching, but lacks scope’.</p>
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<p>Interestingly though, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1973/12/17/jong-love">another male writer, John Updike,</a> helped Jong’s rise up the bestseller list. Even so, his compliments can read as backhanded as Goodlove’s: </p>
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<p>It has class and sass, brightness and bite. Containing all the cracked eggs of the feminist litany, her soufflé rises with a poet’s afflatus. She sprinkles on the four-letter words as if women had invented them; her cheerful sexual frankness brings a new flavor to female prose.</p>
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<p>Updike favourably links Jong with great male writers J.D. Salinger and Philip Roth, while carefully distinguishing her from the more disagreeable women’s liberationists: </p>
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<p>Fear of Flying not only stands as a notably luxuriant and glowing bloom in the sometimes thistly garden of ‘raised’ feminine consciousness but belongs to, and hilariously extends, the tradition of Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy’s Complaint.</p>
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<p>Pull quotes from Updike’s review featured on the novel’s second edition (the one I have been reading), along with a new cover: a luscious 70s serif typeface in black and orange on a yellow background that blatantly copies the 1969 cover of Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. </p>
<p>But Jong never received the same literary establishment acceptance as Roth, whose novels also feature characters with strong parallels to the author’s own life. In a 2011 <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/an-open-letter-from-erica_b_50907">open letter</a> to the author Jane Smiley, Jong warns of the fleeting successes often afforded to women writers:</p>
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<p>The male literary establishment allows us in on sufferance […] Most women writers have been remembered for their love affairs, not their words.</p>
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<p>Jong has not always been unconditionally accepted in the feminist canon either. When Fear of Flying was left out of the 1980 book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85833442-decade-of-women?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Sq9aIwkR4d&rank=3">The Decade of Women: A Ms. History of the Seventies in Words and Pictures</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/09/books/review/erica-jong-fear-of-flying.html">the wounded author complained in a letter</a> to Gloria Steinem and the book’s co-editors, arguing her novel was “probably the most widely read feminist book of the decade”.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-are-the-four-waves-of-feminism-and-what-comes-next-224153">What are the four waves of feminism? And what comes next?</a>
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<h2>That zip</h2>
<p>Perhaps it was Jong’s best-known verbal invention, “the zipless fuck”, that’s responsible for her troubled position within the women’s movement: the concept was perhaps just too fluffy, too <em>frivolous</em> for such a serious movement. </p>
<p>The zipless fuck was, Isadora acknowledges, simply an “ideal”: when two people came together and “zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff”. </p>
<p>In a zipless fuck, according to Isadora, the participants can’t know anything about each other. No names and barely any faces are involved. It certainly can’t be planned (assignations on Tinder or Grindr would not qualify).</p>
<p>The zipless fuck, she says,</p>
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<p>has all the swift compression of a dream and is seemingly free of all remorse and guilt; because there is no talk of her late husband or of his fiancée; because there is no rationalizing; because there is no talk at all […] The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn.</p>
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<p>In Fear of Flying, the existentialist Goodlove abruptly ends their affair when he tells her he had planned to return to his wife and children all along. Isadora retreats to London, where she talks her way into the hotel where Bennett is staying. Alone in a bath, she looks at her sunburned limbs and decides she has a “nice body”.</p>
<p>The scene could be read as a capitulation to heterosexual marriage, but by the novel’s end it’s not clear if she will stay. What she <em>has</em> found is some love and desire, for herself. Perhaps even a story. And she is no longer afraid.</p>
<h2>Sex as liberation</h2>
<p>Issues of consent and sexual assault have rightly been a headline focus of recent feminism. Jong writes about two incidents of sexual assault in Fear of Flying. But while they are turning points for Isadora, they are not defining experiences. </p>
<p>The novel is a useful reminder of the way feminism has <em>also</em> always been interested in the liberatory powers of sex. And it reminds us that our desires can be multiple and contradictory, destructive <em>and</em> productive. They are always in flux and, in an important sense, ultimately unknowable to ourselves. </p>
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<p>In a <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/287542/fear-of-flying-by-erica-jong-with-a-new-foreword-by-molly-jong-fast-and-a-new-introduction-by-taffy-brodesser-akner/">forward to Penguin’s 50th anniversary edition</a> of Fear of Flying, Jong’s daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, recalls that for decades women would come up to her mother, “look earnestly into her eyes, and tell her how the book had changed their lives”. </p>
<p>Jong went on to write eight more novels, poetry collections, non-fiction works (including the 2012 A Letter to the President, about the still unfinished work of feminism) as well as memoirs and children’s books. But none, including the recent Fear of Dying, the story of sixty-something Vanessa, Isadora’s sexually voracious now good friend, would have the cultural impact of Fear of Flying.</p>
<p>Jong’s commercial success was, in part, responsible for the arms-length distance the academy long gave her. When Columbia University held a 2008 conference on Jong’s work after acquiring her literary papers, Jong was interviewed by English professor Jenny Davidson. Fear of Flying brought Jong fame and celebrity, but as Jong <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/14/still-flying">told the Columbia audience</a> the book was both a gift <em>and</em> a “curse.” Jong said she had always wanted to be a poet and professor of literature.</p>
<p>In 2022, Swiss director Kaspar Kasic’s documentary about Jong, Breaking the Wall, was released. Its mix of <a href="https://cineuropa.org/en/interview/429000">archival and contemporary footage</a> testifies to the enduring power of Jong’s story across decades, across languages and culture. </p>
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<p>Also in 2022 Jong’s daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, wrote <a href="https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/wait-what/email/539529cd-5645-4e17-b43d-84e768992278/">a piece for The Atlantic</a> as <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-overturns-abortion-rights-landmark-2022-06-24/#:%7E:text=in%20the%20ruling.-,Roe%20v.,Parenthood%20of%20Southeastern%20Pennsylvania%20v.">a new conservative court was about to overturn</a> the right to an abortion enshrined by Roe v Wade. Jong-Fast reflected on how she had grown up with “an automatic assumption of reproductive rights” that her mother “did not have”. </p>
<p>In the pre-Roe years of the early 1970s, Isadora is sexually daring but still terrified of pregnancy. She’s preoccupied waiting for her period to come and sourcing the diaphragms only easily available to married women.</p>
<p>Perhaps this is why, reflecting on the book’s fiftieth anniversary last year, and as women’s rights to bodily autonomy are being rolled back in the US, feminist critic <a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/fear-of-flying-erica-jong-50-essay-elaine-showalter/">Elaine Showalter concluded</a> that Fear of Flying “still speaks to us”.</p>
<p>Jong is now losing her memory to dementia. Showalter also remarks, “even if the author is disappearing, the novel is still there, still funny, exuberant, ambitious and intelligent”. It is a novel that reminds us that great feminist books have always wanted to change not just lives, but the whole world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222752/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kath Kenny does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Erica Jong’s 1973 novel about one woman’s sexually daring search for freedom changed lives, and sold around 35 million copies. Though her racism now shocks, much of the book speaks to our moment.Kath Kenny, Sessional academic, Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2241532024-03-07T19:24:11Z2024-03-07T19:24:11ZWhat are the four waves of feminism? And what comes next?<p>In Western countries, feminist history is generally packaged as a story of “waves”. The so-called first wave lasted from the mid-19th century to 1920. The second wave spanned the 1960s to the early 1980s. The third wave began in the mid-1990s and lasted until the 2010s. Finally, some say we are experiencing a fourth wave, which began in the mid-2010s and continues now.</p>
<p>The first person to use “waves” was journalist Martha Weinman Lear, in her 1968 New York Times article, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1968/03/10/archives/the-second-feminist-wave.html">The Second Feminist Wave</a>, demonstrating that the women’s liberation movement was another <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/16955588/feminism-waves-explained-first-second-third-fourth">“new chapter</a> in a grand history of women fighting together for their rights”. She was responding to anti-feminists’ framing of the movement as a “<a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/16955588/feminism-waves-explained-first-second-third-fourth">bizarre historical aberration</a>”.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/718868">Some feminists</a> criticise the usefulness of the metaphor. Where do feminists who preceded the first wave sit? For instance, Middle Ages feminist writer <a href="https://blogs.loc.gov/bibliomania/2023/08/30/christine-de-pizan/">Christine de Pizan</a>, or philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/">Mary Wollstonecraft</a>, author of <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman-9780141441252">A Vindication of the Rights of Woman</a> (1792). </p>
<p>Does the metaphor of a single wave <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/16955588/feminism-waves-explained-first-second-third-fourth">overshadow</a> the complex variety of feminist concerns and demands? And does this language exclude the <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/718868">non-West</a>, for whom the “waves” story is meaningless?</p>
<p>Despite these concerns, countless feminists <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317322421_Finding_a_Place_in_History_The_Discursive_Legacy_of_the_Wave_Metaphor_and_Contemporary_Feminism">continue to use</a> “waves” to explain their position in relation to previous generations.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579536/original/file-20240304-28-b6mifj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579536/original/file-20240304-28-b6mifj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579536/original/file-20240304-28-b6mifj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=358&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579536/original/file-20240304-28-b6mifj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=358&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579536/original/file-20240304-28-b6mifj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=358&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579536/original/file-20240304-28-b6mifj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579536/original/file-20240304-28-b6mifj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579536/original/file-20240304-28-b6mifj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A second-wave International Women’s Day rally in Melbourne, 1975.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.naa.gov.au/students-and-teachers/learning-resources/learning-resource-themes/society-and-culture/gender-and-sexuality/international-womens-day-rally-melbourne">National Archives of Australia</a></span>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-whitlam-government-gave-us-no-fault-divorce-womens-refuges-and-childcare-australia-needs-another-feminist-revolution-202238">The Whitlam government gave us no-fault divorce, women's refuges and childcare. Australia needs another feminist revolution</a>
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<h2>The first wave: from 1848</h2>
<p>The first wave of feminism refers to the campaign for the vote. It began in the United States in 1848 with the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/seneca-falls-and-building-a-movement-1776-1890/">Seneca Falls Convention</a>, where 300 gathered to debate Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments, outlining women’s inferior status and demanding suffrage – or, the right to vote.</p>
<p>It continued over a decade later, in 1866, in Britain, with the presentation of a <a href="https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/womenvote/parliamentary-collections/1866-suffrage-petition/presenting-the-petition/">suffrage petition</a> to parliament.</p>
<p>This wave ended in 1920, when women were granted the right to vote in the US. (Limited women’s suffrage had been introduced in Britain two years earlier, in 1918.) First-wave activists believed once the vote had been won, women could use its power to enact other much-needed reforms, related to property ownership, education, employment and more. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579516/original/file-20240304-16-oifdqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579516/original/file-20240304-16-oifdqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579516/original/file-20240304-16-oifdqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=724&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579516/original/file-20240304-16-oifdqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=724&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579516/original/file-20240304-16-oifdqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=724&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579516/original/file-20240304-16-oifdqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579516/original/file-20240304-16-oifdqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579516/original/file-20240304-16-oifdqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Vida Goldstein.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vida_Goldstein#/media/File:Vida_Goldstein-01.jpg">Wikipedia</a></span>
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<p>White leaders dominated the movement. They included longtime president of the the International Woman Suffrage Alliance <a href="https://cattcenter.iastate.edu/home/about-us/carrie-chapman-catt/">Carrie Chapman Catt</a> in the US, leader of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emmeline-Pankhurst">Emmeline Pankhurst</a> in the UK, and <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/spence-catherine-helen-4627">Catherine Helen Spence</a> and <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/goldstein-vida-jane-6418">Vida Goldstein</a> in Australia. </p>
<p>This has tended to obscure the histories of non-white feminists like evangelist and social reformer <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sojourner-Truth">Sojourner Truth</a> and journalist, activist and researcher <a href="https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/ida-b-wells-barnett">Ida B. Wells</a>, who were fighting on multiple fronts – including anti-slavery and anti-lynching – as well as feminism. </p>
<h2>The second wave: from 1963</h2>
<p>The second wave coincided with the publication of US feminist Betty Friedan’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-feminine-mystique-9780141192055">The Feminine Mystique</a> in 1963. Friedan’s “<a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/powerful-complicated-legacy-betty-friedans-feminine-mystique-180976931/">powerful treatise</a>” raised critical interest in issues that came to define the women’s liberation movement until the early 1980s, like workplace equality, birth control and abortion, and women’s education. </p>
<p>Women came together in “consciousness-raising” groups to share their individual experiences of oppression. These discussions informed and motivated public agitation for <a href="https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/HaeberlenPolitics">gender equality and social change</a>. Sexuality and gender-based violence were other prominent second-wave concerns. </p>
<p>Australian feminist Germaine Greer wrote <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780007205011/the-female-eunuch/">The Female Eunuch</a>, published in 1970, which <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-female-eunuch-at-50-germaine-greers-fearless-feminist-masterpiece-147437">urged women to</a> “challenge the ties binding them to gender inequality and domestic servitude” – and to ignore repressive male authority by exploring their sexuality. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-female-eunuch-at-50-germaine-greers-fearless-feminist-masterpiece-147437">Friday essay: The Female Eunuch at 50, Germaine Greer's fearless, feminist masterpiece</a>
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<p>Successful lobbying saw the establishment of refuges for women and children fleeing domestic violence and rape. In Australia, there were groundbreaking political appointments, including the world’s first Women’s Advisor to a national government (<a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/audio/landmark-women/transcripts/landmark-women-elizabeth-reid-181013.mp3-transcript">Elizabeth Reid</a>). In 1977, a <a href="https://www.whitlam.org/women-and-whitlam">Royal Commission on Human Relationships</a> examined families, gender and sexuality. </p>
<p>Amid these developments, in 1975, Anne Summers published <a href="https://theconversation.com/damned-whores-and-gods-police-is-still-relevant-to-australia-40-years-on-mores-the-pity-47753">Damned Whores and God’s Police</a>, a scathing historical critique of women’s treatment in patriarchal Australia. </p>
<p>At the same time as they made advances, so-called women’s libbers managed to anger earlier feminists with their distinctive claims to radicalism. Tireless campaigner <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/rich-ruby-sophia-14202">Ruby Rich</a>, who was president of the Australian Federation of Women Voters from 1945 to 1948, responded by declaring the only difference was her generation had called their movement “<a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-296328435/findingaid">justice for women</a>”, not “liberation”. </p>
<p>Like the first wave, mainstream second-wave activism proved largely irrelevant to non-white women, who faced oppression on intersecting gendered and racialised grounds. African American feminists produced their own critical texts, including bell hooks’ <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Aint-I-a-Woman-Black-Women-and-Feminism/hooks/p/book/9781138821514">Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism</a> in 1981 and Audre Lorde’s <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/198292/sister-outsider-by-audre-lorde/">Sister Outsider</a> in 1984. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/bell-hooks-will-never-leave-us-she-lives-on-through-the-truth-of-her-words-173900">bell hooks will never leave us – she lives on through the truth of her words</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The third wave: from 1992</h2>
<p>The third wave was announced in the 1990s. The term is popularly attributed to Rebecca Walker, daughter of African American feminist activist and writer <a href="https://alicewalkersgarden.com/about/">Alice Walker</a> (author of <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/alice-walker/the-color-purple-now-a-major-motion-picture-from-oprah-winfrey-and-steven-spielberg">The Color Purple</a>). </p>
<p>Aged 22, Rebecca proclaimed in a 1992 Ms. magazine <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200404030632/http:/heathengrrl.blogspot.com/2007/02/becoming-third-wave-by-rebecca-walker.html">article</a>: “I am not a post-feminism feminist. I am the Third Wave.” </p>
<p>Third wavers didn’t think gender equality had been more or less achieved. But they did share <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1464700119842555">post-feminists</a>’ belief that their foremothers’ concerns and demands were obsolete. They argued women’s experiences were now shaped by <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2016.1190046">very different</a> political, economic, technological and cultural conditions. </p>
<p>The third wave has been described as “an <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/beauty/meet-the-woman-who-coined-the-term-third-wave-feminism-20180302-p4z2mw.html">individualised feminism</a> that can not exist without diversity, sex positivity and intersectionality”. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579520/original/file-20240304-16-zuvan5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579520/original/file-20240304-16-zuvan5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579520/original/file-20240304-16-zuvan5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579520/original/file-20240304-16-zuvan5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579520/original/file-20240304-16-zuvan5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579520/original/file-20240304-16-zuvan5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1148&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579520/original/file-20240304-16-zuvan5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1148&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579520/original/file-20240304-16-zuvan5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1148&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">UCLA</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Intersectionality, <a href="https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf">coined</a> in 1989 by African American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, recognises that people can experience intersecting layers of oppression due to race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and more. Crenshaw notes this was a “lived experience” before it was a term. </p>
<p>In 2000, Aileen Moreton Robinson’s <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/talkin-up-to-the-white-woman-indigenous-women-and-feminism-20th-anniversary-edition">Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism</a> expressed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s frustration that white feminism did not adequately address the legacies of dispossession, violence, racism, and sexism.</p>
<p>Certainly, the third wave accommodated <a href="https://paromitapain.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/10.10072F978-3-319-72917-6.pdf#page=112%22">kaleidoscopic views</a>. Some scholars claimed it “grappled with fragmented interests and objectives” – or micropolitics. These included ongoing issues such as sexual harassment in the workplace and a scarcity of women in positions of power. </p>
<p>The third wave also gave birth to the <a href="https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/brief-history-riot-grrrl-space-reclaiming-90s-punk-movement-2542166">Riot Grrrl</a> movement and “girl power”. Feminist punk bands like <a href="https://bikinikill.com/about/">Bikini Kill</a> in the US, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/nov/28/pussy-riot-beaten-jailed-exiled-taunting-putin">Pussy Riot</a> in Russia and Australia’s <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbknev/little-ugly-girls-tractor-album-single-premiere-2018">Little Ugly Girls</a> sang about issues like homophobia, sexual harassment, misogyny, racism, and female empowerment. </p>
<p>Riot Grrrl’s <a href="https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/riotgrrrlmanifesto.html">manifesto</a> states “we are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak”. “Girl power” was epitomised by Britain’s more sugary, phenomenally popular Spice Girls, who were accused of peddling “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/sep/14/spice-girls-how-girl-power-changed-britain-review-fabulous-and-intimate">‘diluted feminism’ to the masses</a>”.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tAbhaguKARw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Riot Grrrrl sang about issues like homophobia, sexual harassment, misogyny and racism.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The fourth wave: 2013 to now</h2>
<p>The fourth wave is epitomised by “<a href="https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol25/iss2/10/">digital or online feminism</a>” which gained currency in about <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/16955588/feminism-waves-explained-first-second-third-fourth">2013</a>. This era is marked by mass online mobilisation. The fourth wave generation is connected via new communication technologies in ways that were not previously possible. </p>
<p>Online mobilisation has led to spectacular street demonstrations, including the #metoo movement. #Metoo was first founded by Black activist <a href="https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/tarana-burke">Tarana Burke</a> in 2006, to support survivors of sexual abuse. The hashtag #metoo then went viral during the 2017 Harvey Weinstein <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/10/28/1131500833/me-too-harvey-weinstein-anniversary">sexual abuse scandal</a>. It was used at least <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563221002193">19 million times</a> on Twitter (now X) alone.</p>
<p>In January 2017, the <a href="https://www.womensmarch.com/">Women’s March</a> protested the inauguration of the decidedly misogynistic Donald Trump as US president. <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Womens-March-2017">Approximately 500,000</a> women marched in Washington DC, with demonstrations held simultaneously in <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Remembering-Womens-Activism/Crozier-De-Rosa-Mackie/p/book/9781138794894">81 nations</a> on all continents of the globe, even Antarctica.</p>
<p>In 2021, the <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/8564388">Women’s March4Justice</a> saw some 110,000 women rallying at more than 200 events across Australian cities and towns, protesting workplace sexual harassment and violence against women, following high-profile cases like that of Brittany Higgins, revealing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/29/brittany-higgins-bruce-lehrmann-defamation-trial-evidence-stand-rape-allegations-liberal-party-ntwnfb#:%7E:text=Bruce%20Lehrmann%20has%20brought%20a,Wilkinson%20are%20defending%20the%20case.">sexual misconduct</a> in the Australian houses of parliament.</p>
<p>Given the prevalence of online connection, it is not surprising fourth wave feminism has reached across geographic regions. The Global Fund for Women <a href="https://www.globalfundforwomen.org/movements/me-too/">reports</a> that #metoo transcends national borders. In China, it is, among other things, #米兔 (translated as “<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/61903744-9540-11e8-b67b-b8205561c3fe">rice bunny</a>”, pronounced as “mi tu”). In Nigeria, it’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we-F0Gi0Lqs">#Sex4Grades</a>. In Turkey, it’s #<a href="https://ahvalnews.com/sexual-harrasment/dozens-turkish-womens-organisations-issue-statement-backing-latest-metoo-movement">UykularınızKaçsın</a> (“may you lose sleep”). </p>
<p>In an inversion of the traditional narrative of the Global North leading the Global South in terms of feminist “progress”, Argentina’s “<a href="https://www.auswhn.com.au/blog/colour-green/">Green Wave</a>” has seen it decriminalise abortion, as has Colombia. Meanwhile, in 2022, the US Supreme Court <a href="https://theconversation.com/us-supreme-court-overturns-roe-v-wade-but-for-abortion-opponents-this-is-just-the-beginning-185768">overturned historic abortion legislation</a>.</p>
<p>Whatever the nuances, the prevalence of such highly visible gender protests have led some feminists, like <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14680777.2020.1804431">Red Chidgey</a>, lecturer in Gender and Media at King’s College London, to declare that feminism has transformed from “a dirty word and publicly abandoned politics” to an ideology sporting “a new cool status”.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-sex-positive-feminist-takes-up-the-unfinished-revolution-her-mother-began-but-its-complicated-189139">Friday essay: a sex-positive feminist takes up the 'unfinished revolution' her mother began – but it's complicated</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Where to now?</h2>
<p>How do we know when to pronounce the next “wave”? (Spoiler alert: I have no answer.) Should we even continue to use the term “waves”?</p>
<p>The “wave” framework was first used to demonstrate feminist continuity and solidarity. However, whether interpreted as disconnected chunks of feminist activity or connected periods of feminist activity and inactivity, represented by the crests and troughs of waves, some believe it encourages binary thinking that produces <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2016.1190046">intergenerational antagonism</a>.</p>
<p>Back in 1983, Australian writer and second-wave feminist Dale Spender, who died last year, <a href="https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/feminism/radical-books-dale-spender-theres-always-been-a-womens-movement-this-century-1983/">confessed her fear</a> that if each generation of women did not know they had robust histories of struggle and achievement behind them, they would labour under the illusion they’d have to develop feminism anew. Surely, this would be an overwhelming prospect.</p>
<p>What does this mean for “waves” in 2024 and beyond?</p>
<p>To build vigorous varieties of feminism going forward, we might reframe the “waves”. We need to let emerging generations of feminists know they are not living in an isolated moment, with the onerous job of starting afresh. Rather, they have the momentum created by generations upon generations of women to build on.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/224153/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sharon Crozier-De Rosa receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>We’re used to describing feminism in ‘waves’, from the first in 1848, campaigning for women to vote, to the current fourth wave, in the age of #metoo. But do waves still work to describe feminism?Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Professor, University of WollongongLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1914962022-09-29T20:05:07Z2022-09-29T20:05:07ZFriday essay: ‘with men I feel like a very sharp, glittering blade’ – when 5 liberated women spoke the truth<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487195/original/file-20220929-26-fi3pch.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C23%2C3910%2C1970&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Helen Garner on stage in Betty Can Jump at The Pram Factory in 1972.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy of the Betty Can Jump collective</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>There’s a climactic scene in Helen Garner’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58420880-how-to-end-a-story?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=2TyyJHICiB&rank=2">third and latest diary</a> where she describes tipping a box of her then husband’s cigars into a pot of soup, picking up a pair of scissors, slashing a straw hat that belongs to his lover and stuffing the pieces in his “ugly black suede shoes.” In her husband’s study she finds his latest manuscript: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wrench the cap off his Mont Blanc fountain pen and stab the proof copy with the nib, gripping the pen in my fist like a dagger. I stab and stab, I press and screw and grind.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This scene of kitchen sink carnage comes after days of diary entries where Garner – the great observer of the smallest details – carries on blind (wilfully? self-protectively?) to what is staring her reader in the face: a novelist husband who is spinning fictional stories both to her and to his lover. It’s a cathartic moment for everyone. As if Garner had called her readers inside the bladder of a dark balloon, blown it up as taut as it could stretch, and then finally punctured the sides so fresh air can come screaming in. We can breathe again.</p>
<p>Something else struck me as I read this scene, which takes place in the mid-1990s: how Garner’s words echoed another scene about men and knives and stabbing she wrote and performed almost 25 years earlier, in 1972.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With men I feel like a very sharp, glittering blade that’s only partly out of its sheath.<br></p>
<p>It glitters and glitters.<br></p>
<p>They don’t see it, but I don’t dare to show that blade, to come right out of the sheath, because I’m afraid of how fierce and joyful it will be to stab – and stab – and stab. So I don’t show it, I hold it, somehow I hold it back, but it’s there, glittering.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>These lines are from a group-devised woman’s play, called Betty Can Jump, staged at Carlton’s experimental Pram Factory theatre in that year. A friend of Garner’s from university, Kerry Dwyer, was one of the founders of a theatre company based at the Pram Factory, the Australian Performing Group (APG). </p>
<p>Dwyer organised women from the APG, together with those from the Carlton Women’s Liberation Group, who were meeting in Garner’s share house, to build sets, make costumes and run the front of house while Garner and four other women – Claire Dobbin, Evelyn Krape, Yvonne Marini and Jude Kuring – workshopped scenes under Dwywer’s direction. </p>
<p>In closed workshops in the Pram’s back theatre, the cast explored how they felt as women, using consciousness-raising techniques from women’s liberation, and physical exercises and improvisations adapted from avant-garde theatre groups.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Pram Factory, circa 1970.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lloyd Carrick</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As I read and reread many of Garner’s books recently, I started seeing knives and blades everywhere. Nora, the narrator of Garner’s 1977 novel Monkey Grip, describes how, after a perfunctory encounter with her careless lover Javo, she grabs a bowie knife and fantasises about “plunging it into the famous handsome picture of him in Cinema Papers”. </p>
<p>In another entry in Garner’s latest diary, Garner offers up to her father her most recent book. He criticises her author photo (it made her “look old”), then he takes a blade he is holding, turns the book on its cover, and demonstrates how to sharpen a knife against a stone.</p>
<p>I started to notice, too, other objects that keep reappearing in Garner’s work. She frequently introduces characters by describing their shoes, for example, like actors in a play walking on stage. </p>
<p>The diary scene where Garner stuffs her husband’s shoes with the remnants of a slashed hat brings these repeating objects together. The scene also vividly dramatises one of Garner’s other great concerns: the conflict between love and passion and individual freedom.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘It glitters and glitters.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy of the Betty Can Jump collective</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘Who will bring in a cup of tea?’</h2>
<p>In the Carlton world Garner inhabited in the 1970s – an inner-city Melbourne community of actors and artists and activists – jealousy and possessiveness was frowned upon while open free relationships were encouraged <a href="http://wayback.archive-it.org/10989/20180903014715/https://www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/Hawkes-Ponch.html">writes Ponch Hawkes</a>, a photographer who documented the Pram Factory world.</p>
<p>In Monkey Grip, as Garner’s fictional surrogate Nora visits the Tower household that adjoined the Pram’s theatre and office space and the share households of her inner-city community, she constantly steels herself for the possibility of seeing her lover Javo emerge from another woman’s bedroom.</p>
<p>People, Hawkes writes of this time, “couldn’t say they were very hurt, or act hurt [when they] had to see you the next day, or the same day, in the hall.” They had to “wear it”.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For many who were part of Australia’s social and cultural revolutions of the early 1970s – especially the denizens of the inner-city bohemia like Garner and her friends – the women’s movement and sexual liberation were so entwined they could not be understood separately.</p>
<p>In 1971 and 1972, Garner and Dwyer and the women rehearsing at the Pram Factory were developing a critique of the traditional, heterosexual, nuclear household. They were influenced by their reading of books such as Virginia Woolf’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18521.A_Room_of_One_s_Own?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=0EqHpxvnAu&rank=1">A Room of One’s Own</a>, The Female Eunuch, in which Germaine Greer argued the liberation of individual women had to begin with their sexual liberation (and satisfaction), and feminist journals and books from overseas – including the Boston Women’s Health Collective’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Bodies,_Ourselves">Our Bodies, Ourselves</a>, a pamphlet urging women to understand their bodies, explore their sexual desires and control their reproductive lives.</p>
<p>Helen wrote another monologue for Betty Can Jump called “What is a woman?”.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You want me to mother you, you want to worship me and make a goddess of me but I disgust you, you loathe me because of the dark wetness of my most secret place …<br></p>
<p>You expect me to find meaning in my household tasks, my hands in water and children’s shit, my back bent in your service, my mind flabby from constant distractions, but when I interrupt your recital of the day’s woes or try to speak of my daily frustration or pleasure I must hear my work dismissed as trivia, and my concern for my children called an obsession.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1477&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1477&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1477&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1856&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1856&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1856&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pram Factory poster (created by Micky Allan).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Twenty-five years after Garner performed this monologue, Garner’s diary entries from the 1990s describe her then husband dismissing her anxieties, making light of her worries, and calling her concerns trivial. </p>
<p>She leaves the house each morning to accommodate his demands for complete solitude while he works. She returns home in the evenings from her own writing labours, with food and hours left in her day to cook for the both of them. </p>
<p>He, a novelist, belittles her non-fiction writing as a lower-order craft. And he criticises her close relationship with her daughter and extended family.</p>
<p>Garner’s life during this period eerily echoes the one her good friend Micky Allan – a painter who created the sets and slides that formed the backdrop to Betty Can Jump – had lived quarter of a century earlier. </p>
<p>Allan attended her first consciousness-raising meeting in Melbourne the day she had split with her husband, a talented artist but someone whose ideas about men and women’s roles were formed in the 1950s.</p>
<p>When I visited her in 2018, Allan told me the story of their time sharing a flat, earlier in London, where she rose early and left in snowy weather to work as a relief teacher, leaving their home to her husband and his art.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had a little cupboard off the kitchen which was my studio, and he took over our living room as his. When I came home in the afternoon, I couldn’t get in without him making a big fuss about having to move a giant painting blocking the door.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He had asked her why she needed to paint: “If you’re painting too, who will bring in the cup of tea?”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-female-eunuch-at-50-germaine-greers-fearless-feminist-masterpiece-147437">Friday essay: The Female Eunuch at 50, Germaine Greer's fearless, feminist masterpiece</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A reaction to frustrations</h2>
<p>Betty Can Jump is named after a <a href="https://victoriancollections.net.au/items/5209c5d92162ef0ab432313a">1951 children’s</a> reader produced by the Victorian Education Department in which a boy called John plays with his truck and dog, and Betty plays with a toy pram and her cat. The play was a reaction to frustrations the women were feeling in their personal and professional lives. Helen was feeling left out and lonely while her husband Bill spent more and more time at the Pram Factory. Kerry, newly pregnant, was feeling increasingly sidelined in the the APG.</p>
<p>Kerry Dwyer recalls the day she stormed out of rehearsals for the APG’s first Pram Factory show, Marvellous Melbourne. It was meant to be a group-created show, but she was enraged at the way the men in the APG dominated the production. While the Marvellous Melbourne cast included equal numbers of women and men, scenes “arrived in the rehearsal room with five parts for men, none for women [or] seven parts for men, one for a woman”. Why are women in the theatre considered incapable of writing? she fumed. Or directing? Why is female culture not respected and nurtured?</p>
<p>The women spent five months devising Betty. One man attended the first planning meeting, bringing a couple of plays he’d written. The women asked him to join the large circle for general discussions, but instead he stormed around the edge shouting: “Damnitall! I don’t know how you are going to achieve anything at all if you won’t accept help and advice from us”.</p>
<p>The rehearsal room was then closed to men – until they realised they needed an actor to play the male roles. So Perth actor Vic Marsh was invited to take part. </p>
<p>In the opening scene, Marsh whips the women, who play convicts emerging from a ship’s hold. The cast re-enact riots in early female factories, and tell stories about suffragists <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lawson-louisa-7121">Louisa Lawson</a> and <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/goldstein-vida-jane-6418">Vida Goldstein</a> and other women who had been largely ignored by an Anglo, male history. They also deliver intimate monologues written during rehearsal exercises, where each cast member has to complete the phrase “As a woman I feel like …” </p>
<p>Helen delivers her scene where feels like a sharp, glittering knife. </p>
<p>Evelyn feels like a cushion plumped up and sat in.</p>
<p>Yvonne feels like a mouth filled with laughing gas.</p>
<p>The lights go out and the cast talk about their bodies and blood and sex and rape. In another scene, the cast don jockstraps and fake penises and mock ocker men drinking at a pub. (Ockers featured in many plays written by APG men.)</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=617&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=617&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=617&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A scene from Betty Can Jump.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy of the Betty Can Jump collective</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This was the first play of the 1970s women’s liberation movement, part of an extraordinary period of social change. In just a few short years, a generation of women led a transformation of our social and cultural life. It’s easy to forget just how different the early 70s were: there were still separate columns in the paper advertising jobs for “women and girls” and “men and boys”. Many public bars still banned women. Not one of the 125 electorates across the country was represented in Canberra by a woman.</p>
<p>As I researched the play and these times, however, I thought about that other definition of revolution: a movement around a circle. I saw how feminism so often keeps rehearsing and staging the same battles. There is a scene in Betty, acted in the dark, where a character taunts a woman: “Got the rags on, have you?”. Fifty years on, I found myself talking to teachers recently about a group of primary school boys allegedly harassing girls with “jokes” about rape, and taunts about being “on their periods”.</p>
<p>These circlings are not unconnected, I thought, to the way in which we forget, or repress our history. Both individually and collectively.</p>
<p>For a long time, my image of the Pram Factory had centred on the male playwrights David Williamson and Jack Hibberd and actors Graeme Blundell and Bruce Spence. Don’s Party and boozing ocker men. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-great-australian-plays-williamson-hibberd-and-the-better-angels-of-our-countrys-nature-79332">The Great Australian Plays: Williamson, Hibberd and the better angels of our country's nature</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kerry Dwyer in 1972 - just as Betty Can Jump’s season was ending and she was about to give birth.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy of Kerry Dwyer.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I discovered the stories of women at the APG in the archives at the State Library of NSW, where Dwyer had deposited her production diaries – her own diary, with notes of rehearsals and descriptions of the cast, as well as Garner’s production diary, with stage directions and script notes in a neat pink slanted cursive script. </p>
<p>Dwyer’s archive also contained interviews she conducted with cast members and with Micky Allan and the play’s researcher, Laurel Frank.</p>
<p>Just as I hadn’t known about the history of women’s theatre at the Pram, Frank and another woman, Kay Hamilton, had turned to archives – at the State Library of Victoria, and the NSW Mitchell Library – to discover stories of colonial women’s settler history. The researched Female Factories, stories of auctions where convict women were sold off, they researched politicians and women’s rights activists such as Vida Goldstein and Caroline Chisholm. The play’s focus is on non-Indigenous women, something that might seem a glaring oversight to contemporary readers, but Kerry tells me: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We were not so much blind to the lives of Indigenous women, it was more that we were catching up with ourselves.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>A huge success</h2>
<p>In 1972, after a shaky preview night of their women’s show – Garner, in an account of the play she wrote in 1972 for the journal Dissent, recalled thinking the APG men watching the show were “stony-faced” – Betty Can Jump turned out to be a huge success. </p>
<p>Women who saw the show laughed and cried, performances sold out, the four-week season was extended for two more weeks. While not all of the APG members praised the play – Hibberd called it “mawkish and sentimental” – the Pram Factory shows did slowly being to change.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The play was a huge success.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy of the Betty Can Jump collective</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The company began exploring women’s issues in plays and appointing women directors. Although the APG always styled itself as a radically democratic organisation, more emphasis began to be placed on what was often described by left political groups in the 1970s as “shitwork”, such as taking minutes and cleaning toilets and kitchens. </p>
<p>APG minutes show the group organised childcare for mothers performing in shows. In 1974, the Melbourne Women’s Theatre Group moved into the Pram, and they would stage dozens of women’s shows over the next four years. Theatre critic Suzanne Spunner wrote that in 1978 in Melbourne, “Everywhere you turned it seems there were plays by and about women wrote”, listing women’s shows at La Mama, Russell Street theatre, the Comedy Theatre and at the Pram Factory.</p>
<h2>Revolutions</h2>
<p>When I interviewed Garner about the time she made Betty Can Jump and these revolutionary years (Helen was active in the abortion rights movement, and women in the Betty collective ran through Moratorium marches doing street theatre dressed up as Viet Cong), she described the sensation of discovering women’s liberation as an epiphany. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I felt as if I’d been underwater for my whole life. And now for the first time, I’d stuck my head out of the water and taken a breath … looking around and thinking: ‘Now I get it. Now I get why my life is such a mess and why I’ve been so unhappy and wrecked everything’. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>She also thought it would be easy to change.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Once I got the sort of basic gist of feminism – or women’s liberation as it was called then – I thought, ‘Oh, now I understand everything, and everything’s going to change, because all we have to do is just say to men: “This is what’s the matter, and if we could just do this, and if you could just do that” …’ And I really thought that was going happen.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She now reflects, in the context of MeToo: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some things might change, but there’s stuff about men and sex and women that are just not amenable to social control, and never will be.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Garner’s latest diary, as her third marriage disintegrates, she laments some lack in her that makes her a failure at marriage. But when she documents the failure of heterosexual marriage and monogamy in her diaries, they don’t read to me as proof of her own personal flaws, but rather as proof of a systemic flaw in the heterosexual, nuclear set-up. As a vindication of the 1970s ideal of the Pram communalism and the collective ideal (if not always the practice) of women’s liberation.</p>
<p>Garner was already known for her brilliant letters before she was cast in Betty Can Jump, <a href="http://wayback.archive-it.org/10989/20180903014625/https://www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/Dwyer-Kerry.html">Dwyer has noted</a>, but the play was the first time she wrote for a public audience. Dobbin described the way she took on a role that was akin to a dramaturge, someone who could “take big ideas and reduce them to a human personal scale”. Garner wrote some of the play’s most affecting and effective scenes. The collective experience, and the visceral responses of audiences, was an important part of her development as a writer. </p>
<p>When Dwyer emailed me to apologise for her messy archives (they were, in fact, a goldmine of material that left me constantly amazed at her prescience in keeping them), I thought about how it can take more than a lifetime for us as women to shake off our proclivity for apology. </p>
<p>And I realised, when I recently began meeting on Sundays with a group of women from my neighbourhood – a visual artist, a filmmaker and children’s author, two musicians, a teacher, a journalist and a public communications expert – that we were reinventing the consciousness-raising circle.</p>
<p>Betty Can Jump was never performed again. Dwyer described it to me a “pastiche” that would be difficult to reproduce. “It was a very complex show. There were slides, there were puppets. We just flung everything at it […] It was a very, very dense show.” </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=844&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=844&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=844&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although Dwyer tells me “not very much of [the script] was written down”, when I comb through the APG archives at the State Library of Victoria, I find a stapled document that appears to be a near-complete script for the play. </p>
<p>Still, unlike books, theatre is an ephemeral art form. Just as the story of women at the Pram Factory has been overshadowed by the story of men, the story of the collectively created plays and short films and bands that were part of the cultural renaissance of the women’s liberation movement, has not been well recorded. There is no star author to help sustain their afterlife in our historical memory.</p>
<p>But understanding our history, and our patterns – individually, collectively, historically – seems to me a pre-condition for escaping the revolutions that take us around in circles, and into the kind of revolutions that take us somewhere else.</p>
<p><em>This essay contains edited extracts from <a href="https://upswellpublishing.com/product/staging-a-revolution">Staging a Revolution: When Betty Rocked the Pram (Upswell Publishing)</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191496/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kath Kenny received funding for this project from Create NSW and an Australian government postgraduate research scholarship.</span></em></p>In 1972, 5 women – Helen Garner, Claire Dobbin, Evelyn Krape, Yvonne Marini and Jude Kuring –spent 5 months workshopping a play. Frank, angry and explicit, it was a beacon of 1970s women’s liberation.Kath Kenny, Sessional academic, Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1506152020-11-25T19:02:49Z2020-11-25T19:02:49ZFrom ‘common scolds’ to feminist reclamation: the fraught history of women and swearing in Australia<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371186/original/file-20201124-13-1o2vx6j.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=14%2C0%2C680%2C609&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Kath and Kim (aka Jane Turner and Gina Riley): the suburban hornbags used swearing in clever ways in their 2002-2007 TV series.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Riley Turner Productions</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Women have had a fraught historical relationship to swearing. Long regarded as guardians of morality and respectability, their use of swear words has been policed and punished in various ways. Yet women have a rich history of using such language as a means of challenging oppression. </p>
<p>These tensions have been evident in Australia <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/9781742236636/">since the time of colonisation</a>. Convict women were likely to be labelled as “whores” and “strumpets”. Colonial commentators and figures of authority often questioned the moral character of these women; their use of insulting language was taken as confirmation of immorality. </p>
<p>Yet convict women used such language to mock and defy authority. When one woman in the colony of Sydney was threatened with being flogged for using obscene language towards her master, she replied to his threat using more bad language.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Augustus Earle’s painting of the Parramatta Female Factory, circa 1826. Convict women often used bad language to mock authority.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/whores-damned-whores-and-female-convicts-why-our-history-does-early-australian-colonial-women-a-grave-injustice-4894">Whores, damned whores and female convicts: Why our history does early Australian colonial women a grave injustice </a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>While convicts could be punished for “insolent” language, by the middle of the 19th century, vagrancy laws were used to control the use of “profane” and “obscene” language in public. Colonial newspapers and court records reveal a large number of such cases were brought before police magistrates. And many of those charged were women.</p>
<p>One called her husband a “bloody bugger” while in a pub. Another called her female neighbour “a bloody whore and a bloody bitch”. </p>
<p>While men swore often, women’s bad language was far more likely to be of concern. An 1850 commentary, published in the Moreton Bay Courier, called on husbands to exercise their authority and prevent wives from publicly using “obscene and filthy language”. </p>
<p>Women could also be charged as being “common scolds”, a common-law charge originating in English law often used to control those considered to be “public nuisances”. Colonial newspapers reveal that many of the cases involving these charges were disputes between neighbours. </p>
<p>In 1849, for instance, two women were accused of being common scolds by their neighbours because of their constant quarrelling and use of the “most obscene and blasphemous language”.</p>
<h2>A question of class</h2>
<p>Women charged with these kinds of offences were predominantly working class. Alana Piper and Victoria Nagy’s <a href="https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/JINH_a_01125">study of female prisoners in Australia from 1860 to 1920</a> reveals the bulk of women’s offences were minor, and included “disorderly, indecent or riotous behaviour” and obscene and abusive language.</p>
<p>Middle-class women’s speech was not publicly policed. It was, rather, contained through the norms of respectability. An 1885 Australian etiquette manual instructed women to avoid “vulgar exclamations”. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371192/original/file-20201125-18-170wse9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371192/original/file-20201125-18-170wse9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371192/original/file-20201125-18-170wse9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371192/original/file-20201125-18-170wse9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371192/original/file-20201125-18-170wse9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1103&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371192/original/file-20201125-18-170wse9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1103&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371192/original/file-20201125-18-170wse9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1103&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Diggers, seen here in a trench at Lone Pine in 1915, were renowned for their swearing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yet popular culture embraced a masculinist mythology of Australian swearing. By the end of the 19th century, swearing could be a source of humour and even seen as something acceptable if used by certain types, such as the bullock driver (notorious for his swearing), and the bushman.</p>
<p>The hard work required of these men excused such language. This justification (and even embrace) of male swearing culminated in the first world war “digger”. </p>
<p>The bad language of the larrikin digger ranged from the more acceptable “bloody” and “bastard” to words such as “bugger” and “fuck”. The Australian soldier was renowned for his swearing as well as his slang. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-aussies-to-whizz-bangs-the-language-of-anzac-6320">From 'Aussies' to 'Whizz-bangs': the language of Anzac</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Liberating language</h2>
<p>If the first wave of Australian feminists sought to operate from a position of respectability, second wave feminists embraced the possibilities offered by flouting such respectability.</p>
<p>Amid the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, and the associated women’s liberation movement, bad language was used to challenge prevailing social and cultural norms. Women such as journalist and activist <a href="https://www.wendybacon.com/">Wendy Bacon</a> and feminist author and academic Germaine Greer became known for (and even subject to charges for) their bad language. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Germaine Greer in 1972.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Bacon was charged initially as an editor of an edition of the UNSW magazine Tharunka that had included the poem “Cunt is a Christian word”. </p>
<p>She protested the trial wearing a sign reading, “I have been fucked by God’s steel prick” and was charged for wearing an obscene publication. She was ultimately sentenced to eight days in prison. </p>
<p>Greer was convicted <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/world/the-feminist-who-fell-foul-of-nz-law-20030824-gdw8g7.html">for saying “bullshit” and “fuck”</a> during an Auckland Town Hall meeting in 1972.</p>
<p>But if words such as “fuck” and “cunt” could be used to shock, they were also part of a feminist reclamation as women claimed control over their bodies and their sexuality.</p>
<h2>Swearing today</h2>
<p>Swearing today can still be seen as more easily claimed by men than women, but this has slowly shifted. </p>
<p>Women comedians, writers, and activists have all played a role in claiming a right to use bad language. For example, women comedians such as <a href="https://thewest.com.au/entertainment/arts-reviews/comedy-review-kitty-flanagan-penny-flanagan-ng-ya-211391">Kitty Flanagan</a> and Jane Turner and Gina Riley (best known as Kath and Kim) have made clever use of swearing in their performances. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iQfiDFq2PtQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The use of swearing by women in public has been increasingly normalised. Yet women are still more likely to be judged for swearing, which can still be seen as “unladylike”. And for some, the swear words themselves can be problematic with their references to women’s body parts and objectification of women as sex objects.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/wordslut-a-new-book-aims-to-verbally-smash-the-patriarchy-but-its-argument-is-imprecise-119160">Wordslut: a new book aims to 'verbally smash the patriarchy', but its argument is imprecise</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>Today, women (and even more so, women of colour) are <a href="http://www.jatl.org/blog/2015/5/13/violence-against-women-in-social-media">disproportionately the targets of bad language, slurs, insults, and threats</a> on social media. </p>
<p>If a woman’s swearing can be an act of empowerment, it also continues to risk punishment.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/150615/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amanda Laugesen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Long regarded as guardians of morality, women who swore were often policed and punished. But whether protesting or parodying, they have used bad language in creative ways.Amanda Laugesen, Director, Australian National Dictionary Centre, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1474372020-10-08T19:10:30Z2020-10-08T19:10:30ZFriday essay: The Female Eunuch at 50, Germaine Greer’s fearless, feminist masterpiece<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/362294/original/file-20201007-22-1a0ndbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C162%2C2369%2C2708&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Germaine Greer at The Chelsea Hotel in 1972. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Germaine Greer’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/822847.The_Female_Eunuch">The Female Eunuch</a> changed lives. Published 50 years ago in October 1970, it exists in the popular imagination as a kind of shorthand for that world-historic moment when women said they’d had enough.</p>
<p>The book inspired women to challenge the ties binding them to gender inequality and domestic servitude. It <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1999.3301_177.x">broke marriages, or else caused some to be renegotiated</a> on more equal terms.</p>
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<p>The Female Eunuch told women the project of emancipation had stalled. Freedom would not be wrested from a process of reform, by “genteel, middle-class women” sitting on committees or signing petitions. To grasp their freedom, “ungenteel” women would need to “call for revolution”, “disrupt society” and “unseat God”. </p>
<p>Indeed, “marriage, the family, private property, and the state” were in the firing line. </p>
<p>Greer urged women to think beyond the stereotype patriarchal society had created for them, which limited their capacity to act. She likened the situation of the 1970s woman to that of a bird “made for captivity”.</p>
<p>“The cage door had been opened but the canary had refused to fly out,” Greer wrote. “The conclusion was that the cage door ought never to have been opened because canaries are made for captivity; the suggestion of an alternative had only confused and saddened them.” </p>
<p>Women, she wrote, needed to “discover that they have a will”. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-how-shakespeare-helped-shape-germaine-greers-feminist-masterpiece-59880">Friday essay: How Shakespeare helped shape Germaine Greer's feminist masterpiece</a>
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<p>Through the book’s five chapters — “Body”, “Soul”, “Love”, “Hate” and “Revolution” — Greer gradually built her famous motif of women as “eunuchs” or castrates, robbed of their natural energy. She wrote that in accepting this castrated or false identity, women had allowed the destruction of their instinct, inclination, will and capacity. </p>
<p>Greer’s book told women — in a hopeful way — that things could be otherwise.
It told them to demand a better education, to pool their childcare arrangements, to share a better washing machine or other labour-saving appliance with women in the street. It told women to challenge men’s ownership of the means of production and consumer capitalism’s ownership of the soul.</p>
<h2>Smashing sexual shibboleths</h2>
<p>Greer famously drew attention to deeply entrenched cultural constructs that linked sex to shame and disgust, calling out the hypocrisy of a society that blamed women for men’s misogyny. “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” she wrote. “The man regards her as a receptacle into which he has emptied his sperm, a kind of human spittoon.”</p>
<p>These sexual shibboleths, she wrote, must be smashed. This was the point behind Greer’s widely discussed calls to go around bra-less <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yySNIIYZr8">and wear no underpants</a>. Own your body, she urged women, its tastes and smells, including — most memorably — your menstrual blood. </p>
<p>“I must confess to a thrill of shock when one of the ladies to whom this book is dedicated told me that she had tasted her own menstrual blood on the penis of her lover,” Greer wrote. And yet, there are “no horrors presented in that blood, no poisons”. </p>
<p>Greer said women must question everything they had been taught about sex, love, romance, their bodies and their rights. Freedom was theirs, but they had to take it. Action was not just collective but individual too. Agency was everything. Grab any missile, break any rule. Do it now.</p>
<p>In this way, The Female Eunuch spoke to, and challenged, women directly. It asked, in its famous end line, “What <em>will</em> you do?”</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-its-time-to-acknowledge-germaine-greer-journalist-88958">Why it's time to acknowledge Germaine Greer, journalist</a>
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<h2>Intellectual origins</h2>
<p>Too few discussions of Greer’s work fully appreciate its intellectual origins in the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3202961-sex-and-anarchy">libertarian ideas of the Sydney Push</a>. Greer was born in Melbourne, educated by Irish nuns in a convent school, and yearned for a world beyond her own home, which was, she says, singularly bereft of books.</p>
<p>She moved to Sydney to study and fell in with a tearaway group of left libertarians known as the Push, a Bohemian movement with its origins in <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anderson-john/">philosopher John Anderson’s</a> Freethought Society.</p>
<p>In Greer’s time, the Push included soon to be luminaries such as Clive James, Richard Neville — editor of Oz magazine and a doyen of the underground culture that gathered around it in London — and Lillian Roxon, “the abundant, the golden, the eloquent, the well and badly loved”, who became the New York-based correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, author of the Rock Encyclopedia, and is one of five women to whom The Female Eunuch is dedicated.</p>
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<span class="caption">Issue 19 of OZ magazine in the UK, early 1969, showing Germaine Greer and Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>The “Sydney line” espoused by the Push featured a heady mix of libertarianism and rule-smashing, anarcho-socialism. It preached “free love” and “opposition to authority”, encouraging members to live “freely” in an attitude of “permanent protest”.</p>
<p>Members of the Push pondered the “futility of revolutions” but nonetheless turned out for protests. The movement gave rise to seminal works of Australian feminism from Greer’s to <a href="https://www.evacox.com.au/node/118">Eva Cox’s</a> and <a href="http://www.womenaustralia.info/exhib/cal/bacon.html">Wendy Bacon’s</a>.</p>
<p>The formative influence of the Push led Greer to mount her social critique from the standpoint of “liberation feminism”, which she <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/09/equality-is-a-profoundly-conservative-goal-for-women-germaine-greer-says">differentiated from so-called “equality feminism”</a>. Equality was dismissed as a conservative aim, because it confers an illusion of power that merely re-entrenches the status quo. </p>
<p>Meaningful change — true “liberation” — required something more radical. Liberty could be terrifying. It was something not even men possessed. “The first significant discovery we shall make as we rocket along our female road to freedom is that men are not free,” wrote Greer, “and they will seek to make this an argument why nobody should be free”. </p>
<h2>Media event</h2>
<p>Intellectual discussions of The Female Eunuch often focus on the book’s appearance as a <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781349676996">media event, and on Greer as a celebrity</a>. It is a rich line of cultural inquiry, but occasionally leads critics to sell her work short, as flippant and ephemeral.</p>
<p>The book was commissioned by Sonny Mehta, who met Greer at a cafe in Soho on March 17 1969, when he was editor at MacGibbon and Kee. Mehta had an unerring eye for words, and an astonishing capacity to connect authors to an audience. He went on to become one of the most influential publishers of the late 20th century. </p>
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<span class="caption">Cover of the first Paladin paperback edition of The Female Eunuch (1970).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>The Female Eunuch launched in London, but it was the extensive publicity campaign preceding the book’s entry into the American market that shaped its Anglophone reception. Its US publisher, McGraw Hill, outlayed a then extraordinary US$25,000 on promotion, including full-page advertisements in national newspapers.</p>
<p>During her 1971 book tour of the US, Greer appeared on television and radio. The New York Times called The Female Eunuch “the best feminist book so far”. </p>
<p>Always the controversialist, Greer gave interviews to magazines such as Esquire and Playboy. She trounced Norman Mailer in a New York debate, and often spoke back to journalists. “What kind of a question is that?” she would ask them.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-town-hall-affair-brings-germaine-greers-1970s-feminist-debate-roaring-into-the-present-89236">The Town Hall Affair brings Germaine Greer's 1970s feminist debate roaring into the present</a>
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<p>In The Female Eunuch, Greer first signalled her <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/07/germaine-greers-on-provocative-victim-shaming-compelling-ambivalent">often misinterpreted theories around rape and sexual consent</a>. Greer has argued the idea of consent as it is written into law <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12119-019-09671-x">automatically positions women as subordinate and inferior</a>. This sets up a situation that makes it almost impossible for a rape victim to get justice, as a perpetrator will only ever need to establish an element of doubt that consent was absent, by arguing that the victim had “given up” or “given in” or “hadn’t fought hard enough”. </p>
<p>The law, she argues, is a reflection of the wider misogyny diffuse in our culture, and is written in men’s interest. In more recent times, Greer has been accused of underplaying the seriousness of sexual assault and its impact on women.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/greer-is-right-to-say-rape-law-has-failings-but-wrong-to-suggest-its-decriminalisation-97847">Greer is right to say rape law has failings, but wrong to suggest its decriminalisation</a>
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<p>In the 1970s, Greer openly discussed sexual violence and reproductive politics on prime-time TV, on talk shows like Dick Cavett’s, which Greer guest hosted for two nights. The results were explosive.</p>
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<p><a href="https://archives.unimelb.edu.au/explore/collections/germainegreer">The Greer archives</a>, housed at the University of Melbourne, contains thousands of <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08164649.2016.1175043">letters that demonstrate the impact of Greer’s work</a> and The Female Eunuch in particular. One female television viewer wrote about Greer’s talkshow appearance, “You could see minds and attitudes changing right on stage”.</p>
<p>She added, “Life magazine claims your appeal is that you ‘like men’. I claim that your appeal is that your intellect is welded to a very handsome ability to communicate”. </p>
<p>Of course, not everybody agreed. A <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08164649.2020.1781534">reader of McCall’s magazine</a> called a book extract from The Female Eunuch published in its pages “the most revolting ideas I’ve read in a woman’s magazine”.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-reading-germaine-greers-mail-74693">Friday essay: reading Germaine Greer's mail</a>
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<span class="caption">Germaine Greer poses on Park Ave in New York City, 1971.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Marty Lederhandler/AP</span></span>
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<h2>Making the personal political</h2>
<p>Greer became known — and still is — equally for her personality as for her ideas. This was perhaps inevitable because Greer had – and still has – a mesmerising capacity to make the personal political, and to play with the cultural gap between news and social norms.</p>
<p>Her work communicated her ideas on a mass scale and translated what were then the utterly unfamiliar ideals of feminism into everyday aspirations.</p>
<p>In the 1970s, The Female Eunch was dismissed with faint praise and even subject to panicked attacks from some feminists who saw the book as taking up too much space. In “The Selling of Germaine Greer”, published in The Nation, Claudia Dreifus argued that Greer was “shallow, anti-woman, regressive, three steps backwards” and “not the feminist leader she is advertised to be”. </p>
<p>In Australia, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612029300200036">Beatrice Faust called Greer a “political bonehead”</a>. <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08164649.2016.1174926">Others appeared disconcerted</a> by her dazzling polemics or dismayed — or simply uncomprehending — of the book’s left libertarian intellectual origins and its blunt insistence that before liberation can be achieved, women need to free themselves from the stereotypes that shackle them personally and sexually, as well as politically. </p>
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<p>Today Greer’s work — and her legacy — remains divisive. Writers <a href="https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/mary-beard-i-will-never-sell-germaine-greer-down-the-river-1.943433">Mary Beard</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/nov/20/rachel-cusk-the-female-eunuch">Rachel Cusk</a> have stood by the book, while others, <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-on-rape-by-germaine-greer-so-wrong-in-so-many-ways-b27j9wh9v">including Naomi Wolf </a>and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612029300200036">Mary Spongberg</a>, have been vocally critical of the author and her subsequent works. In 2010, Greer was vigorously attacked by playwright Louis Nowra in an infamous essay published in the The Monthly. </p>
<p>I first read The Female Eunuch at the age of 12, taking the age-spotted copy from my mother’s bookshelf. I read it again — this time from cover to cover — at 23. The Female Eunuch has never been out of print since it was published. </p>
<p>What still jumps out of the book’s pages is the strength and power of an author’s voice that speaks to its reader so directly. </p>
<p>The voice — like the author — is dazzling, erudite, anti-authoritarian, reliably contrarian, recklessly courageous, full of wit and great encouragement for unconventional ideas, tactics and behaviours, and utterly fearless in her search for social justice. </p>
<p>All this is why the marvellous “Germaine” exists for her reader on first name terms.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/147437/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Camilla Nelson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>First published in October 1970, The Female Eunuch has never been out of print.Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1225782019-10-17T13:04:29Z2019-10-17T13:04:29ZHow freedom of expression in academia is under threat from academics themselves<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296700/original/file-20191011-96231-py22db.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/empty-seminar-hall-microphone-84678583?src=azBmmEGSe7WWqhOw-HPyeA-1-31">Shutterstock/zieusin</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of a global series on <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/academic-freedom-series-76963">academic freedom</a> featuring academic authors from around the world.</em></p>
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<p>Freedom of expression has long been extolled by those who love freedom generally. As George Orwell once <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/literary/george-orwell-quotes-1984-animal-farm">said</a>: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” And, according to the <a href="https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#%7B%22fulltext%22:%5B%22Handyside%22%5D,%22documentcollectionid2%22:%5B%22GRANDCHAMBER%22,%22CHAMBER%22%5D,%22itemid%22:%5B%22001-57499%22%5D%7D">European Court of Human Rights</a>, this includes offending, shocking and disturbing.</p>
<p>Spats, fall-outs and intellectual and personal feuds have long been commonplace among scholars. And, because critiques of ideas and publications are also exercises in freedom of expression, they are integral to the rough and tumble of academic life. </p>
<p>But British universities are now facing much more insidious challenges. Student-led “safe spaces” and “no platforming” campaigns are well known. In 2015, for example, attempts were made to stop veteran <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/18/transgender-activists-protest-germaine-greer-lecture-cardiff-university">feminist campaigner Germaine Greer</a> from giving a lecture at Cardiff University on the grounds that she had previously expressed transphobic views. </p>
<p>Social media have also facilitated mounting intolerance and self-righteous militancy on the part of certain academics themselves. Claims to a monopoly of virtue and wisdom, and narrow conceptions of what is politically and morally acceptable, are being aggressively asserted. </p>
<p>Some seek to affirm their credentials by denouncing, condemning and vilifying others through hostile petitions and mass-signatory letters to the press. These typically demand dismissal, either from editorships of journals, or from scholarly employment altogether. </p>
<p>Others do not shrink from workplace harassment and bullying, including attempts to block the publication of legitimate and lawful opinion before it sees the light of day. </p>
<p>Of course, many attacks on academics occur not in the public eye, but hidden away in the corridors and offices of university faculties. I have been told by colleagues at various institutions of a number of incidents where respected and experienced academics have felt intimidated and harassed by their colleagues – as racists for arguing that certain lawful but controversial public policies are not racist, for example, or as xenophobes for supporting Brexit. </p>
<p>Not every account of such experiences can be authenticated. But the nature of this kind of harassment and hostility has three particularly worrying features. </p>
<p>First, universities have often been coldly indifferent to it. Second, those at the receiving end are understandably <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/11/12/controversial-ideas-journal-academics-can-publish-pseudonyms/">anxious to preserve their anonymity</a> for fear of further repercussions. And third, as a result, the scale of the challenge is very difficult to assess. Although <a href="https://www.afaf.org.uk/the-banned-list/">attempts have been made</a> to document specific alleged incidents of harassment and no platforming, how the facts are interpreted is inevitably contested.</p>
<p>So what is to be done? The central issue in all cases is not whose views are right and whose wrong. It is rather that unless free and open debate of lawful opinion is preserved, questions of considerable public importance will not be properly examined. The core challenge, therefore, is to ensure mounting threats are effectively addressed without unreasonably curtailing free speech itself. </p>
<h2>Legal obligations</h2>
<p>For a start, it needs to be more widely recognised that British universities already have statutory obligations to ensure freedom of expression, breach of which may result in legal action. The <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/61/section/43?view=plain">Education Act</a> requires them to: </p>
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<p>Take such steps as are reasonably practicable to ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured for members, students and employees and for visiting speakers. </p>
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<p>The <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2017/29/contents">Higher Education Reform Act 2017</a> also protects the freedom of academic staff to question received wisdom, and to put forward new ideas and controversial opinions without jeopardising their careers. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents">Equality Act 2010</a> further obliges public authorities, including universities, to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, harassment and victimisation with respect to belief, among other things.</p>
<p>Internet safety experts <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/sep/02/uk-universities-urged-to-do-more-to-tackle-online-harassment">reportedly claim</a> that less than one-quarter of British universities have adequate procedures to deal with harmful and unlawful online conduct by students and staff. The <a href="https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Pages/tackling-online-harassment.aspx">recent publication of guidelines</a> by Universities UK, which represents higher education institutions, is therefore a welcome development. </p>
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<p>Whether rudeness and disrespect amount to bullying or harassment is, in the first instance, a personnel management issue. But universities also have, at the very least, a procedural legal duty to consider whether or not this line has been crossed. </p>
<p>If it has, dismissal of those found culpable is likely to be justified in only the most egregious cases. Examples might include calling for a colleague to be sacked merely because their views, though lawful, are unorthodox or unpopular. This may, in any case, also amount to defamation or an unlawful attempt to induce breach of an employment contract.</p>
<p>Reprimands and warnings should, however, be administered more freely wherever appropriate. And other relevant institutions – including the Office for Students and the University and College Union – should take more seriously the threat posed to academic freedom by academics themselves. </p>
<p>Finally, freedom of expression itself offers a potentially powerful resource. Those who exploit it in order to censor the legitimate opinion of others should themselves be named (and sometimes shamed) as publicly as possible.</p>
<p><em><strong>Read more from our series on <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Academic+Freedom">Academic Freedom</a>.</strong></em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/122578/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steven Greer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Universities need to protect people with different ideas.Steven Greer, Professor of Human Rights, University of BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1019942018-09-07T09:47:09Z2018-09-07T09:47:09ZSex: why we need to research it more post #MeToo<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235367/original/file-20180907-90578-tfpy2a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">ECOSY/Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Feminist arguments around #MeToo have become bitter and divisive. Battle lines have been <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-44958160">drawn</a>, with discussion in many quarters turning to whether the movement is turning women <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/world/germaine-greer-challenges-metoo-campaign-20180121-h0lpra.html">into victims</a> rather than empowering them.</p>
<p>The most recent instance of this divide is the emerging spat between prominent feminists Naomi Wolf and Germaine Greer. When Greer, a prominent “second-wave” feminist and author of the watershed text <a href="https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/greer-germaine/female-eunuch.htm">The Female Eunuch</a>, recently published a post-#MeToo essay simply titled “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKSKLrDB9iI">On Rape</a>”, the essay was criticised by renowned “third-wave” feminist and author of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/oct/18/classics.shopping">The Beauty Myth</a>, Naomi Wolf. <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/culture/review-on-rape-by-germaine-greer-so-wrong-in-so-many-ways-b27j9wh9v">She argued</a> that Greer minimises the harms of #MeToo survivors by writing things such as “rape without injury should not be considered ‘violent’”.</p>
<p>Wolf was also clearly disappointed that Greer did not give women what she thinks we need in this post #MeToo world: a “magisterial summary of the issue of sexual assault by a great feminist philosopher”. In Wolf’s view, what is needed is some “solid research” – in contrast to what she sees as Greer’s piece of “pernicious fiction”.</p>
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<h2>Asking the right questions</h2>
<p>But in reality, there’s actually not so much distance between Wolf and Greer. Both, in the end, are simply saying we need to know more about the sexual experiences of women. And this means more research in the area.</p>
<p>Greer, for example, thinks that the “<a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/germaine-greer-the-law-doesnt-know-what-rape-is-and-that-ruins-sex-for-women-kqp9r937q">law doesn’t know what rape is</a>”, suggesting that the law fails to fit real experiences of sexual violence. Greer also said that the law does not reflect the multitude of ways that women can be coerced. This implies that we need more research about the experiences of women, so that the law can reflect this.</p>
<p>The definition of consent as English law <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/74">defines it</a> is: “A person consents if he agrees by choice, and has the freedom and capacity to make that choice.” This definition gives the illusion that the situation is black and white. But what does “freedom” mean – it’s surely not the same for everyone. If your partner says you must have sex with him, otherwise you must leave your home, or you simply know that if you don’t you will have a massive row filled with emotional and or physical abuse, is this freedom? A strict application of the law would probably say so.</p>
<p>As well as clear instances of rape, we also need to investigate and understand the more subtle (yet painful) ways in which women are coerced and abused. The same question goes in relation to pleasure. Simply put, as both Greer and Wolf say, we need to know more about what is going on for women in sex – what makes women suffer and what gives women pleasure.</p>
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<p><em>Find out more about sex research: listen to The Anthill’s episode on <a href="https://theconversation.com/anthill-22-sex-91797">Sex</a>.</em></p>
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<h2>Finding the answers</h2>
<p>Many academics are currently exploring such questions. This research might consist of interviews, observations, or surveys, with a broad range of men and women, and can also involve what is known as “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participant_observation">participant observations</a>” where the researcher directly explores sexual cultures, spaces and behaviours in order to understand more about sexual identities. Such a researcher is in the “field”, as opposed to analysing literature and researching at a distance. Although women have been thinking and doing feminism for a long time, only recently have they been using participatory research methods to do so.</p>
<p>In 2014, for example, I spent some time on a nudist and public sex beach in France, where I observed, sometimes took part in, and reflected on my experiences in order to explore and understand more about the <a href="https://www.academia.edu/36120193/Fucking_Law_A_New_Methodological_Movement_">sexual behaviours, cultures and ethics</a> in such places. Immersion in the object of study and reflecting on the researcher’s own body and sexual experiences during research, to challenge gender and sexual identity, and sexual assumptions, can also be found in the pioneering work of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_B._Preciado">Paul Preciado</a>. </p>
<p>Armed with this in-depth knowledge about actual sexual experiences, researchers can then make links with the philosophies that underpin our assumptions about sex, as well as our morals, ethics and laws. Universities are the place for such research, since they supposedly have the resources and will to be innovative and push the frontiers of knowledge. But there are problems.</p>
<p>As I and many other researchers in this field have found, work that challenges sexual knowledge and boundaries (such as consent) can bring you into confrontation with institutional power. Such work is often seen as “<a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1363460713516338">dirty work</a>”, as the researcher Janice Irvine found. It is often viewed as somehow sordid or prurient, rather than as the crucial research it in fact is. This stigma reflects institutional inequality in that it prevents women from being in a comfortable and enabling environment for this kind of research. Universities prefer “safe” work that yields research money, does not raise awkward ethical questions around privacy, for example, or gendered concerns about researcher safety.</p>
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<span class="caption">We don’t know all that much about the sexual experiences of women.</span>
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<p>Meanwhile, the same power dynamics that brought about #MeToo are present within universities. This has been demonstrated by leading feminist academics, such as <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/london-university-goldsmiths-professor-quits-sexual-harzassment-female-students-staff-a7072131.html">Sara Ahmed</a> at Goldsmiths, leaving their institutions in response to what they see as the normalisation of sexual harassment within these institutions. </p>
<p>All this means that the very places that fiercely debate feminism and human rights are producing hostile environments where the ideas of women are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/04/metoophd-reveals-shocking-examples-of-academic-sexism">not given equal weight</a>. And so carrying out the crucial research that explores women’s experiences of sex, pleasure, and abuse is very challenging.</p>
<h2>Academia post #MeToo</h2>
<p>Encouragingly, universities have begun to implement ways of changing the academic environment with <a href="https://www.breakingthesilence.cam.ac.uk/prevention-support/be-active-bystander">“bystander” initiatives</a>, such as the US-based <a href="https://alteristic.org/services/green-dot/green-dot-colleges/">Green Dot</a>, that ask for individual commitments from all those that work in universities to collectively change norms in small (but significant) ways to stop sexual harassment within universities. </p>
<p>Perhaps this is a small but significant step toward an environment where the norm is not institutional inequality, silencing and limiting the production of sexual knowledge. I hope that this is the case. If we are ever to move forward from #MeToo we need to understand the conditions and contexts that led to it – but in order to do that we need research environments that encourage, rather than inhibit, women from doing pioneering sexuality work. </p>
<p>Perhaps then we can work towards changing norms around sex and relationships and formulating consent laws that better fit the sexuality and experiences of women.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101994/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Victoria Brooks does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>We need to know more about what is going on for women in sex – what makes them suffer and what gives them pleasure.Victoria Brooks, Lecturer in Law, University of WestminsterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1009632018-08-03T04:19:10Z2018-08-03T04:19:10ZWriters’ festivals aren’t an imaginary republic of letters – they are political arenas<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/230521/original/file-20180803-41363-2yshx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">After Germaine Greer was apparently uninvited from the Brisbane Writers Festival, author Richard Flanagan questioned whether the festival was giving into the social media 'mob'. </span> </figcaption></figure><p>Once again, we are in the middle of a public spat about who should get to speak at a writers’ festival in Australia. It appears the Brisbane Writers Festival uninvited Bob Carr and Germaine Greer (the festival has said neither author had been <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/writers-festival-cuts-carr-greer-citys-writers-festival-cuts-carr-and-greer/news-story/5f455ab3c0b372b086c6aea37998c21a">signed to a contract for appearances</a>). In a context where #metoo has demonstrated the potency of social media mobilisation, it would seem the festival has erred on the side of caution rather than inflame the Twitterverse with contentious speakers.</p>
<p>Richard Flanagan issued a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jul/29/i-didnt-want-to-write-this-but-the-courage-to-listen-to-different-ideas-is-vanishing">forceful response</a>, questioning the festival’s “courage”. Flanagan argued with palpable frustration that this was indicative of a tendency to silence ideas that rub “against the grain of conventional thinking” and it is in danger of becoming a festival “Approved by Twitter Bots”. For Flanagan, this and other moments like it endanger the operation of the “republic of letters” that nourishes our democratic life.</p>
<p>Carr’s and Greer’s publisher has queried the “disinvitation”, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/25/brisbane-writers-festival-under-fire-after-germaine-greer-and-bob-carr-disinvited">suggesting it seems</a> “counter to the ethos of freedom of speech”. </p>
<p>This debate is, in part, a contest over the ethics of public life and what rules should govern speaking privileges within it. The writers’ festival is hardly a politically neutral space in which the most virtuous ideas win the day through their intellectual force and merit; these are curated programs that adhere to visible and invisible rules of admission. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/im-right-youre-wrong-and-heres-a-link-to-prove-it-how-social-media-shapes-public-debate-65723">I'm right, you're wrong, and here's a link to prove it: how social media shapes public debate</a>
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<p>Perhaps Flanagan would do well to remember that his ideal republic of letters was an intellectual community that took shape in specific ways during the Enlightenment. This intellectual community of philosophers forged many of the ideas we take as common sense, like the importance of freedom of speech to democratic culture. But it too had rules of admission. </p>
<p>The conventions of this imaginary republic were profoundly gendered and racialised. It was a space that assumed a white male perspective as the norm and tended to uphold rather than critique gender and racial inequalities. Some historians even suggest that women’s participation in public life in Europe declined over the 18th century as the imaginary republic exerted more influence.</p>
<p>While 200 years of political transformation has meant our public life can admit the ideas of people who don’t look like Voltaire or Rousseau, there are certainly cultural legacies of these formulations. <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/growing-evidence-anti-female-bias-student-surveys">Bucketloads of research</a> demonstrates how, for example, university students grant male professors much more authority than their female colleagues. So too, all kinds of male misbehaviour is excused as the cost of genius. Perhaps the writers’ festival author that Flanagan expects to arrive drunk and tardy would be an example of this. </p>
<p>Gendered ideas are clearly part of the DNA of this contest, often in quite subtle ways. It is no coincidence that the forces Flanagan and others suggest endanger our democratic culture include young feminists emboldened by networks of support on various social media platforms. Social media have provided a space in which a new generation of feminist voices is holding older forms of authority to account. </p>
<p>Indeed, Flanagan’s examples of this dangerous policing of public life are revealing. Junot Diaz, Germaine Greer and Lionel Shriver have all had their sexual, racial and gender politics brought into question at recent writers’ events. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/lionel-shriver-and-the-responsibilities-of-fiction-writers-65538">Lionel Shriver and the responsibilities of fiction writers</a>
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<p>Diaz’s <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-silence-the-legacy-of-childhood-trauma">gut-wrenching account of his sexual abuse</a> as a child was soon followed by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/08/row-over-junot-diaz-sexual-harassment-claims-divides-us-books-world">multiple female voices</a> who raised questions about the impact of his adult behaviour on others. His authority was called into question and he withdrew from a set of public engagements. This represents for Flanagan some kind of calamity. </p>
<p>Flanagan argues that the stories about Diaz remain unproved accusations and, as a consequence, we do him an injustice if we let these accusations alone exclude him from public life. However, as the #metoo moment has demonstrated, the rules of admission for public life tend to conceal rather than reveal sexual misconduct. </p>
<p>We need to ask tough questions about whose voices are more readily heard and what these limitations make invisible. Sometimes that might mean different voices are granted authority and others step back. The social media world that Flanagan fears is limiting our democratic life has, in some cases, provided a space for the articulation of young feminist voices to call into question male authority and the gendered privilege of artistic genius.</p>
<p>The idea that social media is somehow destroying our public culture is hardly a new one; the mob mentality that sometimes unfolds to sustain the pleasures of virtuous condemnation are worth thinking critically about. So, too, it clearly encourages the polarisation of political views. </p>
<p>When Michael Cathcart <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/30/more-than-the-n-word-how-a-tense-paul-beatty-interview-raises-bigger-questions">ran into uncomfortable territory</a> around race in his interview with Paul Beatty last year, the baying continued on Twitter for the next week. This was partly a moment in which Cathcart’s older ideas about how to read and understand texts crashed into more recent political norms about who can and cannot speak about what topics, and who can use what language. </p>
<p>To be sure, these voices certainly have a tendency towards virtuous outrage about harm. As <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n04/jacqueline-rose/i-am-a-knife">Jacqueline Rose recently argued</a>, rigid calculations of harm sometimes do not allow for the messiness of everyday life. A politics conducted in single images and outraged tweets will always struggle with political nuance. </p>
<p>However, #metoo can also be read as a politics that has flourished on social media because the present rules of public life will not fully admit these young female voices. The moment we are living through right now is, in part, a contest over how we should decide who gets to speak. </p>
<p>I’m not sure Flanagan’s idealising of the profoundly gendered republic of letters offers a useful solution to this historically specific rupture. I suspect both sides of this debate might benefit from thinking carefully about the rules they implicitly and explicitly hope to enforce on our public culture, but I’m pretty sure dismissing young feminists as a social media “mob” is hardly productive.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100963/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Leigh Boucher receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>The republic of letters was an intellectual community that took shape in the Enlightenment. And just like writers’ festivals, it had rules about who could speak.Leigh Boucher, Senior Lecturer – Modern History, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/977562018-07-11T23:08:21Z2018-07-11T23:08:21ZRethinking the penalties for rape<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226976/original/file-20180710-70048-4ipxmj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Activists protest in Barcelona, Spain on June 21, 2018. A Spanish court triggered a new wave of outrage by granting bail to five men acquitted of gang rape and convicted instead on a lesser felony of sexual abuse, a case that has shocked Spain. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The past few years have seen intense bouts of media coverage of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/bill-cosby-convicted-on-three-counts-of-sexual-assault/2018/04/26/d740ef22-4885-11e8-827e-190efaf1f1ee_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.37d988f2d464">high profile sexual assault</a> and harassment cases. However, the #MeToo movement has achieved the kind of <a href="https://theconversation.com/metoo-campaign-brings-conversation-of-rape-to-the-mainstream-85875">momentum and longevity</a> that has rarely been seen.</p>
<p>In addition to survivors telling their stories, there are discussions and debates that are often extremely heated. Two big questions seem to come up time and again. What exactly does sexual assault and harassment look like? What are the appropriate punishments for acts of sexual violence and who gets to decide what they will be?</p>
<h2>Germaine Greer weighs in</h2>
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<span class="caption">Germaine Greer.</span>
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<p>Recently, feminist writer and scholar Germaine Greer weighed in on how we should deal with sexual assault. In <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/30/germaine-greer-calls-for-punishment-for-to-be-reduced">a speech at the Hay Festival</a>, an annual literary festival in Wales, Greer argued that rape is not a “spectacularly violent crime.” She said that most rapes are just “lazy, careless and insensitive” incidents of “bad sex.” Greer’s full argument on rape will be published in a new book, coming out in Australia in September.</p>
<p>Greer, who is a survivor of a violent rape, argued that the statistics on post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and sexual violence are likely grossly inflated. In her view, society seems to condition women to believe that sexual assault is capable of destroying their lives. </p>
<p>Greer advocated for punishments for rape to be reduced. She suggested that sentencing might include 200 hours of community service, or a large tattoo of the letter R (for rapist) on the offender’s hand, arm or cheek.</p>
<p>Understandably, Greer’s comments provoked a swift backlash. </p>
<p>Laura Bates, a former actor who founded the #EverydaySexism project in 2012, argued that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/31/germaine-greer-rape-violence-prosecution">further diminishing the severity of rape is dangerous at a moment when the impact of sexual violence is finally being discussed</a>. She said we should not abandon trying rape cases simply because they are difficult to prosecute.</p>
<h2>PTSD and trauma from rape</h2>
<p>Greer’s commentary is dangerous because it denies the evidence regarding PTSD related to sexual violence. <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20008198.2017.1353383">A 2017 study published in the <em>European Journal of Psychotraumatology</em></a> examined data from the World Health Organization’s World Mental Health Surveys.</p>
<p>It showed that interpersonal trauma was linked to the highest risk of developing PTSD. Those who experienced traumatic experiences within the broad category of intimate partner sexual violence accounted for the highest population burden of PTSD. </p>
<p>PTSD is a <em>clinical diagnosis</em> of trauma, and not the only way that we measure how survivors are impacted by assault. Unfortunately, our cultural understanding of trauma often aligns with <a href="https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/ptsd-overview/dsm5_criteria_ptsd.asp">the strict diagnostic criteria of PTSD</a>. There are certain key features of the clinical diagnosis that we might popularly associate with “real” trauma: trouble remembering details, hypervigilance, an avoidance of triggers. </p>
<p>However, as researchers point out in a <a href="http://go.galegroup.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA539324403&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=15378276&p=AONE&sw=w">2018 review of the diagnostic criteria of PTSD,</a> “exposure to trauma is not tantamount to a diagnosis of PTSD, as most trauma exposures do not result in PTSD.” The absence of PTSD after a rape, however, is not the absence of trauma. It does not mean that an individual’s life might not be profoundly impacted by an experience of sexual violence. </p>
<p>When Greer doubts that rape can destroy someone’s life, she denies others’ experiences rather than providing a helpful observation that rape doesn’t affect everyone in the same way. She fails to address that trauma and PTSD are not the same thing, and shows we desperately need a robust understanding of trauma and how it encompasses a wide variety of experiences.</p>
<h2>A long history of restorative justice</h2>
<p>Because she claims to have had minimal trauma from her own rape — and that most rapes are the result of inconsiderateness rather than violence — Greer infers that punishments need not be so severe. What Greer seems to forget is that feminist activists and legal scholars alike have long been rethinking how to best address sexual violence. </p>
<p>Racialized activists, such as those with <a href="http://www.incite-national.org">INCITE!, a network of feminists working to end violence against women, gender non-conforming and trans people of colour,</a>, have long histories of seeking alternative solutions to the criminal justice system, particularly because of how people of colour are disproportionately impacted by incarceration.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226973/original/file-20180710-70063-12vhexq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226973/original/file-20180710-70063-12vhexq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=183&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226973/original/file-20180710-70063-12vhexq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=183&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226973/original/file-20180710-70063-12vhexq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=183&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226973/original/file-20180710-70063-12vhexq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=230&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226973/original/file-20180710-70063-12vhexq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=230&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226973/original/file-20180710-70063-12vhexq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=230&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">This poster was part of the INCITE! campaign to end law enforcement violence against women of colour and trans people of colour.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Artwork by Cristy C. Road/INCITE</span></span>
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<p>Criminal justice provides a blanket solution: Jail time. The primary variable one has to consider is how much time is to be served: none, a lot or something in between. </p>
<p>If we are to consider other solutions, including those found in restorative justice programs, then it is possible that 200 hours of community service <em>could</em> be an appropriate punishment for a particular incident of sexual assault. Indigenous communities especially have been at the forefront of this work, <a href="http://vatjss.com/services/">as can be seen in initiatives such as the Vancouver Aboriginal Transformative Justice Service Program.</a></p>
<h2>Better conversations needed</h2>
<p>It will take time for us to respond differently to violence. It takes a willingness to recognize that sexual assault has a wide range of impacts on victims, and that it is impossible to universalise the experience. <a href="http://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/daphne-bramham-time-may-finally-be-right-to-end-sexual-harassment-says-anita-hill">As professor Anita Hill told Daphne Branham of <em>the Vancouver Sun</em></a>, “It is a long time coming and not going to happen overnight… But we are at a moment where there is resolve on the part of many people. If ever it could be possible, now is that time.”</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226969/original/file-20180710-70060-1yqw14b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226969/original/file-20180710-70060-1yqw14b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226969/original/file-20180710-70060-1yqw14b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226969/original/file-20180710-70060-1yqw14b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226969/original/file-20180710-70060-1yqw14b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226969/original/file-20180710-70060-1yqw14b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226969/original/file-20180710-70060-1yqw14b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">In 1991, Anita Hill testified before Congress, speaking about how her boss, Clarence Thomas, sexually harassed her, during his confirmation hearings for the U.S. Supreme Court.</span>
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<p>We often make broad statements or claims about sexual violence to be strategic; to raise awareness, to show solidarity or to demonstrate the scope of the problem. #MeToo owes a great deal of its success to its wide reach and broad scope. It is also easy for individual personal experience, like Greer’s to become the basis of larger claims to truth, especially at the expense of others.</p>
<p>Greer’s comments have added troubling fuel to the fire of debate. Hopefully, they can also reignite more productive, respectful and evidence-based conversations about the complexities of violence.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97756/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lucia Lorenzi receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. </span></em></p>Germaine Greer’s recent comments about the punishments for rape show the need for more complex, evidence-based discussions about trauma and the criminal justice system.Lucia Lorenzi, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Cultural Studies, McMaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/978472018-06-17T18:54:11Z2018-06-17T18:54:11ZGreer is right to say rape law has failings, but wrong to suggest its decriminalisation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222693/original/file-20180612-182738-1hzmtyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Among other things, Greer’s dismissal of "harm" also illustrates how misconceptions about rape inhibit prosecution.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Flickr/walnut whippet</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Germaine Greer is a provocateur of long standing. Her <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/30/germaine-greer-calls-for-punishment-for-to-be-reduced">recent comments about rape</a> enhance that reputation. </p>
<p>We accept Greer’s premise: rape law has profound and persistent failings. The #metoo movement has made vivid what rape researchers already know: <a href="http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/4906.0%7E2016%7EMain%20Features%7EKey%20Findings%7E1">rape is common</a>.</p>
<p>While <a href="http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/DA3DED213BAE8114CA257178001B6949?Opendocument">reports to Australian police have risen</a>, <a href="http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/4530.0%7E2015-16%7EMain%20Features%7ESexual%20assault%7E32">reporting</a> and <a href="https://www.crimestatistics.vic.gov.au/research-and-evaluation/publications/attrition-of-sexual-offence-incidents-across-the-victorian">conviction rates</a> remain low. Greer claims proving rape is too difficult, and rape without physical injury doesn’t warrant prosecution.</p>
<p>However, her account of the harm of rape is flawed, and her proposed solutions do not engage with the proper role of rape law within the criminal justice system. </p>
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<p>“Rape” has a legal meaning and a social meaning. </p>
<p>In law, rape centres on whether the accused knew the other person was not consenting. As illustrated by recent high-profile cases in the <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/06/us/sexual-assault-brock-turner-stanford/index.html">US</a>, <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11409596/Rape-consent-trial-led-to-landmark-appeal.html">UK</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jul/21/this-doesnt-get-to-be-over-for-me-the-case-that-put-consent-on-trial">Australia</a>, non-consent is tough to prove. Proving knowledge of non-consent in the face of gendered expectations about sexual behaviour can be even more difficult.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/rape-sexual-assault-and-sexual-harassment-whats-the-difference-93411">Rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment: what’s the difference?</a>
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<p>Greer is right to challenge the stereotype of rape involving a stranger using violence and causing physical injury. This stereotype impedes reporting and successful prosecution. Many who experience rape (as defined by law) <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01973533.2017.1398091?src=recsys">do not call that experience rape</a> even if <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1471-6402.00103">they feel distressed, uneasy, or traumatised</a>. Many who have committed rape under the law <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1471-6402.00030">do not recognise themselves in the stereotype of the rapist</a>.</p>
<p>Most rapes are committed by <a href="http://anrows.org.au/sites/default/files/Fast%20Facts%20-%20Violence%20against%20women%20key%20statistics.pdf">partners, ex-partners and acquaintances</a>; these happen <a href="http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/4906.0">in the home</a> and not the stereotypical dark street.</p>
<p>Greer characterises “most rape” as “lazy … careless, insensitive”, giving the example of a husband taking his “conjugal rights” — rights the law no longer recognises.</p>
<p>However, the real difficulty for the law is not in failing to see this as rape. The absence of consent renders it rape unless the husband is believed when he says he thought his wife was consenting. Greer misses the primary reason the husband’s defence could succeed: the absence of social consensus that consent is needed in an ongoing relationship.</p>
<p>Greer’s dismissal of “harm” also illustrates how misconceptions about rape inhibit prosecution.</p>
<p>Greer calls “bullshit” on rape as a crime of violence and correctly states most rapes do not cause physical injury. However, the crime of rape focuses on bodily autonomy. The law recognises that being subjected to non-consensual sex is dehumanising. It denies the victim the human dignity of choosing who is permitted sexual access to their body and when. Greer fails to acknowledge this breach of bodily autonomy that lies at the heart of rape as a crime.</p>
<p>Speaking as a rape survivor, Greer says society wanted women to believe that rape destroyed them. But “We haven’t been destroyed, we’ve been bloody annoyed.”</p>
<p>Historically, women were men’s legal property. Sexual activity outside of marriage, including rape, ruined women’s value as property. Long after women gained legal personhood, it destroyed women’s reputation and prospects. </p>
<p>Women need to be able to report rape without believing they will be “destroyed”. We must be able to acknowledge this, without telling people who experience rape how they must or should feel. </p>
<p>The law and the social conversation about rape need to acknowledge that rape is real, common, damaging and sometimes physically violent. In doing so, we need to take care not to further traumatise survivors and foreclose stories of survival, resilience and recovery by holding out that rape is so damaging that people cannot recover from it. </p>
<p>Research bears out Greer’s assertion that <a href="http://www.svri.org/sites/default/files/attachments/2016-01-13/127.full_.pdf">rape does not destroy everyone who experiences it</a>. Recovery is real and possible. However, research also shows rape can create <a href="http://www.svri.org/sites/default/files/attachments/2016-01-13/127.full_.pdf">intense and long-lived suffering</a>. </p>
<p>Feminist activism initially demanded that rape be acknowledged as unacceptable and damaging. The #metoo movement builds on this recognition, teasing out in greater complexity the forms rape and sexual harassment can take and the harm this can cause.</p>
<p>Greer proposes reducing rape penalties in return for women being believed without giving lengthy evidence in court – a suggestion that fails to accord with procedural justice.</p>
<p>The #metoo movement also demands better criminal justice responses to rape. In response to perceived failures in criminal justice and workplace protection, women are publicly disclosing rape and sexual harassment, exposing alleged perpetrators to social and workplace sanctions and demanding these accounts be believed – but are not proposing a reduction in penalty.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/rape-is-a-plot-device-in-western-literature-sold-back-to-us-by-hollywood-85971">Rape is a plot device in western literature, sold back to us by Hollywood</a>
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<p>The #metoo movement has shown us that women are no longer prepared to tolerate legal inaction on sexual harassment and rape. It has returned to strategies of self-help and mutual aid that feminists advocated before contemporary laws on rape and sexual harassment were won. It should not be confused with calling for rape to be decriminalised, or for rapists to be convicted without legal process. </p>
<p>On paper, rape looks like a serious crime with a heavy penalty. Yet reporting and conviction rates are so low that <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13200968.2007.10854391">rape is virtually untouched by the criminal law</a>.</p>
<p>Most rapes never reach the police and fewer still result in a trial. If police and courts are the services offered to people who experience rape, most of them are choosing not to use those services. This suggests Greer is right when she says:
“the system [is] not working, and radical change [is] needed”.</p>
<p>If “do no harm” is the measure of success, rape law fails here too. Most <a href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R92yp-DNrTkJ:https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/229443/2010-Daly-and-Bouhours-Rape-and-attrition-PUBversion.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au&client=firefox-b">rapes do not enter the legal system, let alone result in convictions</a>, and <a href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5GZjNQ-08QAJ:https://aifs.gov.au/sites/default/files/publication-documents/i12.pdf+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au&client=firefox-b">other choices</a> are not being made widely available.</p>
<p>Greer’s proposals would effectively decriminalise rape: a widespread, serious crime that causes profound suffering. We believe rape should remain a crime, reflecting the value we place on bodily autonomy. We should recognise the failures of the legal system as driven by persistent stereotypes about rape, society’s refusal to believe women and accept that rape occurs within relationships, and the continued preparedness to protect men who abuse women.</p>
<p>The #metoo movement has reopened discussion of the barriers to protecting women’s bodily autonomy. To accept decriminalisation of rape and normalise it, as Greer suggests, fails to recognise bodily autonomy as a key marker of humanity to which women are entitled.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97847/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The author and academic makes some valid points about rape, but to decriminalise it, as she suggests, fails to recognise bodily autonomy as a key marker of humanity to which women are entitled.Kate Galloway, Associate Professor of Law, Bond UniversityMary Heath, Associate Professor, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/976452018-06-06T14:54:47Z2018-06-06T14:54:47ZGermaine Greer: from feminist firebrand to professional troll<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222013/original/file-20180606-137288-1fq7inx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=62%2C13%2C953%2C688&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Germaine Greer: professional troll. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Helen Morgan via Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Former celebrated feminist turned public polemicist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germaine_Greer">Germaine Greer</a> is no stranger to controversy. In fact, the author seems to court the headlines, especially when promoting a forthcoming book. </p>
<p>You may remember when Greer made <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2015/10/what-row-over-banning-germaine-greer-really-about">transphobic comments</a> in the run-up to the publication of her 1999 book <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/16/daily/051899greer-book-review.html">The Whole Woman</a>. She’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/12/germaine-greer-tells-qa-her-trans-views-were-wrong-but-then-restates-them">reiterated</a> these <a href="https://www.varsity.co.uk/comment/8087">opinions</a> <a href="https://www.advocate.com/caitlyn-jenner/2015/10/26/feminist-germaine-greer-goes-anti-trans-rant-over-caitlyn-jenner">many times</a> <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/germaine-greer-defends-grossly-offensive-comments-about-transgender-women-just-because-you-lop-off-a6709061.html">in the years since</a>. And then in 2003, she claimed <a href="https://www.scotsman.com/news/uk/greer-braced-for-paedophile-book-storm-1-1292069">she’d be accused of paedophilia</a> while promoting <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n01/jenny-diski/cuddlesome">The Beautiful Boy</a> – her lavishly illustrated book about “why boys have always been the world’s pin-ups”.</p>
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<p>Now Greer is preparing for the publication of her latest book, On Rape – with a series of troubling observations on #MeToo and sexual (non-)violence. </p>
<h2>Professional provocateur?</h2>
<p>Greer started her promotional campaign earlier this year when she opined that the rise in representations of sexual violence on TV was due to <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/germaine-greer-sexual-violence-tv-women-enjoy-luther-the-fall-paranoid-metoo-a8330561.html">women’s enjoyment</a> of watching other women being sexually assaulted and that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/02/germaine-greer-women-rapes-tv-fantasies">women fantasised</a> about being subjected to sexual violence. </p>
<p>She followed this up with <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p061qrm7">comments</a> on the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX1gNTF7liM&t=38s">#MeToo movement</a>, which include <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/germaine-greer-me-too-harvey-weinstein-women-spread-legs-movie-roles-actress-a8173161.html">her claims</a> that women raped by Harvey Weinstein were “<a href="https://metro.co.uk/2018/03/20/germaine-greer-slammed-calling-victims-sexual-assault-career-rapees-7401180/">career rapees</a>” who “<a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/germaine-greer-me-too-harvey-weinstein-women-spread-legs-movie-roles-actress-a8173161.html">spread their legs</a>” to get movie roles. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/world/germaine-greer-challenges-metoo-campaign-20180121-h0lpra.html">an interview</a> with Fairfax Media in Australia, <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/germaine-greer-on-metoo-i-want-women-to-react-now/news-story/9bda0d50e1783eb031183ddf2d0113d4">Greer said</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What makes it different is when the man has economic power, as Harvey Weinstein has … if you spread your legs because he said ‘be nice to me and I’ll give you a job in a movie’ then I’m afraid that’s tantamount to consent, and it’s too late now to start whingeing about that.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Courting controversy</h2>
<p>Greer’s comments to <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/germaine-greer-announces-new-book-in-wake-of-metoo-backlash-20180328-p4z6mk.html">promote the publication</a> of <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44315214">On Rape</a>, then, are merely the latest in a <a href="http://www.theweek.co.uk/93968/germaine-greer-rape-is-rarely-a-violent-crime-and-four-other-controversial-quotes">long line</a> of dubious claims from the seemingly publicity hungry academic. </p>
<p>Speaking at the <a href="https://www.hayfestival.com/p-13944-germaine-greer.aspx">2018 Hay literary festival</a>, Greer attracted criticism by calling for <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/30/germaine-greer-calls-for-punishment-for-to-be-reduced">more lenient sentences for rapists</a>. Despite <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/apr/09/online-support-grows-for-women-after-rugby-stars-acquittal">contemporary movements</a> <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/many-rape-victims-like-justice-has-never-served-will-change/">lobbying</a> for a <a href="https://theconversation.com/survivors-of-sexual-violence-are-let-down-by-the-criminal-justice-system-heres-what-should-happen-next-94138">long overdue overhaul</a> of how survivors of rape <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-42011039">can access justice</a>, Greer suggests that 200 hours of community service – or an “R” tattoo on the hand, arm or cheek – may be more appropriate punishment for rapists. </p>
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<p>While acknowledging the considerable obstacles rape survivors face in navigating the criminal justice system (the consequences of which are <a href="https://rapecrisis.org.uk/statistics.php">abysmal conviction rates</a> of rapists which, arguably, contribute to more rapes), Greer suggests that accepting a drastically reduced sentence for rape would result in more convictions. </p>
<p>Greer recounts her own experience of rape – but seems to imply that she hasn’t experienced any long-term damage as a consequence of the assault. The leap from her own emotional reaction to sexual violence (to which she is, of course, entitled) to her cavalier response to others’ experience of sexual violence is troubling.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221733/original/file-20180605-119867-3d01nh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221733/original/file-20180605-119867-3d01nh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221733/original/file-20180605-119867-3d01nh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221733/original/file-20180605-119867-3d01nh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221733/original/file-20180605-119867-3d01nh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221733/original/file-20180605-119867-3d01nh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221733/original/file-20180605-119867-3d01nh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Germaine Greer seems to diminish the gravity of rape and the severity of damage it causes for others.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/cascade_of_rant/5827890190">Cascade_of_rant/flickr</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Misunderstanding sexual violence</h2>
<p>Greer also draws a bizarre distinction between violent and non-violent rape, which demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of sexual assault. She comments: “We are told that it is a sexually violent crime … Every time a man rolls over on his exhausted wife and insists on enjoying his conjugal rights he is raping her.” She’s right: penetration without consent is always rape – but to suggest that it isn’t “violent” is a mistake and dangerously misrepresents the real experiences of many survivors of sexual assault and rape.</p>
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<p>It is surprising, too, that even some of the criticisms of Greer’s position concede that rape isn’t always violent. For instance, in her response to Greer’s comments, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/04/rape-bad-sex-germaine-greer-suzanne-moore">Suzanne Moore said</a>: “Greer is correct to say not all rape is violent, but all rape surely involves the threat of violence.” The idea that rape can be a “non-violent” act seems to be a widely held myth in rape culture. The non-consensual penetration of a human body is an <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/louise-pennington/ched-evans-rape-is-always-an-act-of-violence_b_5990092.html?guccounter=1">inherently violent violation</a>. </p>
<p>With astonishing flippancy and no appeal to evidence, Greer went on to tell the audience at Hay: “Most rapes don’t involve any injury whatsoever. We are told it’s one of the most violent crimes in the world – bull.” As if the lack of visible evidence of external physical violence <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/26/protests-spain-five-men-cleared-of-teenagers-gang-rape-pamplona">diminishes the damage</a> caused by rape. While it’s true that other kinds of physical violence may be perpetrated alongside rape, the absence of visible evidence of punches, kicks or bites does not negate the violence of the act of rape. </p>
<p>Greer’s comments echo <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/news/there-are-no-good-rapes-but-some-are-worse-than-others-6403597.html">those</a> of other public figures such as <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10998498/Richard-Dawkins-in-storm-over-mild-date-rape-tweets.html">Richard Dawkins</a>, <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8520940/Kenneth-Clarke-questions-whether-date-rape-is-really-rape.html">Kenneth Clarke</a>, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2793302/sarah-vine-judy-s-right-rapes-worse-others.html">Judy Finnegan</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/nyregion/brooklyn-police-peter-rose-date-rape-comments.html">NYPD officer</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/07/nypd-captain-rape-comments-peter-rose">Peter Rose</a>, who have assumed a “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/opinion/sexual-abuse.html">hierarchy of rape</a>” – the idea that <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/07/29/richard-dawkins-claims-some-types-rape-pedophilia-worse-others_n_5629458.html">some rapes</a> are <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13440222">“worse” than others</a> (although <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ken-clarke-apologises-for-rape-comments-2285710.html">Clarke</a> and <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-29598732">Finnegan</a> later apologised) and only victims who display the external marks of physical violence are worthy of serious concern. </p>
<h2>Trivialising sexual violence</h2>
<p>When trivialisation and disbelief lie at the heart of a <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/is-there-really-no-rape-culture-in-the-west-10314028.html">rape culture</a>, attitudes that can be traced right back to the Bible, (see Judges 19: <a href="http://biblehub.com/judges/9-19.htm">Levite and his wife</a> where a woman is gang raped and cut up into pieces), the impact of <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/todays-feminists-arent-warrior-women-like-germaine-theyre-pearl-clutching-princesses-0xx9jm5bl">comments such as these</a> from those who identify as feminists cannot be underestimated. They provide a platform to the myths that create environments where sex crimes become normalised.</p>
<p>And despite lamenting the role of women in rape trials as little more than “<a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/31/europe/rape-crime-greer-intl/index.html">bits of evidence</a>”, Greer locates rapists at the centre of the narrative. By <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/germaine-greer-rape-punishment-hay-festival-crime-a8376876.html">describing rape as</a> “just lazy, just careless, insensitive”, she privileges the experiences of men over women. She presents rape as something men do (exclusively in a heterosexual context), rather than something survivors are forced to endure. </p>
<p>Greer’s comments on sexual violence are glib, ill-informed and potentially dangerous. Let’s hope she’s put more thought into the content of her forthcoming book.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97645/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Katie Edwards works for the University of Sheffield. She receives funding from the AHRC and the White Rose Collaboration Fund. She co-directs The Shiloh Project, a collaboration between academics at the Universities of Sheffield, Leeds and Auckland to explore rape culture, religion, and the Bible. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emma Nagouse receives funding from the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities and is a member of The Shiloh Project, a collaboration between academics at the Universities of Sheffield, Leeds and Auckland to explore rape culture, religion, and the Bible. </span></em></p>Germaine Greer’s recent comments on rape are troublingly glib.Katie Edwards, Director SIIBS, University of SheffieldEmma Nagouse, PhD Candidate in Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, University of SheffieldLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/908432018-02-01T17:57:18Z2018-02-01T17:57:18ZEssays On Air: Reading Germaine Greer’s mail<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203736/original/file-20180129-100919-1pmvaky.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">From the initial avalanche of mail triggered by Germaine Greer's book The Female Eunuch grew a collection of 50 years of letters, emails, faxes, telegrams and newsletters.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Marcella Cheng/The Conversation NY-BD-CC</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>From the initial avalanche of mail triggered by Germaine Greer’s book The Female Eunuch grew a collection of 50 years of letters, emails, faxes, telegrams and newsletters from academics, schoolchildren, radicals and housewives all over the world. They’re now stored in 120 grey, acid-free boxes at the University of Melbourne Archives.</p>
<p>Lachlan Glanville, assistant archivist of the Germaine Greer Archive at the University of Melbourne has pored over these letters. </p>
<p>In the latest episode of Essays On Air, the audio version of our <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/friday-essay-22955">Friday essay</a> series, Glanville says the collection offers a powerful, often amusing, sometimes perplexing glimpse into the lives of the people affected by her work, as well as the many faces of Greer herself – academic, feminist, provocateur, confidant.</p>
<p>Today, Conversation editor Lucinda Beaman reads Glanville’s fascinating essay, <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-reading-germaine-greers-mail-74693">Reading Germaine Greer’s mail</a>.</p>
<p>Find us and subscribe in <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/essays-on-air/id1333743838?mt=2">Apple Podcasts</a>, in <a href="https://play.pocketcasts.com/">Pocket Casts</a> or wherever you get your podcasts.</p>
<h2>Additional audio</h2>
<p>Snow by <a href="http://freemusicarchive.org/music/David_Szesztay/Cinematic/Snow">David Szesztay</a></p>
<p>Dreaming in the Non-Dream by <a href="http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Chris_Forsyth_and_the_Solar_Motel_Band/Live_at_Monty_Hall_11172017/Chris_Forsyth_4_Dreaming_In_the_non_Dream">Chris Forsyth and the Solar Motel Band</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5vjykeMfhg">Germaine Greer interview (1999)</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18-nflHp9Pg">TV Heaven 1971 - Germaine Greer - The Female Eunuch</a></p>
<p><em>This episode was edited by Jenni Henderson. Illustration by Marcella Cheng.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90843/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
The Germaine Greer Archive offers a powerful, often amusing, sometimes perplexing glimpse into the lives of people affected by her work, as well as the many faces of Greer herself.Sunanda Creagh, Senior EditorLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/892362018-01-09T19:36:28Z2018-01-09T19:36:28ZThe Town Hall Affair brings Germaine Greer’s 1970s feminist debate roaring into the present<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201253/original/file-20180108-83559-ntjwrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Maura Tierney (second from left) plays Germaine Greer, Scott Shepherd (far left) and Ari Fliakos (second from right) both play Norman Mailer, and Greg Mehrten as Diana Shilling (far right). </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Prudence Upton</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The moment was 1971, Labour Day’s eve. The context: a biting critique of feminism published by journalist-novelist Norman Mailer in Harper’s magazine earlier that year. Mailer’s essay, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/226022.The_Prisoner_of_Sex">The Prisoner of Sex</a>, sold more than any previous Harper’s edition. </p>
<p>The event: a sell-out fundraiser billed as A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation promised an explosive line-up. Mailer was set to debate literary critic Diana Trilling, feminist-activist Jacqueline Ceballos, Village Voice author Jill Johnston and Germaine Greer. A raucous audience of New York’s intellectual elite crammed in to witness the fallout. </p>
<figure>
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/78950738" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Excerpt from Town Bloody Hall.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The year is now 2018 and New York experimental theatre company the Wooster Group are replaying this signature event with audacious physical, rhythmic and vocal precision as part of the Sydney Festival at the Opera House.</p>
<p>Using the 1979 film documentary of the event, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0217853/">Town Bloody Hall</a>, <a href="https://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2018/the-town-hall-affair">The Town Hall Affair</a> reworks the gestural, aural and filmic traces of a signature moment in the history of the Women’s Liberation Movement. The stage production, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, shows how time, when critically replayed against another time, reveals its bleed: the socio-historical ruptures, cross-fades and points of continuity.</p>
<p>For one thing, Greer – whose characteristic manner and voice is carried with powerful nuance by actor Maura Tierney – seems to appear and appear again in the production. In Tierney’s replay, the familiarity of Greer’s jocular head tilts, her indignant eye rolls, and her impassioned vocal cadences convey the sheer enormity of her intellectual contribution to the history of women’s lives. It shows how her unwaveringly public presence worked to disrupt the (then) set habitus of gender relations. </p>
<p>Behind Tierney, an “original” Greer appears on a screen projection of the 1979 documentary, which captures the particular riotousness of the original event. Greer speaks with candid eloquence against a culture of the privileged masculine artist whose achievements happen at the expense of her own. “We broke our hearts trying to keep the aprons clean”, she implores. Her commitment to her own voice even now astonishes.</p>
<p>These two Greers are flanked by a third Greer, the real one, who is here now for the Sydney premiere. </p>
<p>While the 1971 audience included Susan Sontag and Betty Friedan, this week Greer herself attended the Wooster Group’s show, re-heckling the unfolding calamity of the past as it replayed in the present. </p>
<p>Greer’s public presence as a feminist commentator has not wavered since the 1970s, yet her almost intertextual presence in the here and now of the theatre auditorium revealed something else about why this theatre work succeeds. </p>
<p>There is a painfully familiar quality about much of the discourse dynamics we witness in the show. The female speakers jostle for first position. They are punished for running over time. They are not heard. They do not agree. </p>
<p>The boldness of Mailer – positioned as mediator and calling the female speakers “ladies” – only seems more impudent for the contemporary familiarity of the whole set-up. Played expertly by both Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd, the Mailer characters’ vocal pace reveals how voice alone carries histories of power, of who is allowed to speak, and when and why. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201257/original/file-20180108-83559-gl4f9j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201257/original/file-20180108-83559-gl4f9j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201257/original/file-20180108-83559-gl4f9j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201257/original/file-20180108-83559-gl4f9j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201257/original/file-20180108-83559-gl4f9j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201257/original/file-20180108-83559-gl4f9j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201257/original/file-20180108-83559-gl4f9j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201257/original/file-20180108-83559-gl4f9j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A woman stages an intervention during Jill Johnston’s poetry reading, right, played by Kate Valk.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">PrudenceUpton</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Jill Johnston’s free-verse spoken word poetry is a marvel in this context, rendered with potent whimsy by Kate Valk. Johnston’s words, like Greer’s, move us from witnessing the past to being activated in the present, recomposing the Opera House audience into some form of cross-temporal convention. </p>
<p>Her poetry offers stunning incitements such as “a woman who can love herself naturally is a woman is a lesbian”, calling for none other than “a lesberated woman”. Johnston’s wordplay is dismissed by Mailer but nonetheless compels two female audience members to mount the stage and kiss her. Mailer tries to call for order; the audience is loudly divided. </p>
<p>The original event was a riot. And its arguments on all sides became heartfelt but increasingly unclear, at risk of complete decomposition or, at least, discomposure. As the reperformance begins to exceed the original, another film is projected, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/">Maidstone</a> by Norman Mailer, providing a different underscoring to the live action. </p>
<p>This little-known film, described in the program as concerning “a famous film director … who is running for President while making a movie about his campaign” seems to expose more than explore the unrelenting masculinity that has evolved through Mailer to his contemporaries. The pre-ghosts of Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton seem everywhere here. </p>
<p>The Wooster Group has been a driving force in theatre that includes film and digital technology since 1975. And yet this 2018 event, or re-event, seems exceptionally prescient. Its timeliness can be read in its attempt to understand history unfolding, the evolution of feminism, and its continuities, failures, ruptures and successes. The fallout goes on. </p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2018/the-town-hall-affair">The Town Hall Affair</a> will be staged as part of the Sydney Festival until January 13.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89236/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bryoni Trezise has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>The Town Hall Affair is a recreation of a 1971 debate between Germaine Greer and other feminists and Norman Mailer. It feels exceptionally prescient in 2018.Bryoni Trezise, Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/889582018-01-07T19:10:05Z2018-01-07T19:10:05ZWhy it’s time to acknowledge Germaine Greer, journalist<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198741/original/file-20171212-9451-1uufuiu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Happy Christmas Ethiopia: this photo was part of a Christmas card sent to Germaine Greer from the Diverse Productions film crew who worked with Greer on her 1985 documentary Diverse Reports: Ethiopia.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph: Colin Skinner, reproduced with permission. University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, 2014.0054.00156. Copyright: Colin Skinner. </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The pages of Germaine Greer’s University of Warwick diary for 1971 are mostly blank; she was too busy to fill them out. After April 20, 1971, publication day for The Female Eunuch in the United States, Greer plotted her life in single words or urgent phrases. Hamburg. Leave for Sardinia. Quarrel with Ken. Arr. Paris. Esquire Round Table Luncheon. Canada. WET DREAM. Hanoi?</p>
<p>April 30, 1971, the night Greer appeared on stage at the New York Town Hall with Norman Mailer, Diana Trilling, Jackie Ceballos and Jill Johnson, is blank. So are the pages around it. The Dialogue on Women’s Liberation, as the 1971 event was called, is the subject of a documentary film (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0217853/">Town Bloody Hall</a>, 1979) and that film has been turned into a piece of theatre by the New York-based Wooster Group. <a href="https://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2018/the-town-hall-affair">The Town Hall Affair</a> is on now at the 2018 Sydney Festival and Greer is giving <a href="https://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2018/germaine-greer">a public lecture tonight</a> at the Sydney Opera House.</p>
<p>The town hall debate just keeps getting bigger but for Greer back then, it was a minor extravaganza. A more significant thing happened on June 1, 1971. “Column begins,” Greer has written in the diary, one of thousands of records in the 500 boxes that comprise the Germaine Greer Archive at University of Melbourne Archives.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198732/original/file-20171212-9404-b3blw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198732/original/file-20171212-9404-b3blw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198732/original/file-20171212-9404-b3blw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198732/original/file-20171212-9404-b3blw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198732/original/file-20171212-9404-b3blw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198732/original/file-20171212-9404-b3blw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198732/original/file-20171212-9404-b3blw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198732/original/file-20171212-9404-b3blw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of Germaine Greer, Ethiopia, 1985.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photographer unknown. Photograph is image 21 of 37 contained on a roll of negatives. University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, 2014.0044.00258, Ethiopia (a) negatives, roll 11 of 16.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This entry is the start of one of the most important but least recognised aspects of Greer’s professional life – her international career as a journalist. The column Greer is referring to is the bi-weekly one she wrote for The Sunday Times, at the invitation of editor Harold Evans.</p>
<p>Greer was a veteran of the student and underground presses but the Times column was her first paid gig. Her journalism career had begun with the publication of an essay on rationalism in Farrago, the University of Melbourne’s student newspaper, in 1959. (Greer’s clipping of this piece and a 1971 press pass are on display at Melbourne’s City Gallery, for the <a href="https://whatson.melbourne.vic.gov.au/Whatson/Exhibitions/HistoryandHeritage/Pages/7a019dc1-b929-4430-9c20-c27e8ddd4db0.aspx">Ink in the Blood</a> exhibition.)</p>
<p>For the next 12 years, Greer wrote theatre reviews for student papers in Sydney and Cambridge and satirical essays for London-based OZ magazine and Suck, “the first European sexpaper”.</p>
<p>Greer’s inaugural Look! column (on vaginal deodorants) ran on July 25, 1971. Diary notes say she went to Hamburg to watch a live sex show, then to Vietnam, where she researched a piece on Vietnamese “bar girls” who had babies to American soldiers.</p>
<p>Her research notes, including contacts for fixers (locals employed by foreign correspondents) and typescripts are in the Print Journalism series, a collection of 1,268 folders, housed in 24 boxes, that document Greer’s journalism from 1959 until 2010.</p>
<h2>‘Laborious investigation’</h2>
<p>The photograph attached to her press pass, issued in November 1971 in Saigon, depicts a woman who is tough, tired, no bullshit. The glamorous, naughty scholar who dressed up in an op shop slip and fox fur and flirted with Norman Mailer in front of an audience of “diamond-studded radical chic New Yorkers” only seven months earlier is gone. This face belongs to a reporter in a war zone. The quote about radical chic comes from Greer’s cover story for Esquire in September 1971.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198666/original/file-20171211-9392-2qz6r5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198666/original/file-20171211-9392-2qz6r5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198666/original/file-20171211-9392-2qz6r5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198666/original/file-20171211-9392-2qz6r5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198666/original/file-20171211-9392-2qz6r5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198666/original/file-20171211-9392-2qz6r5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198666/original/file-20171211-9392-2qz6r5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198666/original/file-20171211-9392-2qz6r5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Press pass issued to Germaine Greer, November 24, 1971, Hanoi. Greer went to Vietnam to research a column for The Sunday Times.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, 2014.0046.01280, [Vietnam Press Pass].</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After Vietnam, Greer went to Bangladesh and interviewed women who had been raped by Pakistani soldiers during the 1971 war of independence.</p>
<p>Greer has also been a columnist for The Spectator, The Oldie, The Independent, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, among others, and her features and essays have been published in the world’s best newspapers and magazines. The most significant collection of journalism records in the archive document Greer’s work as a foreign correspondent in Ethiopia. Greer went in 1984 (for the Daily Mail), in April 1985 (for The Observer) and in September (as a presenter for Diverse Reports – Ethiopia, a TV documentary that screened on 23 October, 1985 on Channel 4).</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198668/original/file-20171211-9422-1tqmw8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198668/original/file-20171211-9422-1tqmw8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198668/original/file-20171211-9422-1tqmw8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198668/original/file-20171211-9422-1tqmw8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198668/original/file-20171211-9422-1tqmw8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198668/original/file-20171211-9422-1tqmw8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198668/original/file-20171211-9422-1tqmw8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198668/original/file-20171211-9422-1tqmw8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Detail from Germaine Greer’s reporter’s notebook, Ethiopia, April 1985.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, 2014.0045.00134, Ethiopia reporter’s notebook A. Copyright: University of Melbourne.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After the first trip, Greer was determined to go back and report on what Ethiopians themselves were doing to ease the catastrophe of famine. She pitched her idea to The Observer.</p>
<p>“The kind of laborious investigation I have in mind will take time; the results will not be the sort of sensational expose which is what foreign correspondents usually think it is their job to get, but they will be interesting and moving just the same – I know this from having been there before,” Greer told Observer editor Donald Trelford in a letter of February 18, 1985.</p>
<p>The Ethiopian government’s Refugee Resettlement Commission was moving people from famine zones in the north to more fertile ones in the south and west and Greer was one of the few foreign journalists to travel with resettlement convoys either on the buses or in a Toyota LandCruiser she hired. At one stage, she drove 700 kilometres over unmade roads to Asosa, a resettlement city on Ethiopia’s eastern edge. A big road map (92cm x 90cm) is hand-annotated by Greer in pen and pink felt tip and marked with coffee rings and fragments of text in Ethiopian.</p>
<p>For a month, Greer used her Olympic quick flash camera to capture a different side of the famine to the one being presented by the international media and by aid organisations. She circled a starving nation and took photos of people surrounded by food; women selling mangoes, men milling flour or tending beehives or planting seedlings in a greenhouse.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198727/original/file-20171212-9422-1k9mr1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198727/original/file-20171212-9422-1k9mr1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198727/original/file-20171212-9422-1k9mr1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198727/original/file-20171212-9422-1k9mr1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198727/original/file-20171212-9422-1k9mr1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198727/original/file-20171212-9422-1k9mr1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198727/original/file-20171212-9422-1k9mr1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198727/original/file-20171212-9422-1k9mr1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Women selling mangoes at a market in Gambella, a city south of Asosa on the eastern border of Ethiopia and Sudan, April 1985.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Germaine Greer. Photograph is image 18 of 24 on roll of negatives. University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, 2014.0044.00255, Ethiopia (a) negatives, roll 8 of 16. Copyright: University of Melbourne.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By May 14, Greer’s agent Gillon Aitken, sent Trelford Greer’s copy (two pieces, each more than 5,000 words) and 36 black and white prints, selected from 16 proof sheets. “I am not going to make a judgment on the pictures beyond saying that, from my amateur eye, they seem truthful and good,” Aitken wrote. “Regarding the text, I think this is Germaine at her best.”</p>
<p>The Observer decided not to run the articles. Greer said they did not want to be seen to endorse her (pro-government) views. “No one has suggested that I did not see what I said I saw,” Greer wrote. She had “ocular proof” in the form of hundreds of pictures on contact sheets “because I did as you suggested and bought an automatic camera and embarrassed myself hideously by using it”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198726/original/file-20171212-9410-1wplc9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198726/original/file-20171212-9410-1wplc9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198726/original/file-20171212-9410-1wplc9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198726/original/file-20171212-9410-1wplc9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198726/original/file-20171212-9410-1wplc9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198726/original/file-20171212-9410-1wplc9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198726/original/file-20171212-9410-1wplc9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198726/original/file-20171212-9410-1wplc9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Child in a doorway, Ethiopia, 1985.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Germaine Greer. Photograph is image 32 of 37 contained on a roll of negatives. University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, 2014.0044.00258, Ethiopia (a) negatives, roll 11 of 16.Copyright: University of Melbourne Archives. </span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Greer’s agent insisted the paper pay Greer’s expenses and a kill fee of £5000. On October 7, the paper issued her a cheque for £9609.90. Greer photocopied the cheque and inserted it into a folder in the Print Journalism series that she labelled “The True Story of Ethiopian resettlement, The New Worker. 10.i.86”. The New Worker is the weekly newspaper of the New Communist Party of Britain. It published seven of Greer’s photos and a long interview with her.</p>
<h2>‘A fantastic eye for a picture’</h2>
<p>Much of the material relating to Greer’s journalism in Ethiopia, including typescripts, ephemera, reporter’s notebooks, letters and the road map has been digitised and published on the University of Melbourne Archives catalogue. In all, there are 51 records relating to Greer’s reportage in Ethiopia and to her ongoing attempts to understand what this experience meant for her. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198667/original/file-20171211-9416-19joatf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198667/original/file-20171211-9416-19joatf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198667/original/file-20171211-9416-19joatf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=822&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198667/original/file-20171211-9416-19joatf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=822&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198667/original/file-20171211-9416-19joatf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=822&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198667/original/file-20171211-9416-19joatf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198667/original/file-20171211-9416-19joatf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198667/original/file-20171211-9416-19joatf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Proof sheet, 1 of 15, 24cm x 30.5cm black and white pictures taken by Germaine Greer while she was on assignment for The Observer.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, 2014.0044.00265, Ethiopia (b) proof sheets 1 of 15, 1985. Copyright: University of Melbourne.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Greer’s pictures are extraordinary. We digitised 15 rolls of negatives and the related proof sheets. Opaque analogue records – 561 pictures hidden on strips of 35mm black and white Kodak film – have been transformed into a series of powerful visual essays.</p>
<p>I have charted the journey described in Greer’s piece, Resettlement, Ethiopia 1985 (published in 1986 in an anthology, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118117.The_Madwoman_s_Underclothes">The Madwoman’s Underclothes</a>) with audio diaries, her road map and the photographs.</p>
<p>In time, I plan to work with Ethiopian communities to try and identify people in the photos. She appeared to have a good rapport with the people she met. On several rolls of film, Greer’s face pops up - she has handed over her camera; a nice gesture of reciprocity.</p>
<p>Greer was “embarrassed” about her photos. A snippet of audio from Ethiopia Resettlement captures her anxiety. “I’m not sure I get things in focus,” she tells her cassette recorder. “I mean in frame I should probably say.”</p>
<p>I’m not the only one who disagrees.</p>
<p>Between 1984 and 1987, Alex Graham was the program editor for Diverse Reports, a 30-minute analytical news program made for Channel 4. He now chairs the Scott Trust, owner of The Guardian and The Observer.</p>
<p>“I’ve only just now had time to properly look through some of the photographs,” Graham wrote to me in November. “They really are remarkable. She clearly has a fantastic eye for a picture!”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198669/original/file-20171211-9396-1rxv446.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198669/original/file-20171211-9396-1rxv446.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198669/original/file-20171211-9396-1rxv446.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198669/original/file-20171211-9396-1rxv446.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198669/original/file-20171211-9396-1rxv446.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198669/original/file-20171211-9396-1rxv446.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198669/original/file-20171211-9396-1rxv446.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198669/original/file-20171211-9396-1rxv446.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Joy and sorrow on arrival at Kone settlement site – two brothers are reunited, but another man has received bad news from home.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo and caption: Germaine Greer. University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, 2014.0044.00248, Ethiopia (a) negatives roll 1 of 16. Copyright: University of Melbourne. Photo first published New Worker, 1986.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Graham was not aware of Greer’s photography; he had worked with her on the television program. As program editor, his aim was to find provocative and iconoclastic ideas that would otherwise struggle to find a place on mainstream TV. “That was the origin of Germaine’s film,” he said.</p>
<p>The film argued that Ethiopia had become the “media famine” just as Vietnam became the “media war” and sought to counter allegations that the Refugee Resettlement Commission was forcibly removing people. It also wanted to show that Ethiopians were able to help themselves and not utterly dependent on Western acts of charity. </p>
<p>“We [Diverse Reports] made it in the aftermath of Band Aid and the beatification of Bob Geldof and its message was one which many people did not want to hear. But I felt there were important criticisms [in it] of Live Aid and the work of NGOs in Ethiopia which needed to be heard,” said Graham.</p>
<p>Graham’s hand-annotated outline for Diverse Reports - Ethiopia is 32 years old but the words still feel urgent and new. “A year ago, Ethiopia became a household word. The agony and humiliation of slow death by famine became public property,” the script reads.</p>
<p>“Ethiopians had to recognise that they had become beggars on a global scale. A new kind of sensationalism was born as photographers vied with each other to catch the most appalling, and hence the most moving, images. The typical famine victim was a child on the point of death, the typical Ethiopian adult was helpless, apathetic totally dependent on kindness from strangers.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198730/original/file-20171212-9404-qdf8f8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198730/original/file-20171212-9404-qdf8f8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198730/original/file-20171212-9404-qdf8f8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198730/original/file-20171212-9404-qdf8f8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198730/original/file-20171212-9404-qdf8f8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198730/original/file-20171212-9404-qdf8f8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198730/original/file-20171212-9404-qdf8f8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Donation of Australia Through World Food Program, Ethiopia 1985.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Germaine Greer. Photograph is image 3 of 37 contained on a roll of negatives. University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, 2014.0044.00258, Ethiopia (a) negatives, roll 11 of 16. Copyright: University of Melbourne.</span></span>
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<p>Greer’s photographs let us marvel at these strong people doing what they can to survive a disaster. The pictures invite reflection on the famine now engulfing East Africa and how little we are seeing of that.</p>
<p>As part of the project, I also tracked down veteran Canadian TV journalist Brian Stewart, who wrote a fan letter to Greer after watching her Ethiopia documentary. Stewart was the first foreign correspondent into Ethiopia and <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/alerting-the-world-to-famine-in-ethiopia">his initial report</a> spurred many famine aid projects, including Geldof’s Live Aid rock concerts in July 1985.</p>
<p>Stewart granted me permission to publish his letter to Greer on the proviso that I explain his views have changed. Although he admires Greer as “a superb and brave correspondent and commentator” he now considers the Resettlement Program that both he and Greer championed to be an “act of tragic repression”.</p>
<p>Greer did some of her best journalism in 1985. She started off in Cuba and interviewed revolutionary Vilma Espin. A recording of this encounter is held in the archive. Another recording Greer made on that trip, at the fourth congress of the Federation of Cuban Women, includes questions from a male voice – Espin’s brother-in-law, Fidel Castro. Between the April and September trips to Ethiopia, Greer bought her country property at The Mills, Essex. In October, Greer interviewed Italian philosopher Primo Levi in Turin and the resulting piece was published in The Literary Review. The astonishing conversation was conducted in Italian, a language she spoke fluently.</p>
<p>Greer’s legacy needs to be liberated from The Female Eunuch.</p>
<p><em>To see Greer’s pictures, type Ethiopia in to search this <a href="http://archives.unimelb.edu.au/">digitised records box</a>. You can read letters from Stewart, Graham, Greer and researcher Roy Ackerman by typing Diverse Reports into the same spot. A scholarly essay on Greer’s journalism will be published in Archives and Manuscripts in March.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88958/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachel A. Buchanan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>One of the least recognised aspects of Germaine Greer’s professional life is her international career as a journalist. It spans reportage in Vietnam and Ethiopia and interviews with figures such as Primo Levi.Rachel A. Buchanan, Curator, Germaine Greer Archive, University of Melbourne Archives, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/885542017-12-10T19:10:49Z2017-12-10T19:10:49ZA nursery of unconventional ideas – sex radicalism in Australia<p><em>Welcome to our series on sexual histories, in which our authors explore changing sexual mores from antiquity to today.</em></p>
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<p>In functioning democracies, yesterday’s radicalism is often today’s orthodoxy. Same-sex marriage was barely on the political agenda in the early years of this century. What a difference a few years can make.</p>
<p>But sometimes yesterday’s radicalism can still disturb the peace today. William Chidley was Australia’s most famous sex radical of a century ago. Chidley wandered the streets of Sydney in a thin tunic selling his booklet, The Answer, for a small fee and preaching his message to anyone willing to listen.</p>
<p>In The Answer, Chidley criticised “the crowbar method” – a none-too-subtle reference to a male erection – of intercourse. He argued that sex between and man and woman should occur only in the spring, when the woman’s vagina would act as a vacuum, drawing the flaccid penis inside. The present unnatural method of coition, Chidley argued, was ruining civilisation. His own method would save it.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197686/original/file-20171204-23009-1hk1m7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197686/original/file-20171204-23009-1hk1m7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197686/original/file-20171204-23009-1hk1m7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197686/original/file-20171204-23009-1hk1m7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197686/original/file-20171204-23009-1hk1m7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197686/original/file-20171204-23009-1hk1m7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197686/original/file-20171204-23009-1hk1m7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197686/original/file-20171204-23009-1hk1m7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A banner promoting one of Chidley’s talks.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Library of New South Wales</span></span>
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<p>Chidley was persecuted by officialdom, declared insane, condemned by doctors, and locked up in jail and an asylum. </p>
<p>But there was also a popular campaign in support of him. Feminists endorsed Chidley’s message of gentleness. Liberals approved his right to speak. Socialists detected a plot to suppress a fellow radical. Still the persecution continued until his death late in 1916.</p>
<p>When in 2013, an innovative young historian in the ABC’s social history unit, Catherine Freyne, made a radio documentary about Chidley, she hired an actor to dress up like him and once again declaim The Answer. How would Sydney react this time round?</p>
<p>Unlike the original Chidley, this one was not arrested. Indeed, among the preoccupied shoppers in the Pitt Street Mall, he attracted little attention at all. But Speakers’ Corner at the Domain was livelier. While the audience was apparently torn between puzzlement and amusement, Chidley was soon being <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/hindsight/good-sex---the-confessions-and-campaigns-of-w.j.-chidley/4597570">roundly abused</a> by an audience member. </p>
<p>Chidley was not the only sex radical in Australia, although he was, for a time, the most famous. Indeed, Australia has been something of a nursery of unconventional sexual ideas. Rosamund Benham was an early female graduate in medicine from the University of Adelaide who wrote pamphlets grappling with how modern couples could enjoy sex without the harmful effect of male “animal passion”. </p>
<p>In Sense About Sex and Circumvention (credited to “a Woman Doctor”) she turned to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coitus_reservatus">Karezza</a>, or “practicable continence”. A couple, she said, should cultivate their self-restraint by embracing each other in a nude state without actual “sexual connection”.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197702/original/file-20171205-22967-1uzy7i2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197702/original/file-20171205-22967-1uzy7i2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197702/original/file-20171205-22967-1uzy7i2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197702/original/file-20171205-22967-1uzy7i2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197702/original/file-20171205-22967-1uzy7i2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197702/original/file-20171205-22967-1uzy7i2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197702/original/file-20171205-22967-1uzy7i2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197702/original/file-20171205-22967-1uzy7i2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Henry Havelock Ellis.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>If they persisted, they would achieve “the highest delight through a thorough exchange of magnetism”. The idea, unsurprisingly, did not catch on, but her husband and one of his comrades were nonetheless prosecuted and sentenced to brief terms of imprisonment in 1906 — later overturned on appeal — for selling the booklets.</p>
<p>The most famous sexual scientist in the English-speaking world in the first half of the 20th century, Henry Havelock Ellis, had earlier spent four years in country New South Wales working as a teacher. By his own account, this was a critical time in his spiritual and intellectual formation. Ellis then returned to Britain to study medicine and make his name as the author of Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1910). </p>
<p>Chidley sought his friendship and support via a letter. Ellis responded with characteristic kindness, as well as drawing, for his own writings, on the unpublished autobiography Chidley sent him (eventually published as The Confessions of William James Chidley in 1977). </p>
<h2>A gender continuum</h2>
<p>Australia, meanwhile, continued to produce its own sex radicals, a few of them, like Ellis, globally influential. Norman Haire, a Sydney doctor, went to England in the 1920s and 1930s, making his fortune performing “rejuvenation” operations for wealthy clients, W.B. Yeats among them. </p>
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<span class="caption">Norman Haire pictured in the 1940s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>“Rejuvenation” — which might variously involve a testicle or ovary transplant, x-ray stimulation, or a vasectomy — would supposedly enhance sexual vigour. But Haire was also a pioneering birth controller, sex reformer and prolific author on diverse sexual subjects. He wrote a sex advice column in an Australian’s women’s magazine after returning to Sydney during the second world war.</p>
<p>When the sexual revolution unfolded in the 1960s and 1970s, Australian sex radicals were there again, with British-based expatriates prominent. Richard Neville’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1439793.Play_Power?ac=1&from_search=true">Play Power</a> (1970) celebrated the sexual libertarianism of the international counter-culture while Germaine Greer’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98532.The_Female_Eunuch">The Female Eunuch</a>, published in the same year, was a feminist landmark as well as a work of sexual libertarianism. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198229/original/file-20171207-11325-1jbuchc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198229/original/file-20171207-11325-1jbuchc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198229/original/file-20171207-11325-1jbuchc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198229/original/file-20171207-11325-1jbuchc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198229/original/file-20171207-11325-1jbuchc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198229/original/file-20171207-11325-1jbuchc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1031&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198229/original/file-20171207-11325-1jbuchc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1031&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198229/original/file-20171207-11325-1jbuchc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1031&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Germaine Greer in 1970.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germaine_Greer#/media/File:Germaine_Greer,_1972_(cropped).jpg">Nationaal Archief Fotocollectie Anefo/Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>A few of her ideas, while clothed in the blunt and sometimes Anglo-Saxon language of sexual revolution, belong to a lineage that in Australia stretched back at least to Chidley. “The man who is expected to have a rigid penis at all times,” Greer declared in an article in 1971, “is not any freer than the woman whose vagina is supposed to explode with the first thrust of such a penis.”</p>
<p>But it is perhaps with <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/dennis-altman-7746">Dennis Altman’s</a> sex radicalism that we move closest to the preoccupations of our present. Altman, in recent years an academic at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, was the author of the best-selling Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1971). It is rightly regarded as a pioneering work of gay scholarship and politics, but it is Altman’s insistence on what we might now call gender fluidity that now seems most striking and prescient.</p>
<p>Liberation, Altman suggested, would allow people to be truly human, instead of being trapped in acting out the roles prescribed by a patriarchal society to “men”, “women”, “heterosexuals” and “homosexuals”. </p>
<p>Drawing on Freud’s concept of “polymorphous perversity”, Altman went so far as to call the final chapter of his book The End of the Homosexual?, arguing provocatively that “the homosexual’s very existence is an affront to the way in which society defines roles, sexuality, and achievement”. In a truly liberated order, he added, “the homosexual as we know him or her may … disappear”. </p>
<p>Here we find, in an earlier form, the notion of a gender continuum that seems so disturbing to modern conservatives. The recent ordeal of the Safe Schools program, and the terms in which the conservative Christian lobby campaigned against same-sex marriage, can be seen in a new perspective once we have this longer history in view.</p>
<h2>Ordinary, open-minded citizens</h2>
<p>One reason the authorities dealt sternly with Chidley was his habit of addressing audiences that included women and children. The fear — whether sincere or concocted — that children would be damaged by exposure to “progressive” or “radical” sexual ideas has been resilient. For many years, it was a pillar of opposition to sex education in schools. It has been at the heart of the anti-Safe Schools campaign and figured in the unlikely context of the marriage equality debate.</p>
<p>The association of sex radicalism with ambitions to transform society has also aroused fear and hostility. The wider implications of Chidley’s scheme for male sexual privilege were one reason he attracted the support of feminists and the hostility of powerful men. Similarly, the Australian Christian Lobby and the Murdoch press mobilised hostility to Safe Schools on the basis that it was supposedly seeking to impose radical changes to the gender order, as well as to advance a radical socialist or Marxist agenda.</p>
<p>What the wider public thinks of these often confusing culture wars is not easy to fathom. A majority clearly rejected the effort to link marriage equality to the corruption of children. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2017/09/moral-panic-101">Benjamin Law has reported</a>, Safe Schools, in one form or another, survives on the life-support offered by state Labor governments. Many schools are taking their own steps – often with the help of the Safe Schools program – to assist students dealing with the challenges of negotiating sexual and gender identity.</p>
<p>A century ago, while officialdom persecuted Chidley, many ordinary Australians supported him as a sincere battler who deserved a hearing. Today, in these matters as in so many other aspects of Australian life, ordinary citizens sceptical of hyperbole and practical in their concerns are often providing more dynamic leadership than those they elect to lead them.</p>
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<p><em>Tomorrow: sex in convict Australia</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88554/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Frank Bongiorno does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From William Chidley to Germaine Greer Australia has spawned more than its fair share of radical thinkers about sex, and Australians have often embraced their ideas, despite persecution by officialdom.Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/814552017-07-31T19:53:41Z2017-07-31T19:53:41ZSpilling blood in art, a tale of tampons, Trump and taboos<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180284/original/file-20170731-9675-1idv67s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Part of Jordan Eagles's Blood Equality – Illuminations, 2017, an installation that uses imaged blood on plexiglass.
</span> </figcaption></figure><p>When <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/08/politics/donald-trump-cnn-megyn-kelly-comment/index.html">Donald Trump said of journalist Megyn Kelly</a>, “you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever”, the American artist Sarah Levy responded by painting a <a href="https://www.sarahlevyart.com/#/bloodytrump/">portrait of him</a> using her own menstrual blood.</p>
<p>Setting aside, (as if one could), the overt misogyny implicit in Trump’s comments, his views amplify the anxiety the open body creates – the destabilisation of the intact body of the viewer, a momentary collapse of self.</p>
<p>Artistic freedom is given so as to encourage such exploration. Art operates as a laboratory for ideas, it can be radical, political and sometimes deeply confronting; no more so than when art confronts audiences with bodily fluids most often hidden from view. To paint with menstrual blood is a provocation. It asks that we see things differently, and presents us with what is usually unseen.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"644129469800841216"}"></div></p>
<p>But not all blood is equal. When blood is spilled it is generally presumed to be male, frequently in the name of the nation, and spent in some heroic act or another - largely on foreign shores, commemorated but rarely seen. Blood has its place – contained, controlled and out of view. </p>
<p>When blood escapes the body or laboratory, it is particularly disturbing and unruly. We speak of spilt blood as contaminated, infected, impure. Controlled blood-letting is a symbol of masculinity; menstruation a sign of abjection, and gay men’s blood is to be feared, to say nothing of the anxiety of intermingling blood between people, races and species. To work with blood can raise ethical issues, but is equally an opportunity to shed light on the source of many prejudices and misconceptions.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-whats-actually-in-our-blood-75066">Explainer: what's actually in our blood?</a>
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<p>The feminist art movement of the 1960s and 1970s took aim at these entrenched religious and societal norms, and presented audiences with menstrual blood: both as the subject of art works and the material with which artists worked. Feminist artworks that included blood acquired their potency because of its taboo status. Blood was dangerously out of place. </p>
<p>Before Tracey Emin’s blood soaked tampon appeared in her Turner Prize nominated work My Bed, Judy Chicago produced <a href="https://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/2403">Menstruation Bathroom</a> as part of Womenshouse (Los Angeles, 1972) an iconic feminist art installation. The bathroom contained a rubbish bin with bloodstained sanitary pads and tampons as “unmistakeable marks of our animality”. Carolee Schneeman’s <a href="http://feministlibrary.tumblr.com/post/116368435045/carolee-schneemann-blood-work-diary-detail">Blood Work Diary</a> (New York, 1972) consisted of a series of bloodstained tissues blotted with blood from one menstrual cycle, as a response to a male partner’s revulsion at the sight of menstrual blood.</p>
<p>These artists sought to make visible the quotidian blood spilling of which we do not speak, enacting the mantra of the feminist movement of the time: “the personal is political”. As Germaine Greer famously said: “If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood - if it makes you sick, you’ve got a long way to go, baby”. As we see from Levy’s portrait of Trump, societies’ taboos continue to imbue art using menstrual blood with threatening power.</p>
<h2>A destabilising of self</h2>
<p>The ability of the presence of blood and the open body to destabilise one’s sense of self is often utilised by male artists to instil a sense of vulnerability. Franko B’s performance work I Miss You, in the Tate’s Turbine Hall (London, 2003), saw him naked with blood flowing from cuts to his arms and seeping into a canvas covered runway. Largely because of our long standing gendered perceptions of bodies and blood, when male artists bleed, both they and their work tend to be queered, as if “real men” do not bleed. </p>
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<p>And so it was that the HIV-AIDS epidemic in western gay communities produced its own form of gendered crisis and diverse cultural and artistic expressions. The blood borne virus also fundamentally changed the way blood was viewed. If women’s menstrual blood was considered taboo, gay men’s blood was considered lethal.</p>
<p>Suddenly the metaphors of blood, pure and impure, clean and unclean, became frightening literal. The spectre of HIV-positive blood pervaded political and social conversations, and the mere sight of blood in association with the gay community set off hysterical reactions.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/restricting-gay-men-from-donating-blood-is-discriminatory-61021">Restricting gay men from donating blood is discriminatory</a>
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</em>
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<p>The spectre of blood was ubiquitous during this period, yet ill-informed anxieties around the infection ensured that blood itself was largely absent in art. One exception was Ron Athey’s performance piece, Four Scenes in a Harsh Life, performed at the Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis USA 1994). </p>
<p>Completely fictionalised accounts of the event circulated, with one report describing HIV-positive blood being thrown at the audience. Athey is HIV+, and blood did flow, but it was that of his HIV negative collaborator, Darryl Carlton—aka Divinity Fudge. The erroneous media reactions fuelled the psychic transmission of the virus, if not literally infecting others, at the very least, creating a fear that bodies might silently and secretly be contaminated by mere proximity. </p>
<p>Such fears persist, in spite of scientific knowledge that the virus can only be transmitted intravenously, through sharing needles or blood transfusions, and unprotected sex. It is these phobias that the German artist Basse Stittgen addresses when he creates objects and vessels out of blood products. He challenges audiences to consider whether they would drink out of, or even hold these objects if they were made of blood from HIV or Hepatitis positive donors.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180282/original/file-20170731-19115-dwyx32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180282/original/file-20170731-19115-dwyx32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180282/original/file-20170731-19115-dwyx32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180282/original/file-20170731-19115-dwyx32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180282/original/file-20170731-19115-dwyx32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180282/original/file-20170731-19115-dwyx32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180282/original/file-20170731-19115-dwyx32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180282/original/file-20170731-19115-dwyx32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Blood Objects, Basse Stittgen (The Netherlands, Germany) Objects made from animal and human blood, 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the artist</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Mixing bodily fluids is also taboo: Andres Serrano’s photographs of semen and blood most notably made this connection between life and death in his Bodily Fluids series in the late 1980s.</p>
<p>After his son Lucas’s birth, meanwhile, <a href="http://marcquinn.com/artworks/single/lucas">artist Mark Quinn created a sculpture </a>out of the mother Georgia Byng’s placenta. The work challenges us to consider where the mother and child separate, where bodies begin and end. Stelarc and Nina Sellers asked similar questions with their work <a href="http://stelarc.org/?catID=20245">Blender</a>, which mixed both their blood and extracted fat.</p>
<p>But what of interspecies blood mingling? May the Horse Live in Me!, a collaborative project by Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin presents us with this very provocation. Over time, Laval-Jeantet built up an immunity to horse blood, sufficient to enable her to be injected with horse blood plasma as part of an experiment that they describe as a “foray into human/animal ‘blood-sisterhood’.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180283/original/file-20170731-19115-14m6a1k.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180283/original/file-20170731-19115-14m6a1k.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180283/original/file-20170731-19115-14m6a1k.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180283/original/file-20170731-19115-14m6a1k.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180283/original/file-20170731-19115-14m6a1k.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180283/original/file-20170731-19115-14m6a1k.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180283/original/file-20170731-19115-14m6a1k.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180283/original/file-20170731-19115-14m6a1k.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">May the Horse Live in Me! Art Orienté Objet; Marion Laval-Jeantet & Benoît Mangin (France)
Film and relics of original performance, 2011.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the artists</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This work can also be seen as a response to the hubris of the anthropocene, the implicit assumption that humans are something other than animal. Ultimately this seems to be the common thread in these artworks: each asks questions of the ways in which humans are gendered, categorised and deemed separate from animals and from each other.</p>
<p>An exhibition at <a href="https://melbourne.sciencegallery.com/">the Science Gallery</a> at the University of Melbourne, Blood: Attract and Repel, addresses our ambivalent attitudes to blood. Laval-Jeantet and Mangin’s work is represented in it, as is Stittgen’s Blood Objects. </p>
<p>The Hotham Street Ladies (a collective based in Australia, UK and Berlin) present in the show what might be considered as an hysterical homage to Chicago’s Menstruation Bathroom. Vivid icing and confectionary is used to create menstrual murals in two toilet cubicles. There is no real blood this time but perhaps the work is all the more abject through its excess.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180280/original/file-20170730-15340-zepu50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180280/original/file-20170730-15340-zepu50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180280/original/file-20170730-15340-zepu50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180280/original/file-20170730-15340-zepu50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180280/original/file-20170730-15340-zepu50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180280/original/file-20170730-15340-zepu50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1107&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180280/original/file-20170730-15340-zepu50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1107&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180280/original/file-20170730-15340-zepu50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1107&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">You Beaut, Hotham Street Ladies, (Australia, UK and Germany) Installation, 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the artist</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Blood is also absent in Irish artist John O’Shea’s <a href="https://www.prote.in/journal/articles/black-market-pudding">Black Market Pudding</a>. He had hoped to produce a sausage using blood drawn from a living pig, but at the time of writing this is apparently a step too far for Australia, with no farmer willing to provide a pig to be bled. </p>
<p>The work has been produced elsewhere - highlighting how our industrial, legal and ethical frameworks make it easier to slaughter an animal than bleed one, but keep it alive. </p>
<p><em>Blood: Attract and Repel opens on August 2 and runs until October 5 <a href="https://melbourne.sciencegallery.com/">at the Science Gallery</a> at University of Melbourne.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81455/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kate MacNeill works for the University of Melbourne with which the Science Gallery is affiliated. She has received fundng from the Office of Learning and Teaching. </span></em></p>Contemporary artists from Judy Chicago to Stelarc have made art from blood. And an exhibition at Melbourne’s new Science Gallery addresses our ambivalent attitudes to this life-giving fluid.Kate MacNeill, Head of Art History, and Arts and Cultural Management, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/746932017-03-23T19:15:54Z2017-03-23T19:15:54ZFriday essay: reading Germaine Greer’s mail<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161747/original/image-20170321-5405-14zwnb1.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Penny Gulliver wrote to Germaine Greer several times over two decades</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, 2014.0042.00350, Correspondence with Penny Gulliver</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Between 1968 and 1969, ensconced in London’s legendary bohemian flophouse <a href="http://www.shadyoldlady.com/location.php?loc=1082">The Pheasantry</a>, Germaine Greer wrote a book that would change thousands of women’s lives. Scrawled in pen across her statement of intent, under the title The Female Eunuch Editorial, is the sentence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My book on women, for which I have not yet devised a title, will be a collection of essays about what it is like to be a woman in 1969. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Though it’s unlikely she knew it at the time, the publication of <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98532.The_Female_Eunuch">The Female Eunuch</a> would give birth to a shadow work that would document the inner lives and experiences of women and men from across generations. </p>
<p>This shadow work would eventually become the <a href="http://gallery.its.unimelb.edu.au/imu/imu.php?request=multimedia&irn=70448">General Correspondence</a> series of the <a href="http://archives.unimelb.edu.au/germainegreer">Germaine Greer Archive</a>. From the initial avalanche of mail triggered by The Female Eunuch grew a collection of 50 years of letters, emails, faxes, telegrams and newsletters from academics, schoolchildren, radicals and housewives all over the world, now stored in 120 grey, acid-free boxes at the University of Melbourne Archives. </p>
<p>The collection offers a powerful, often amusing, sometimes perplexing glimpse into the lives of the women (and men) affected by her work and drawn into her orbit, as well as the many faces of Greer herself – academic, feminist, provocateur, confidant.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161748/original/image-20170321-5384-hajlfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161748/original/image-20170321-5384-hajlfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161748/original/image-20170321-5384-hajlfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161748/original/image-20170321-5384-hajlfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161748/original/image-20170321-5384-hajlfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161748/original/image-20170321-5384-hajlfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161748/original/image-20170321-5384-hajlfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161748/original/image-20170321-5384-hajlfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Greer in her office in Essex.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photographer: Nathan Gallagher</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Delving into these records is a daunting and often disorienting experience. Archivists don’t just collect records, they collect record-keeping systems. One of the guiding principles of our profession is that of original order – the concept that there is information and meaning implicit in the order and method in which records have been maintained. </p>
<p>Germaine’s organising principle was egalitarian: correspondence is filed alphabetically by surname, organisation or project, regardless of date, subject or significance. A system such as this has obvious practical benefits for someone as busy as Greer, juggling television appearances, publishing deals and public lecturing, as well as attempting to answer personal mail from a devoted readership. However, when we read the series as a document – as an archivist must in the process of cataloguing – the effect is dizzying.</p>
<h2>Grass-roots feminists and gardeners</h2>
<p>Letters from grass-roots feminists hoping to bring about the sexual revolution in 1971 sit beside those from Essex gardeners advising on the best way to protect apple trees from rabbits. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161751/original/image-20170321-5377-1l6kq7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161751/original/image-20170321-5377-1l6kq7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161751/original/image-20170321-5377-1l6kq7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161751/original/image-20170321-5377-1l6kq7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161751/original/image-20170321-5377-1l6kq7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161751/original/image-20170321-5377-1l6kq7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161751/original/image-20170321-5377-1l6kq7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161751/original/image-20170321-5377-1l6kq7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sean Connery: requested her phone number.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Eon Productions/imdb</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A letter from Sean Connery in 1972 requesting Greer’s phone number “… as I have an idea for a project which could be interesting and fun” is sandwiched between theatre invitations and autograph requests. I like to imagine that the arrangement also has a touch of the diehard Marxist, giving equal prominence to noted author Margaret Atwood and Joe Public from Manchester.</p>
<p>Inside these files, time is displaced. There is a sense of disorientation while browsing through a folder and moving from printed emails to rapidly fading thermal fax paper, to telegrams and carbon copies. </p>
<p>Decades of changes in addresses, administrative assistants and literary agents are mashed together as we jump from a basement flat in Gloucester Walk, to the Tulsa Centre for the Study of Women’s Literature, to the rural solitude of Greer’s farmhouse in Essex and its legion of dogs, geese, doves and goldfish. </p>
<p>So, too, does Greer’s voice shift through these different periods. In the 1970s, she frequently answers unsolicited letters at length, sometimes entering into detailed correspondence on issues such as women’s liberation, abortion rights and contraception.</p>
<p>To a 17-year-old Australian girl called Penny, reeling from her encounter with The Female Eunuch, Greer writes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is a contribution which only you can make, and only which can give you happiness. Be true to yourself, dear Penny, and be assured of my regard for you.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Penny went on to write a women’s self-defence handbook and has a black belt in kung fu. </p>
<p>A 54-year-old man writes asking Greer for suggestions of three to four books worth reading at his public library. She responds by suggesting he set up a second-hand book exchange and sends him a parcel of her favourites, including <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2175.Madame_Bovary">Madame Bovary</a>.</p>
<h2>New York and Tuscany</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161977/original/image-20170322-31213-1abpe8c.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161977/original/image-20170322-31213-1abpe8c.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161977/original/image-20170322-31213-1abpe8c.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161977/original/image-20170322-31213-1abpe8c.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161977/original/image-20170322-31213-1abpe8c.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161977/original/image-20170322-31213-1abpe8c.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161977/original/image-20170322-31213-1abpe8c.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161977/original/image-20170322-31213-1abpe8c.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Polaroid of Germaine (left) c.1967.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Collection, 2014.0042.00523, Correspondence Emilio Manaru</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To good friends, Greer often writes in a free-association, beat-style ramble, breaking off to bake some bread in the massive stone oven that served as the foundation of her house in rural Tuscany. She returns in the evening with an anecdote about whatever particularly creative way her cat Boogaloo had courted death that week. </p>
<p>We are transported to the stone house Pianelli in Cortona where she beseeches friends to come and stay to escape the conservatism of Tory England during the OZ magazine obscenity trial in 1971 and, later, Thatcherism. </p>
<p>Greer tears around (and sometimes off) mountain roads in a Triumph convertible and reads <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3458106-the-thornbirds?from_search=true">The Thornbirds</a> in between tapping what would become <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1135191.Sex_and_Destiny?from_search=true">Sex and Destiny</a> into an ancient, filthy manual typewriter borrowed from Newsweek’s Rome office. </p>
<p>This was her fortress of solitude among the madness of the ’70s and ’80s. To a neighbour she writes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is what I came for – the sereno, a kind of weather so clear that I can hear the shepherd singing to his sheep in a valley two miles away. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Her joy is palpable in these flimsy pink and yellow ochre carbon copies of her descriptions of the state of her garden and the gathering of wild herbs. Letters written during her whirlwind 1971 tour of the United States provide the other side of the picture, betraying a horrified fascination with American politics and culture. </p>
<p>A letter to lawyer and civil rights activist <a href="http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Ka-M/Kennedy-Florynce.html">Florynce Kennedy</a> gives an account of staying at the Hotel Chelsea and having dinner in a singlet and clogs at La Grenouille with Peace Corps founder <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/01/the-good-works-of-sargent-shriver/69677/">Sargent Shriver</a>.</p>
<p>To Richard Neville in 1971 she writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A right-wing revolution in America could mean the end of the world; can that be what Edward Heath is preparing for? Sterile screwnoses rule us all. I am deeply afraid again like I was when I was a little girl and the war was only just out of sight. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>From New York, she tells her publisher Sonny Mehta:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Jerry Rubin was trying to persuade me to come and live – come and die more like.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>A talismanic figure</h2>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162099/original/image-20170322-31180-1sa1ur5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162099/original/image-20170322-31180-1sa1ur5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162099/original/image-20170322-31180-1sa1ur5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162099/original/image-20170322-31180-1sa1ur5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162099/original/image-20170322-31180-1sa1ur5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162099/original/image-20170322-31180-1sa1ur5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162099/original/image-20170322-31180-1sa1ur5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162099/original/image-20170322-31180-1sa1ur5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Queen Victoria: one writer wanted her to try on the royal underpants.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>From the ’90s onward, Greer finds less and less time for correspondence. She sends her thanks for a kind word scrawled on a postcard of a kangaroo or a printout form response apologising that she is unable to respond personally.</p>
<p>Despite this, she still treats it as something like a sacred duty to respond in some way to those who have approached her.</p>
<p>Greer’s <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/3326381/Country-notebook-a-fond-farewell.html">Country Notebook</a> column in The Sunday Telegraph, begun in 1999, resulted in an extraordinary amount of mail from old metalworkers keen to explain to her the process of forging a carbon-steel knife and Essex gardeners sending snapshots of English bluebells in the wild. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162098/original/image-20170322-31194-9u1ba1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162098/original/image-20170322-31194-9u1ba1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162098/original/image-20170322-31194-9u1ba1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162098/original/image-20170322-31194-9u1ba1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162098/original/image-20170322-31194-9u1ba1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162098/original/image-20170322-31194-9u1ba1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162098/original/image-20170322-31194-9u1ba1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162098/original/image-20170322-31194-9u1ba1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Timothy Leary: ‘It’s about time we connected’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia commmons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To many of her correspondents, Greer seems to have been a talismanic figure able to bring scrutiny and justice to their own personal cause. One correspondent writes regarding the accused English witch <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/stoke/content/articles/2006/03/03/molly_leigh_witch_profile_feature.shtml">Molly Leigh</a> who died in 1746. When the people believed her spirit continued to haunt their town she was reburied facing north-south, at a right angle to the other graves in the cemetery. </p>
<p>Greer’s petitioner writes to recruit her to exhume and rebury Molly Leigh facing east-west (Greer’s response: Let Molly Lie). </p>
<p>A woman who runs a private museum in Chelsea writes several times offering to let Greer try on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/11/pants-queen-victorias-underwear-sold-for-12000-at-auction">Queen Victoria’s underpants</a>.</p>
<p>Psychologist and writer Timothy Leary, a man Richard Nixon once described as “the most dangerous man in America”, writes from Sweden in exile:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve loved you long. It’s about time we connected.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Each believes in a mythic Germaine Greer. Most often, though, she just wants to be left alone.</p>
<h2>She kept it all</h2>
<p>The fascinating thing is that Greer has kept it all. Every letter telling her to go back to Australia and leave the queen alone, every handwritten unified theory, has made its way into a carefully alphabetised file and been kept for posterity. </p>
<p>At first, the drive to keep everything seems baffling given the sheer volume of material and bizarre nature of some of the requests. And in her newspaper columns in The Daily Telegraph and The Independent, Greer has written repeatedly about the strain of answering her mail. In a 1995 column, she declared: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>all those demands for my favourite poem, recipe, book, colour, into my big new shiny black garbage bin. No more filing and cross-referencing. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Of course, rambling letters from strangers continued to be filed, though the cross-referencing may have ceased.</p>
<p>Perhaps as an English scholar, well practised in the use of manuscript sources, Greer has an appreciation for another concept central to archival theory – integrity.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161743/original/image-20170321-5377-ezs4h8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161743/original/image-20170321-5377-ezs4h8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161743/original/image-20170321-5377-ezs4h8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161743/original/image-20170321-5377-ezs4h8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161743/original/image-20170321-5377-ezs4h8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161743/original/image-20170321-5377-ezs4h8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161743/original/image-20170321-5377-ezs4h8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161743/original/image-20170321-5377-ezs4h8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A postcard from Margaret Atwood. Photographer: Nathan Gallagher.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of the modern patriarchs of archival science, Sir Hilary Jenkinson, has defined the role of the archivist as a calling: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>His Creed, the Sanctity of Evidence; his Task, the Conservation of every scrap of Evidence attaching to the Documents committed to his charge. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>I can see more than a little of Greer in this definition. Across the archive we see retrospective attempts by her to complete the record, including employing an AV archivist at one point to document and source footage of the hundreds of television and radio appearances she has made over the years.</p>
<h2>Coming together</h2>
<p>The archive as a whole has become something of a labyrinth for we archivists as we attempt to capture the complexity of its relationships. While we have biographies and Greer’s published works to draw on, there is much that is undocumented beyond this archive, perhaps existing only in Greer’s own memory. </p>
<p>Cryptic nicknames and references to places, people and events encountered early in records may be made clear 50 boxes later. Red herrings constantly present themselves – is “Rennie” Count Lorenzo Passerini or South African novelist Rennie Airth? Does “Fed” refer to Federico Fellini?</p>
<p>Attempting to describe the range of topics of discussion within a single file using subject headings leads to complex chunks of text that read like concrete poetry.</p>
<p>The description for the folder Correspondence SIN reads: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Chelsea Flower Show; Apples; Charoset; Seder; Birds as pets; Terminal care; The Female Eunuch; Prohibited books – South Africa; Bumblebees; Feminist films; Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady (documentary); Paraskeva Clark; Women comedians; Sex and Destiny; Women’s underwear; The Sunday Times; Vietnam War 1961-1975; People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice; Taxicab drivers; Country Notebook (The Telegraph); Animal welfare; Dogs; The Guardian; Man-woman relationships; Rape victims – Bangladesh; Bangladesh – History – Revolution, 1971; Abortion; Advertising; Alka-Seltzer; Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme; Homes and haunts; Travel. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In a column about her biographer Christine Wallace, Greer once stated that her archive “… will take five years of genuine commitment to read”. One year in, I think this is a conservative estimate.</p>
<p>The Female Eunuch Editorial closes with a quote from Rainer Marie Rilke: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed from all false feeling and aversion, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbours and will come together as human beings. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Perhaps it’s sentimentality, but having waded through the compressed evidence of so many lives, I feel that in some small, symbolic way Greer’s correspondence achieves this. Her work can bring together novelists and gardeners, academics, prisoners and housewives, perhaps not always in agreement, but in conversation.</p>
<p><em>The Germaine Greer Archive will be accessible to researchers from March 27. Digitised items are available from <a href="http://archives.unimelb.edu.au/">The University of Melbourne Archives catalogue</a>. To hear Germaine’s thoughts on the archive, video of the public event Germaine Greer Meets the Archivists is available <a href="https://youtu.be/LOcMazsj6OQ">online</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74693/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lachlan Glanville does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Fifty years of correspondence is stored at the Germaine Greer archive. It ranges across topics as diverse as US politics, grassroots feminism, gardening and Queen Victoria’s underpants.Lachlan Glanville, Assistant Archivist, Germaine Greer Archive, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/741882017-03-07T12:52:57Z2017-03-07T12:52:57ZI’m an ‘Essex girl’ – and here’s why such terms need to be dropped<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/159755/original/image-20170307-14973-kwta8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Thanks for nothing OED.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of ITV</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Tasmania. It’s not at the ends of the Earth, but it was the last place I thought the pejorative term “<a href="https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/essex-girl">Essex girl</a>” would find me. When my working-class Colchester childhood came up in conversation with an elderly male university lecturer, his sideways wink and lecherous grimace suggested that even at the southernmost tip of Australia one couldn’t escape the misogynistic connotation associated with the moniker.</p>
<p>With that one gesture I believed all the professional and academic credibility I’d established as a mature university student was peeled away. What was left was the imposter of a woman defined by the hostile double whammy of class and gender stereotypes.</p>
<p>Variously defined as an unintelligent, sexually promiscuous woman with garish fashion sense, lacking in social graces and standing, the term “Essex girl” prominently entered the lexicon in the late 20th century with the popularity of television shows such as Birds of a Feather and, later, The Only Way is Essex (TOWIE).</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/159754/original/image-20170307-14976-11rdixn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/159754/original/image-20170307-14976-11rdixn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/159754/original/image-20170307-14976-11rdixn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/159754/original/image-20170307-14976-11rdixn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/159754/original/image-20170307-14976-11rdixn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/159754/original/image-20170307-14976-11rdixn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/159754/original/image-20170307-14976-11rdixn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">TOWIE: how stereotypes become fixed in people’s minds.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mr Pics/Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While it could be said that the use of the term is “jovial”, the associated jokes and jibes underpin a misogynistic rhetoric descriptive of women who have social aspiration and mobility coupled with a command of their own sexuality. In isolation, these behaviours are often met with snobbery and derision but together they are perceived to deliver a dangerous cocktail of self mastery, rejection of social convention, independence and increasing consumer power.</p>
<p>Historically, women who stepped outside gender and (heaven forbid!) social convention were seen to be in need of discipline to reel in their behaviour. In a piece on the “Essex girl” phenomenon from 2001 – which just goes to show how long we’ve been putting up with this – Germaine Greer points out that forthright women are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/mar/05/gender">embedded in the fabric of Essex history</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Essex was always noted for its ducking stools and scolds’ bridles, and for “witches”, which is just another name for uncontrollable women.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>One might suggest that the recent attempt to have the <a href="http://www.motherhub.co.uk/campaign/2016/10/6/i-am-an-essex-girl">term removed from the dictionary</a> is an overreaction to a “jovial” term that means little in reality. It isn’t.</p>
<h2>Words matter</h2>
<p>There is a body of research that identifies that discriminatory practices, particularly in the labour market, can be <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/214435/rrep664.pdf">linked to residence and background</a>. The origin of an applicant can trigger bias, regardless of the stated skills and capacities outlined in written applications. It follows, then, that similar overt discriminatory practices may be applied to women who carry with them a negative “Essex girl” stereotype simply by virtue of their background or residence. While overt discrimination of this nature may, on occasion and with evidence, be challenged, it is the implicit bias (unconscious, first thoughts and actions) that terms such as “Essex girl” perpetuate. This is far more insidious.</p>
<p>Language is a magical and powerful thing. It gives us the capacity to manifest thoughts and ideas, and to develop a shared meaning. Words are <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19487021">invested with value and intent</a>. If one is aware of the disparaging definition of a term such as “Essex girl” then the characteristics will be applied to the individual to whom it is directed. The stereotype allows us to quickly, and often erroneously, apply understanding about an individual based on a few selected characteristics. That understanding then informs thinking and behaviour.</p>
<p>Work undertaken by <a href="http://aura.abdn.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2164/3526/Martin_PS_inpress.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">Dr Doug Martin and colleagues</a> suggests that as stereotypes become used more frequently, attributes become more polarised. They deliver meaning that is far more binary – good/bad, positive/negative. The highly simplified bits of information invested in terms such as “Essex girl” become more readily identifiable and entrenched.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"816994683117273089"}"></div></p>
<p>In the instant that lecturer leered and winked, the unstated meaning of the term was shared. By virtue of my social and geographical background I was no longer an educated professional woman undertaking a university education, I was a promiscuous bimbo reaching above my station and disparaged for seeking social mobility. I felt belittled and aggrieved. The words had allowed him to put me “back in my place” and, while it may be said that it was not his intent, that was the result. If I had come from Oxford, say, I doubt his behaviour would have been the same.</p>
<p>As International Women’s Day rolls around again, we are offered an opportunity to reflect on how women fit into the world, our achievements, contributions and our future.</p>
<p>Invariably we will see reports about <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/datablog/2016/nov/10/equal-pay-day-how-the-uks-gender-gap-in-earnings-has-shifted-over-the-years">the gender gap</a>, and the continued lack of female representation in certain areas of society (in the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/mar/25/all-time-high-uk-women-boardroom-members">boardroom</a>, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/women-underrepresented-at-all-levels-in-british-politics-9695320.html">in politics</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/women-leadership-blog/2014/oct/20/women-science-engineering-under-representation">in the sciences</a>, for example), and we will make a case as to why, as a community, we need to keep discussing and questioning the status quo. </p>
<p>If we are to make more rapid advances towards equality in pay and status, we need to retire the idea that terms such as “Essex girl” are only meant in jest. Continuing to entertain the use of erroneous and disparaging terms such as this only perpetuates the bias and hostility.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74188/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Theresa Simpkin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It’s time we retired this misogynistic stereotype.Theresa Simpkin, Senior Lecturer, Leadership and Corporate Education, Anglia Ruskin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/598802016-05-26T20:16:14Z2016-05-26T20:16:14ZFriday essay: How Shakespeare helped shape Germaine Greer’s feminist masterpiece<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123737/original/image-20160524-11032-kyaay1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A typescript for the Female Eunuch with photo of a young Greer on a book.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Germaine Greer archive: 2014.0038.0001. Picture Nathan Gallagher, copyright University of Melbourne</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>What happens if you read <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98532.The_Female_Eunuch">The Female Eunuch</a> not for evidence of feminism but for evidence of Shakespeare?</p>
<p>As celebrations of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death intensify, I have been cataloguing a key series in the Germaine Greer Archive and these two seemingly unrelated events collided to inspire the random question that opens this article. </p>
<p>I decided to take my silly question seriously. This article explains why and discusses how reading The Female Eunuch for evidence of the Bard reveals a new kind of book, one that is deeply informed by more than a decade of full-time traditional humanities study, most of it devoted to early English literature, especially the work of Shakespeare.</p>
<p>“Series 2014.0044 early years academic, performance, writing and personal papers” is a small but significant collection of records that sits around the middle of the 487 boxes of the Greer Archive in the University of Melbourne Archives store. The university bought <a href="http://archives.unimelb.edu.au/germainegreer">Greer’s archive</a> in 2013.</p>
<p>It includes drafts of The Female Eunuch, annotated typescripts for Greer’s early journalism for underground magazines like <a href="http://ro.uow.edu.au/ozlondon/">OZ </a>and Suck and many letters, including Italian-language letters between Greer and Federico Fellini, letters between Greer and Marsha Rowe, the co-founder of <a href="http://www.bl.uk/spare-rib">Spare Rib</a>, letters between Greer and Australian abortion rights activist Julia Freebury and tantalising one-offs, such as notes from Denis Altman, Ann Curthoys, Christopher Hitchens and Warren Beatty.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123694/original/image-20160524-19272-j46kp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123694/original/image-20160524-19272-j46kp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123694/original/image-20160524-19272-j46kp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123694/original/image-20160524-19272-j46kp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123694/original/image-20160524-19272-j46kp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123694/original/image-20160524-19272-j46kp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123694/original/image-20160524-19272-j46kp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123694/original/image-20160524-19272-j46kp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer, 1970.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But the earliest papers in the series – and the archive itself – are lecture notes and essays from 1957 and 1958, when Greer was a tall Melbourne teenager in her second and third years at the University of Melbourne. Greer was doing a BA majoring in English and French. She graduated with an honours degree in 1959.</p>
<p>About half of the series, eight boxes in all, contain Greer’s university notes from Melbourne (1956-1959), the University of Sydney (1960-1963), the University of Cambridge (1964-1967) and from Warwick University where she lectured in English from 1967 until 1973.</p>
<p>The extent of these records was surprising and, I’ll admit, a bit annoying. I wanted to get to the juicy stuff, like the <a href="http://www.keithmorrisphoto.co.uk/germaine-greer-may-1971-suck-magazine-editorial/">Suck</a> correspondence, but here I was wading through dozens of folders of notes about 16th and 17th-century men who wrote plays, poems, sermons and pamphlets: Shakespeare; Lyly; Browne; Sidney; Spenser; Nashe; Jonson; Webster; Dryden; Donne; Sir John Davies; Samuel Daniel; Butler. </p>
<p>Once I had got through the individual blokes, there were many more folders about Renaissance literature, Jacobean drama and, of course, William Shakespeare’s early comedies, Greer’s special area of interest. Her PhD, The Ethic of Love and Marriage in Shakespeare’s Early Comedies, was awarded in 1968. She had studied four of his plays: Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and Love’s Labour’s Lost.</p>
<p>Some of the papers were ripped, stained and fragile, but they were safe now in numbered, acid-free folders and archival boxes, on shelves in a climate-controlled store. I prised out rusty staples with my little forked gadget and the staples fell apart in my hands, staining my skin with orange-brown dust. The papers were typed and handwritten and Greer’s writing varied greatly, moving from an ornate sort of copperplate to scrawled longhand and dense, tiny, insane portions of notes all in capital letters.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123693/original/image-20160524-11020-2fasmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123693/original/image-20160524-11020-2fasmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123693/original/image-20160524-11020-2fasmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123693/original/image-20160524-11020-2fasmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123693/original/image-20160524-11020-2fasmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123693/original/image-20160524-11020-2fasmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123693/original/image-20160524-11020-2fasmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123693/original/image-20160524-11020-2fasmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A page from Germaine Greer’s Marciana notebook, 1965. The notebook is named for the 1560 Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice (the National Library of St Mark’s) where Greer made these multilingual notes.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, Marciana, 2014.0044.00002.</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The handwriting was one good thing, the doodles and notes to self were another. On the back of course handouts, Greer sketches a girl with her head in the clouds, a woman in a backless evening dress, a spider in a web. As she reads, she writes messages to herself. In a PhD notebook from 1965, Greer’s dense notes on European comedies written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries are broken up with a comment in thick black Texta. “And so on. I can’t stand it.” </p>
<p>Turn over Greer’s 1964 handwritten notes on Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra, dated May 13, and you can see sketches and notes. “I’d love to see you get P.G. Why? Don’t you reckon I could?” says one. Another is “bored”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123692/original/image-20160524-11017-1mgck9u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123692/original/image-20160524-11017-1mgck9u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123692/original/image-20160524-11017-1mgck9u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=732&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123692/original/image-20160524-11017-1mgck9u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=732&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123692/original/image-20160524-11017-1mgck9u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=732&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123692/original/image-20160524-11017-1mgck9u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123692/original/image-20160524-11017-1mgck9u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123692/original/image-20160524-11017-1mgck9u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Drawings on the back of Germaine Greer’s 1964 handwritten notes on Antony and Cleopatra, dated May 13. Greer was a senior tutor in English at the University of Sydney from April 1963 until September 1964.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, 1964, 2014.0044.00121</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In a 1958 folder Greer has labelled “Browne” (yes, I had to look it up – Sir Thomas Browne, 1605-1682, an “English polymath”) is an essay Greer wrote when she was a third-year student at Melbourne. Two small, typed pages of tutor’s notes are attached. The unidentified tutor notes: “You yourself write vigorously and often expressively, but a bit carelessly.”</p>
<p>I felt moved by this evidence of Greer’s scholarship, by the care she had taken to preserve this material, and by the demanding and mostly defunct Western canon humanities curriculum preserved in the folders.</p>
<p>But aside from a future biographer, what sort of researcher would ever want to look at these bits of old paper? The content was testament to an elite, outmoded, traditional sort of education devoted entirely to the work of dead white men. The records appeared absolutely academic, in the most disparaging popular definition of that much abused word. Where was the Greer liberation, feminism, fire?</p>
<p>Around this low point, senior archivist Stella Marr and I had a meeting with our colleague Dr David McInnis, the University of Melbourne’s Gerry Higgins Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies. Late last year, not long after I had started in this job, I’d shown McInnis a box of Shakespeare material from 1967 and 1968. This included an annotated typescript for Greer’s PhD and a beautiful notebook covered in green floral-printed cloth, labelled “Venezia - 1966 - Afosto Researches for PhD The Taming of the Shrew Love’s Labour’s Lost”.</p>
<p>McInnis had selected four Greer items for <a href="http://shakespeare400.unimelb.edu.au/events/">After Shakespeare</a>, a University of Melbourne exhibition that celebrates the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Greer is fond of felt tip and in the late 1960s she often used wild colours (yellow, pink, purple, green). To protect the felt tip from fading further, each page could be displayed for only three months each. Perhaps the manuscripts could be digitised to help preserve them and make them accessible? Perhaps there was other Greer-Shakespeare material that could be copied too?</p>
<p>On a hunch, I decided to re-read The Female Eunuch (1970), hunting not just for references to Shakespeare but to the dozens of other Elizabethan and Jacobean-era writers I had just encountered in the archive. I used my Harper Perennial 2006 Modern Classics paperback edition of The Eunuch for the experiment.</p>
<h2>The hard-working, firebrand scholar</h2>
<p>In the Work sub-section of The Female Eunuch, Greer mentions her academic job at Warwick as an example of fair employment (she got equal pay, she had been picked ahead of male applicants), but she then downplays her own academic labour. “Guiltily I must also admit that I did not toil particularly hard to attain what academic distinction I had,” Greer writes.</p>
<p>The records tell a different story, one of dedication, hard yakka, ambition, a fever to know. Greer completed her doctorate in less than three years and she did this at a time when many scholars spent a decade on their PhDs while also enjoying the security of a tenured teaching position.</p>
<p>Greer worked very hard, no doubt, and reading The Female Eunuch with this work in mind opens up new connections between this classic feminist polemic and humanities scholarship. Greer did not need a postdoctoral fellowship to develop her thinking; she wrote The Female Eunuch instead. Talk about knowledge transfer!</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123720/original/image-20160524-11032-sm8z0r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123720/original/image-20160524-11032-sm8z0r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123720/original/image-20160524-11032-sm8z0r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123720/original/image-20160524-11032-sm8z0r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123720/original/image-20160524-11032-sm8z0r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123720/original/image-20160524-11032-sm8z0r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123720/original/image-20160524-11032-sm8z0r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The black filing cabinets in which Greer stored her archive at her Essex home.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nathan Gallagher</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I selected 23 records for “Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare: early writing”, a digital collection that allows fans and scholars to reconnect Greer the Shakespearean (and Renaissance) scholar with Greer the anarchist, the artist, the feminist and the journalist and so help contribute to new, or perhaps rediscovered, genealogies for one of the 20th century’s most influential books. </p>
<p>The material has not been digitised to support a claim that a man who died 400 years ago can somehow claim credit for a book that transformed the lives of thousands of 20th-century women. Rather, the records invite us to think again about the influence a traditional humanities education – including instruction from some of the world’s top scholars of English literature – had on The Female Eunuch, and Shakespeare is an important part of that story.</p>
<p>In July 1979, in “Second Thoughts: The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer”, an article for the Guardian Women’s page, journalist John Cunningham joked that the only man mentioned more often than Shakespeare in the book was Freud.</p>
<p>“A big chunk of the book is argued historically on the basis of English literature, from late Medieval romances, through 18th-century novelists, to women’s magazines currently on the bookshelves,” Cunningham writes. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Here is Greer PhD moving into top critical gear: ‘It is by now commonplace to point out that in feudal literature romantic love was essentially anti-social and adulterous.</p>
<p>Shakespeare, who is mentioned probably more frequently than any other male except Freud, is unromantic in his view of marriage: his practical view is summarised approvingly: ‘He recognised it as a difficult state of life, requiring discipline, sexual energy, mutual respect and great forbearance: he knew there were no easy answers to marital problems, and that infatuation was no basis for continued cohabitation.‘</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Likewise, in <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1135202.Germaine_Greer">Untamed Shrew</a>, a 1997 biography of Greer, Christine Wallace expresses surprise that Greer’s brief marriage to builder Paul du Feu is barely mentioned in the section on love in The Female Eunuch.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Instead, it [the Love section] is a vehicle for what looks suspiciously like off-cuts from her doctoral thesis. There is far more on the Renaissance and Shakespeare in the chapter than on modern matrimony and the tyranny of Mills and Boon.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Such observations, whether admiring or disparaging, are rare. A significant new scholarly assessment of the book is Marilyn Lake’s essay <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08164649.2016.1174926">Revolution for the hell of it: the transatlantic genesis and serial provocations of The Female Eunuch</a>: the lead one in Australian Feminist Studies’ forthcoming special issue on Greer. In it, Lake uses early draft and synopsis material from the Greer Archive to foreground the Eunuch’s “American orientation”, including the influence of “radical American admirers of Black urban machismo: Norman Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin” on its content and tone. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123735/original/image-20160524-11025-x29rfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123735/original/image-20160524-11025-x29rfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123735/original/image-20160524-11025-x29rfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123735/original/image-20160524-11025-x29rfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123735/original/image-20160524-11025-x29rfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123735/original/image-20160524-11025-x29rfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123735/original/image-20160524-11025-x29rfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Germaine Greer speaking at Sydney University in 2005.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Will Burgess/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Most popular contemporary commentary on The Female Eunuch highlights the book as a revolutionary, personal polemic.</p>
<p>If Greer’s own scholarship is mentioned, it is just as an aside. For example, in April 2016, The Guardian named The Female Eunuch as no. 13 on its list of the “100 best non-fiction books”. In his accompanying essay, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/25/female-eunuch-germaine-greer-100-best-nonfiction-books">Robert McCrum</a> acknowledges Greer as a writer “steeped in the English literary tradition” and praises her book as “an explicit liberation struggle that focuses on the self”. In 2010, the 40th anniversary of the book, novelist <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/nov/20/rachel-cusk-the-female-eunuch">Rachel Cusk</a> argued that The Eunuch was a work of “piercing subjectivity”, a book whose power came from its autobiographical elements.</p>
<p>When I re-read the Eunuch with an eye for Shakespeare, I began to see many of the names I had catalogued in the archive also appeared in the text and the footnotes. Half of the references in the Sex sub-section are Renaissance-era writers. Ditto for The Stereotype. Most of the sources cited in The Ideal are at least 400 years old: Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, Wyatt, Nashe, anonymous Elizabethan ballads, they are all named in a couple of dense pages in the sub-section The Middle-Class Myth of Love and Marriage.</p>
<h2>The Phoenix and the Turtle</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123742/original/image-20160524-11025-17ew3vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123742/original/image-20160524-11025-17ew3vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123742/original/image-20160524-11025-17ew3vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123742/original/image-20160524-11025-17ew3vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123742/original/image-20160524-11025-17ew3vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1088&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123742/original/image-20160524-11025-17ew3vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1088&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123742/original/image-20160524-11025-17ew3vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1088&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Greer cites Shakespeare’s poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, as an example of the fullest expression of the ideal of love “as a stabilizing, creative, harmonizing force in the universe”. </p>
<p>As I read, the unusual name of the poem had fired a memory from the archive. I searched my description and found the work mentioned in lecture notes Greer took in her third year at Melbourne in 1958 in an English seminar. Greer had labelled the folder “the Epyllion”. (An epyllion is a brief, narrative poem dealing with mythological or romantic themes.)</p>
<p>A record I had considered so dry was suddenly animated. In her inventory Greer has described the folder as containing: Notes from final Seminar Course, Melbourne University with “Miss Walker”, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Jennifer Dallimore, Philip Martin, Margaret Walters. My description says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The first page of notes is titled Miss Walker on Hero and Leander. Works and writers mentioned include: William Shakespeare; Christopher Marlowe; M.C. (Muriel) Bradbrook; S.L. Goldberg; L.P. Wilkinson; The Rape of Lucrece; Venus and Adonis; Phoenix and the Turtle; S.T. Coleridge; Hero and Leander; Ovid; Ovid in Shakespeare.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123869/original/image-20160525-25247-g830uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123869/original/image-20160525-25247-g830uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123869/original/image-20160525-25247-g830uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123869/original/image-20160525-25247-g830uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123869/original/image-20160525-25247-g830uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123869/original/image-20160525-25247-g830uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1190&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123869/original/image-20160525-25247-g830uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1190&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123869/original/image-20160525-25247-g830uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1190&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Germaine Greer’s notes from final Seminar Course, Melbourne University with ‘Miss Walker’ and others, 1958.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, The Epyllion, 2014.0044.00080</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_and_the_Turtle">Phoenix and the Turtle</a> in the title of this metaphysical poem is actually short for “the turtledove not the shelled reptile”.</p>
<p>The 1958 Epyllion folder is the earliest record we have digitised. The latest is handwritten notes on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, all housed in a folder that Greer has called Warwick: Macbeth 1971?</p>
<p>I poured over the Epyllion, looking at the names of the scholars that Greer was citing. One stood out: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1993/06/21/obituaries/m-c-bradbrook-84-shakespeare-scholar.html">M.C. Bradbrook</a>. As a Melbourne girl, Greer took notes from books by an M.C. Bradbrook; six years later she had a Commonwealth Scholarship and was sitting in seminars led by this same woman and by other influential scholars, such as the Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams. In 1967, Muriel Bradbrook would examine Greer’s PhD (along with John Russell Brown). That same year, when Greer applied for her first academic job, the lectureship at Warwick, Bradbrook was one of her referees, along with Professor S.L. Goldberg of Melbourne’s English Department and Dr Ann Righter, Greer’s supervisor.</p>
<p>What a journey Greer had made. The bookish girl had met her hero and she kept all the evidence of these encounters. Her lecture notes from her first weeks at Cambridge were stored in two battered loose-leaf book ring-binders labelled “Michaelmas term, 1964”.</p>
<h2>‘Have got very tired and thin’</h2>
<p>If Shakespeare – or, rather, Greer’s thinking about Shakespeare – is a key source for many of the arguments about love, marriage, romance and family in The Female Eunuch, then Greer’s two great intellectual mentors, Bradbrook and Righter, are important sources as well.</p>
<p>The digitised records trace this intellectual genealogy too. Bradbrook was the first female professor of English at Cambridge University and eventually became mistress of Girton Hall, the first all-women college at Cambridge. In her biography of Greer, Wallace notes that Bradbrook came to Cambridge from Glasgow to read English in 1927 and, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>in 1930 received a certificate stating she had done all that would have entitled her to graduate as a Bachelor of Arts, if she were a man. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bradbrook was taught by influential British literary critic F.R. Leavis, another scholar who features heavily in Greer’s undergraduate notes.</p>
<p>Righter was only a few years older than Greer when she supervised her PhD. She had just arrived at Cambridge from the United States. In 1969, Righter married John Barton, one of the founders of the Royal Shakespeare Company and she became <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/nov/25/anne-barton">Ann Barton</a>, the name by which she is best known. In 1974, Barton became the first female fellow of New College, Oxford University.</p>
<p>In 1965, Greer began work on her doctorate and we have digitised the seven named research notebooks she kept that year: Dude; Cemoli; Bodley; Marciana; Molasses; Cluny; and Coco. </p>
<p>The notebooks contain notes in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Latin and English. In response to a query about the digitisation of some of her Shakespeare records, Greer pointed out the significance of these notebooks. “The point of my research into Shakespeare’s early comedies was to show that Shakespeare was not imitating a Continental tradition,” Greer said.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Most scholars, who did not have the languages to read the Italian, Spanish, French, German and Latin comedies, simply assumed what they had to prove.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Greer learnt Italian as a child; the mother of neighbourhood friends taught her. She also did fencing at the YWCA and told UMA that during the 1956 Olympics she had volunteered as a translator for French and German-speaking fencing teams.</p>
<p>The 1965 research notebooks are beautiful objects in their own right and demonstrate the complexity of Greer’s multilingual scholarship as well as the flashes of ideas about other things that sometimes intruded. Marciana, for example, contains notes about The Taming of the Shrew but flip it over and a different object emerges – handwritten drafts for a hilarious sketch about what the English expect of an expatriate Australian. After contributing this sketch, Greer was invited to join Cambridge University’s Footlights Dramatic Club; she was one of the first women to be granted membership.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123718/original/image-20160524-11025-1olajs1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123718/original/image-20160524-11025-1olajs1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123718/original/image-20160524-11025-1olajs1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123718/original/image-20160524-11025-1olajs1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123718/original/image-20160524-11025-1olajs1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123718/original/image-20160524-11025-1olajs1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123718/original/image-20160524-11025-1olajs1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">News clipping on Germaine Greer with Hilary Walston and Sheila Buhr, the first women admitted to Footlights, article in Cambridge News, 1964.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nathan Gallagher, copyright University of Melbourne Archives</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In a doleful fragment inside Marciana’s back page, Greer notes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Have got very tired and thin. Constantly worried about money because cannot scale down standard of living – but do not suggest that grant is inadequate.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Greer had been named actress of the year at Cambridge in 1965 and this note may be an application for a supervision job (where a PhD student takes on undergraduate supervision of a small group of two or three students).</p>
<p>Greer was a member of Newnham College, Cambridge’s second all-women college. The head of the college from 1954 to 1972 was agricultural economist Ruth Cohen. She was the first Jewish principal of an Oxbridge college. Slipped into a substantial cache of papers housed in a red ring-binder labelled “The Importance of Love’s Labour Lost Michaelmas Term, 1964” is a note from Cohen, dated April 13 1967, inviting Greer to lunch.</p>
<h2>Sympathy for the virago</h2>
<p>Greer was surrounded by pioneers. Even the men she worked with were breaking new ground. At Warwick, Greer was recruited by Professor G.K. Hunter, a Shakespearean scholar and the founding professor of Warwick University’s Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies.</p>
<p>A 2008 obituary of <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-g-k-hunter-shakespeare-scholar-and-founding-professor-of-english-literature-at-warwick-812674.html">Hunter</a> in The Independent described him as a Renaissance man, a champion of marginalised Elizabethan playwrights like Lyly.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To achieve his hugely ambitious vision for English at Warwick, Hunter headhunted a brilliant team of rising specialists – including Claude Rawson and Bernard Bergonzi – American linguists, poets and such new talents as Gay Clifford (the youngest academic in Britain when she was appointed) and Germaine Greer (who juggled teaching, writing and appearances in a TV comedy show).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Could it be that the extraordinary confidence of Greer’s voice in The Eunuch is the result of her long and rigorous intellectual apprenticeship?</p>
<p>One especially suggestive document in the digitised Greer Shakespeare material is from about 1965 or 1966. It contains a delicate typescript marked Cambridge Papers by Greer and another small cache of papers bound together with soft purple wool tied in a bow. At the top of the first page are two labels written in Greer’s hand. TFE Editorial has been struck out and Greer has written Shakespeare’s Early Comedies next to it. TFE is Greer’s shorthand for The Female Eunuch.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123870/original/image-20160525-25226-17mlv3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123870/original/image-20160525-25226-17mlv3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123870/original/image-20160525-25226-17mlv3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123870/original/image-20160525-25226-17mlv3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123870/original/image-20160525-25226-17mlv3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123870/original/image-20160525-25226-17mlv3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123870/original/image-20160525-25226-17mlv3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123870/original/image-20160525-25226-17mlv3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A page from a typescript Germaine Greer has labelled TFE Editorial [struck out] then Shakespeare’s Early Comedies, c. 1964-c.1967.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, [Cambridge Papers], 2014.0044.00124</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Bradbrook, Righter and others guided Greer towards the Shakespeare she wanted to find, the brilliant writer who favoured tough women, the man who used “transvestite heroines”, girls in men’s clothing who “win the men they love by a more laborious means”.</p>
<p>“When the choice lies between the ultra-feminine and the virago, Shakespeare’s sympathy lies with the virago,” Greer writes in The Eunuch section on love and marriage. A virago is a bad-tempered or violent woman, a woman of “masculine strength or spirit, a female warrior”. In 1973, Virago was the name fellow Melburnian Carmen Callil chose for the new feminist press she founded in London.</p>
<p>The digitised records are a fraction of the Shakespeare-related material in the Greer Archive but they contain the foundations for so much of Greer’s thinking in The Female Eunuch and beyond. </p>
<p>The Greer who wrote The Female Eunuch was a phoenix, but that flaming bird could not exist without its counter, the stabilising, harmonising, quiet, steadfast turtledove. “Dr G” – the rockstar groupie, the cunt power shocker, the TV host – was the loudmouth partner of Dr Greer, the academic.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Loved, as love in twain <br>
Had the essence but in one<br>
Two distincts, division none:<br>
Number there in love was slain.<br>
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;<br>
Distance and no space was seen<br>
‘Twixt the turtle and his queen:<br>
But in them it were a wonder.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This extract from Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle is the one that Greer cites in her discussion of The Ideal, the Love section of her most famous book. The early-years Greer Shakespeare records suggest that the Female Eunuch had two authors, and the turtledove matters at least as much as the phoenix.</p>
<h2><br></h2>
<p><em>To see “Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare: early writing” records go to <a href="http://archives.unimelb.edu.au/">University of Melbourne Archives</a> website and type Greer Shakespeare into the search catalogue box. The records are also published in the library’s <a href="https://digitised-collections.unimelb.edu.au/handle/11343/91820">digital collections</a> repository.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/59880/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachel Buchanan works for the Univeristy of Melbourne Archives and the Germaine Greer Archive is housed there.</span></em></p>The Greer archives brim with notebooks and papers from her time as a student of the traditional humanities. And reading The Female Eunuch for evidence of the Bard reveals a new kind of book, one that is deeply informed by this scholarship.Rachel A. Buchanan, Curator, Germaine Greer Archive, University of Melbourne Archives, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/578722016-04-18T20:11:33Z2016-04-18T20:11:33ZMarx, Freud, Hitler, Mandela, Greer… Shakespeare influenced them all<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119082/original/image-20160418-1548-uzula4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Even if you've never read or seen any of Shakespeare's works, his influence has touched your life.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo credits, clockwise from top: Kevin Lamarque, public domain, public domain, public domain, public domain, Mike Tsikas, 20th Century Fox, Mike Hutchings</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the 1980s there was a concerted attempt to downgrade, even eliminate Shakespeare from popular consciousness. </p>
<p>Cultural studies practitioners argued there was little point in performing and revering plays that seemed anachronistic and irrelevant to modern times. Feminists said the same of a male writer, deriding the patriarchal attitudes in his works. Postcolonial critics persuasively railed against the British literary canon.</p>
<p>In 1989, however, Kenneth Branagh’s filmed version of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097499/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Henry V</a> (cleverly timed 50 years after the outbreak of the Second World War), hit a global nerve. Extracts were played on national radio, full of fine language and stirring music.</p>
<p>Even more unexpectedly, in 1996, Baz Luhrmann’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117509/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Romeo + Juliet</a> attracted audiences of tearful teenagers in millions around the world. The argument that Shakespeare’s plays could not be popular with modern audiences of all ages was looking shaky.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the postcolonial subjects themselves, in countries such as India and the USA, refused to answer the call to give up Shakespeare. In fact there is a strong argument that Shakespeare had for some centuries ceased to be a “British-owned” commodity, since his works had been translated by writers revered as national icons in their own right – Goethe in Germany, Pasternak in Russia, and celebrated film-makers such as Kurosawa in Japan. I’ve heard the Sonnets read in translations in Noongar, Urdu, Hindi, Chinese, French, Czech and Korean, and I’m certain they exist in virtually every other language on earth.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119067/original/image-20160418-23601-1qy7a2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119067/original/image-20160418-23601-1qy7a2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119067/original/image-20160418-23601-1qy7a2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119067/original/image-20160418-23601-1qy7a2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119067/original/image-20160418-23601-1qy7a2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119067/original/image-20160418-23601-1qy7a2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119067/original/image-20160418-23601-1qy7a2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119067/original/image-20160418-23601-1qy7a2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Akira Kurosawa’s first Shakespeare adaption, Throne of Blood (1957), is a retelling of Macbeth.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kurosawa Productions</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Feminists, too, began to reclaim his works, reinterpreting them as creating assertive, independent and outspoken women – Cleopatra, Rosalind, Portia, Lady Macbeth, <a href="https://theconversation.com/inspiring-game-of-thrones-shakespeares-finest-female-role-55916">Queen Margaret of Anjou</a> – who voiced eloquent attacks on gender inequality. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/01/biography.germainegreer">Germaine Greer</a>’s Cambridge PhD was a far from unsympathetic study of Shakespeare’s comedies. More recently, she published <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1740851.Shakespeare_s_Wife">Shakespeare’s Wife</a> (2007).</p>
<p>Triumphantly rehabilitated as “<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/special_report/1999/11/99/millennium/your_mill/default.stm">Person of the Millennium</a>” in 2000, celebrated on his 450th birthday in 2014, and now the subject of unprecedented, global attention 400 years after his death, there seems no sign of Shakespeare going away again any day soon.</p>
<p>But even if the unthinkable were somehow to happen and all traces of Shakespeare’s names and works were eradicated from the modern world, his influence would remain around us. He has made, and changed, history. </p>
<p>For instance, we would still have the almost 2,000 <a href="http://www.shakespeareswords.com">new words</a> Shakespeare either coined or imported into the English language – words like “bedroom”, “excite”, “blood-stained” and “zany”.</p>
<p>Ditto the myriad phrases (such as “a foregone conclusion” from Othello), which may sound proverbial but come from Shakespeare. And the hundreds of titles of books and movies shamelessly taking phrases from the plays. </p>
<p>Among classic novels we find Under the Greenwood Tree, Remembrance of Things Past, The Sound and the Fury, and Brave New World. In movies, North by North-West, Rich and Strange and The Dogs of War. This is not even to broach the multiple operas, ballets, symphonies, musicals, and songs inspired by his works.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119086/original/image-20160418-1500-1c8oe8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119086/original/image-20160418-1500-1c8oe8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119086/original/image-20160418-1500-1c8oe8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119086/original/image-20160418-1500-1c8oe8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119086/original/image-20160418-1500-1c8oe8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119086/original/image-20160418-1500-1c8oe8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119086/original/image-20160418-1500-1c8oe8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119086/original/image-20160418-1500-1c8oe8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mirandala</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Decisive historical events have been framed and driven by Shakespearean analogies. In 1865, US President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in a theatre, shot by the famous actor <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/john-wilkes-booth-9219681">John Wilkes Booth</a>, whose brother Edwin had recently played Brutus in Julius Caesar.</p>
<p>Apparently John Booth coveted the role. Taking method acting to an extreme, he choreographed the event with the play’s assassination scene in mind. He is said to have intoned “Sic Semper Tyrannis” (<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-african-caesar">thus always to a tyrant</a>) directly after shooting the president.</p>
<p>In the first and second world wars, both sides enlisted Shakespeare for his morale-raising speeches. Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036910/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2">Henry V</a> was funded by the British Ministry for Information. In one scene, arrows from longbows fly into the distance and eerily metamorphose into RAF bombers. Naturally the British made the most of the propaganda possibilities.</p>
<p>Hitler and the Third Reich appropriated Hamlet as an Aryan German soldier, and used The Merchant of Venice for anti-Jewish purposes. The Nazis <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/219500">embraced Shakespeare</a> in pamphlets such as “A Germanic Writer”.</p>
<p>In South Africa when the African National Congress was outlawed, travelling players went from village to village playing Macbeth, news of their clandestine arrival passing by word of mouth. </p>
<p>Under apartheid, Janet Suzman courageously cast a black actor and a white Desdemona in a famous and galvanizing production of Othello. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/apr/17/ten-ways-shakespeare-changed-the-world">Nelson Mandela</a> found inspiration by constantly re-reading a copy of Shakespeare’s complete works while in prison. </p>
<p>In countries as different as Poland, Egypt and Serbia, productions of Shakespeare’s master-narratives that depict the overthrow of tyrants became provocative calls for rebellion against regimes and dictators. Many were closed down by state authorities.</p>
<p>Stalin took Shakespeare’s subversive influence so seriously that he banned Hamlet from theatres in Russia. </p>
<p>More recently, George W Bush proclaimed <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/03/enough-hamlet-obama-act-now-syria">Henry V</a> as his favourite literary work. And Barack Obama has been likened to Hamlet for his perceived procrastination in foreign interventions (still, better Hamlet than Coriolanus, for the world’s sake).</p>
<p>Shakespeare’s indelible influence has also been indirect, working through figures whose works have profoundly entered modern thinking. </p>
<p>Sigmund Freud acknowledged his debt, basing some of his most famous theories on Shakespeare’s plays, especially Hamlet but also Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice. Melanie Klein wrote profoundly on King Lear and absorbed it into her psychoanalytical practice. More recently, psychotherapy has constructed theories of analysis using Shakespeare’s role-playing theatrical practice.</p>
<p>In the field of economics and politics, Karl Marx kept returning to <a href="http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/shakespeare/chapter.jsf?bid=CBO9781139053266&cid=CBO9781139053266A012">passages in Timon of Athens and King Lear</a> to develop his theories of inequity and redistribution of wealth.</p>
<p>Shakespeare was bedtime reading for Marx’s children. His daughter Eleanor had learned whole passages by heart by the time she was three. </p>
<p>These days, in contrast, business studies departments around the world workshop among executives role-playing scenes involving Richard III and other Shakespearean kings.</p>
<p>Speaking of indirect influence, popular culture has soaked up Shakespeare. He is regularly quoted in The Simpsons and a whole episode of Doctor Who returns the Doctor to Elizabethan England to influence the writing of some plays.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119031/original/image-20160418-23633-1vss84n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119031/original/image-20160418-23633-1vss84n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119031/original/image-20160418-23633-1vss84n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119031/original/image-20160418-23633-1vss84n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119031/original/image-20160418-23633-1vss84n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119031/original/image-20160418-23633-1vss84n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119031/original/image-20160418-23633-1vss84n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119031/original/image-20160418-23633-1vss84n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dean Lennox Kelly as William Shakespeare and Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones in Doctor Who episode The Shakespeare Code.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Advertisers regularly use his memorable phrases to spruik their wares, while Hollywood and Bollywood plentifully reuse his plots, with or without acknowledgement, relying on a familiarity factor.</p>
<p>One story, Romeo and Juliet, has been regularly cited in films and news reports depicting love that blossoms in conflict trouble spots around the world, such as Belfast, the Gaza Strip, Bosnia, Kashmir, and elsewhere. </p>
<p>The phrase “a Romeo” has become synonymous with a certain kind of male romantic lover, and Juliet on the balcony is probably the most recognisable scene in the world, even when the words are yanked out of context and misunderstood: “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” (“wherefore” means “why”, not “where”). Meanwhile, “falstaffian” is used to describe a robustly comic person.</p>
<p>The extraordinary global attention given to Shakespeare 400 years later not only retrieves the past but traces how historical inscriptions of feeling states have shaped modern consciousness.</p>
<p>Shakespeare’s comedies of love, his tragedies of doomed families, as well as his Sonnets, have given us paradigms of emotional experience that still unconsciously guide our thought processes and emotions. To this extent, he has even taught us how to think and feel.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/57872/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions receives ARC funding.</span></em></p>In the almost 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, his words have been enlisted by an extraordinary range of historical figures. Even the Nazis tried to claim him as a ‘Germanic’ writer.Robert White, Winthrop Professor of English, The University of Western AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/504322015-11-11T15:30:37Z2015-11-11T15:30:37ZA third wave of feminism is rising – and here’s why we need to surf it now<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/101313/original/image-20151109-29309-16sy3cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Emmeline Pankhurst: part of the first wave. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism#/media/File:Emmeline_Pankhurst_adresses_crowd.jpg">Hulton Archive, Getty Images/wikipedia.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>We are witnessing the beginning of a third wave of feminism. Taking up the struggle of Victorian social reformers, suffragettes and the revolutionary feminists of the 1970s, feminists today are fighting again for equal treatment and an end to sexual violence in a 21st society that remains patriarchal. </p>
<p>It’s a busy time for feminists in Britain. In late October, the new Women’s Equality Party (WEP) <a href="http://www.womensequality.org.uk/policy_launch_announcement">lauched</a> its policy programme. It is pressing for equal representation in politics, business, and industry; equal pay and equal parenting; equal treatment of women by and in the media; and an end to sexual violence.</p>
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<p>A few days after attending the launch, I went to the <a href="http://www.feminisminlondon.co.uk/">Feminism in London</a> conference, which attracted over a thousand women and men who had come to listen to an array of speakers talking about issues as diverse as trafficking for domestic labour, equality and austerity, and the campaign for 50:50 representation in parliament. I was very excited, feeling part of a feminist movement “on the move”.</p>
<p>It’s unclear how many women or men self-identify as feminist, and perhaps the majority of people couldn’t care less one way or the other. But whichever position you take, the history of feminism demonstrates that it transforms private and public life – whether or not everyone is conscious of this, or welcomes that transformation. </p>
<h2>A brief history of feminist time</h2>
<p>The last two centuries have witnessed three waves of feminism. Unfortunately the first two followed a familiar pattern: initial public resistance to feminist aims followed by a period of social acceptance of what initially seemed unreasonable demands. Then comes a denouement, usually taking the form of a consensus that feminism has succeeded and thus made itself redundant. After this women become at least publicly quiescent about their social conditions until a tipping point occurs and feminism rises up again like a phoenix from the ashes. This may well happen again.</p>
<p>The first wave of feminism arose during the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century and worked for social reform. Women such as <a href="http://www.josephinebutler.org.uk/a-brief-introduction-to-the-life-of-josephine-butler/">Josephine Butler</a> were concerned with prostitution, and with the double-standard of sexual morality. <a href="http://global.britannica.com/biography/Harriet-Martineau">Harriet Martineau</a>, a co-founder of sociology, taught that any sociological analysis of key political, religious and social institutions should include the lives of women, while <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/pankhurst_emmeline.shtml">Emmeline Pankhurst</a> campaigned for women’s right to vote and to have full political citizenship.</p>
<p>The second wave of feminism arose in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and was less concerned about social reform as revolution. This period was a ferment of political activity. Australian writer Germaine Greer <a href="https://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Female_Eunuch.html?id=dtnbrx0pOI4C&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y">argued</a> that women’s sexuality was tamed and eviscerated by patriarchy, while British theorist Sheila Rowbotham <a href="https://books.google.fr/books/about/Women_Resistance_and_Revolution.html?id=tMFNBAAAQBAJ&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y">described</a> the inter-relationship between capitalism and patriarchy in exploiting women’s labour. </p>
<p>In the 1990s the language of “post-feminism” began to arise in public discourse. Thankfully, it was alleged, we can all rest easy now that women are equal in the land of sexual and gender politics. Terms such as women’s individual “empowerment” replaced the idea of collective action. Although it was sometimes recognised that male sexual violence still existed, the strategy of resistance focused on women’s rights to look and act as they please, without risk or blame. </p>
<p>But empowerment was reduced to sexual empowerment: second wave feminists from the 60s and 70s were <a href="https://books.google.fr/books/about/Porno_Chic.html?id=oTq9Hs1P7EAC&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y">re-framed as “sex-negative”</a>. Instead, a new wave of “sex-positive” women rejected feminism and, <a href="https://books.google.fr/books/about/Female_Chauvinist_Pigs.html?id=vwVmVxgqBggC&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y">according to writer Ariel Levy</a>, were culturally induced to find empowerment by looking and acting like porn stars. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/101584/original/image-20151111-9400-nfrg3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/101584/original/image-20151111-9400-nfrg3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/101584/original/image-20151111-9400-nfrg3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/101584/original/image-20151111-9400-nfrg3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/101584/original/image-20151111-9400-nfrg3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/101584/original/image-20151111-9400-nfrg3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/101584/original/image-20151111-9400-nfrg3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Pop singer Miley Cyrus: upheld and criticised.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/64253735@N04/5851534528/in/photolist-9V5Dmm-6Z9aV4-6Z9aRM-z82Vwk-6oYLF7-6e4vgX-6Z9aHP-fW8JpK-j4RhD4-beBa86-6Z9aDp-6ZdbMd-6Aq63X-5EpccS-oYpYXX-6Zdbr1-d1pENf-iDVHgN-3LasKz-6Zdbz5-o4SAAw-k6SiDu-fQbchf-jiaPqn-d1qJiy-gqWpDe-48rYdQ-8jt4bo-91Jr4L-6hRiRL-acbZ4r-fPTD4X-9aATWB-krPPp7-fQbc1Q-fQb991-YJ27y-soUKeg-fQb9dq-YJ4qu-ivkS5A-4jSG6R-ir4HmS-kWWadZ-4iEmLe-4ZxWaG-uxZ7rQ-7xK6o8-ivkS7j-4JLidU">StarBlindKing</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<h2>A phoenix rising from the ashes</h2>
<p>A few years into the 21st century and a tipping point began to occur again. In 2005, <a href="https://books.google.fr/books/about/Female_Chauvinist_Pigs.html?id=vwVmVxgqBggC&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y">Levy argued</a> that when women sexually objectify themselves and other women this is not a signifier of the success of feminism and women’s equality with men, but rather feminism’s downfall. </p>
<p>New movements began to emerge which returned to the idea that all is not well with gender relations. Laura Bates began the online <a href="http://everydaysexism.com/">Everyday Sexism Project</a> and Kat Banyard co-founded the campaigning group <a href="http://ukfeminista.org.uk/">UK Feminsta</a> and <a href="https://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Equality_Illusion.html?id=Eo046KrxKOYC&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y">wrote about</a> the illusion of women’s equality. She is now spokeswoman for the <a href="http://enddemand.uk/about/end-demand/">End Demand</a> for prostitution campaign and an outspoken critic of Amnesty International’s policy decision that prostitution should be de-criminalised, arguing it is little more than a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/22/pimp-amnesty-prostitution-policy-sex-trade-decriminalise-brothel-keepers">pimp’s charter</a>.</p>
<p>Unfortunately the sexual, racial and economic inequalities of a patriarchal society haven’t disappeared because of feminist political activity. These social structures are remarkably persistent, although they shape-shift according to changed historical and political circumstances. Nevertheless, while any wave of feminism is surging, real legal and political gains are made that transform all our lives for the better. </p>
<p>The history of feminism seems to suggest that this third wave, which is currently gathering momentum, may bring about personal and public changes such as an increase of women MPs, public awareness of male sexual violence, sensitivity to the gender pay gap and to women’s structural economic disadvantage. But then history suggests feminism itself will sadly fade away. </p>
<p>If my prediction of the ultimate collapse of the third wave turns out to be true, let’s move with speed and ardour while we can. The lives of women, children and men will be immeasurably improved. Long may it last.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/50432/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Heather Brunskell-Evans is affiliated with Resist Porn Culture</span></em></p>Why it’s an exciting time to be a feminist.Heather Brunskell-Evans, Research Associate, University of LeicesterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/196252013-11-01T02:31:17Z2013-11-01T02:31:17ZWhy Germaine Greer’s life in letters is one for the archives<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/34205/original/s5yspy3y-1383266429.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Germaine Greer's acquired work is enough to fill 150 filing drawers.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Dean Lewins</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Earlier this week, as you may have read, the University of Melbourne <a href="http://www.campaign.unimelb.edu.au/news-and-events/2013-10-28-university-to-house-germaine-greer-archive">announced</a> it had acquired the archives of a former student, feminist scholar and writer Germaine Greer. The total cost of the archive including transport, cataloguing, indexing and digitisation is A$3 million, much of which will be raised by alumni donations.</p>
<p>Is this money well spent? As the university archivist, I’m inclined to say yes. The Greer archive contains the complete works of the Australian academic and public intellectual over six decades. It’s an extraordinary record of the life and work of one of the most important Australian thinkers of the 20th century. </p>
<p>It’s also, quite simply, an enormous amount of material – enough to fill 150 filing cabinets. Although there are some audiovisual and digital components, it’s comprised mainly of paper. </p>
<p>Despite the efforts of archivists and digital scholars, most of the archival legacy of the 20th century remains untranslated into computer-readable language and accessible only to those with traditional archival research skills or specialist reference services. </p>
<p>In this way, the Germaine Greer archive raises important questions about the value of research archives in the digital age.</p>
<h2>International perspective</h2>
<p>When it comes to archives, there is increasingly a gap between the information that has been translated into computer-readable form and the much larger reserves not yet digitised. Much is at stake if universities, public institutions, corporations and individuals take an indifferent stance to the modern research archive. </p>
<p>Without the concerted efforts of translation to computer-readable form – analogous to the recovery of classical texts in the Renaissance – the modern age will be lost to us in a deluge of information unhinged from real events and human lives. Yet as the Greer archive reveals, there is much worth investigating.</p>
<p>Though she’s resided outside of Australia for most of her adult life – she moved to the UK to study at Cambridge in 1964 – the archive contains much material about Australia: from family history and religious school reunions, university education, the anti-war, women’s liberation and social protest movements – including an invitation from historian, activist and writer <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/dennis-altman-7746/profile_bio">Denis Altman</a> to speak at a Sexual Liberation seminar at the University of Sydney in 1972 – to research notes, manuscripts, and responses to Greer’s essays, journalism, and books. </p>
<p>The archive provides a glimpse of what Greer, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jun/19/australia.bookextracts">writing in The Guardian</a> in 2004, called “the Australian situation from an international perspective”. This is a perspective informed not just by the rarefied experience of the Cambridge postgraduate – captured in her 1964/5 diary as a round of lectures, poker, parties and evensong – but also by travel throughout Asia and Africa in the 1970s and early 1980s on journalistic assignments. </p>
<p>And so, even as she questioned Australian <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/rugby-union/union-news/rugbys-magnificent-seven-turned-their-backs-on-ugly-face-of-apartheid-20110820-1j3l9.html">anti-apartheid protests</a> against the 1971 Springbok tour in the context of Australian racial politics, the international importance of the Australian labour tradition and its influence on her own student generation via figures such as University of Melbourne economic historian and federal politician <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/10/12/1065917276600.html">Jim Cairns</a> was not lost on Greer.</p>
<h2>Outposts of rebellion</h2>
<p>The reverse and more important perspective in the archive is that of an Australian in the world. We see Greer performing what she claims to be a mode of native egalitarian and fearless inquiry – which produced one of the most influential books of the 20th century, <a href="http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780061579530">The Female Eunuch</a>, in 1970.</p>
<p>An international best-seller, The Female Eunuch was widely read and debated in the burgeoning feminist movement of the 1970s, and remains an iconic text. </p>
<p>The archive holds plenty to support study of the work and <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/second-wave-feminism/4983136">second-wave feminism</a>, including a multicoloured handwritten outline for the book, two pages of autograph typescript for the work – “my book on women for which I have not yet devised a title” – and 70 pages of typescript (on pumpkin-coloured paper), as well as files of material on reception of the text in the media and the wild. </p>
<p>One librarian writes to Greer:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is exciting to see things stirring, even in the small lumber and mining towns of the northern Ontario wilderness. As a librarian I’m going to make certain your book reaches those outposts of rebellion.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Feminist history</h2>
<p>The University of Melbourne started collecting feminist archives in 1974. The Greer archive will add new rich sources for scholars trying to understand this complex social movement. </p>
<p>The archive offers much more than a literary account of the feminist movement. </p>
<p>Drawers full of unsolicited correspondence from members of the public on a multitude of topics bring academic and public debates into direct dialogue with private lives. No mere celebrity role-call (although there are letters from Canadian writer <a href="http://margaretatwood.ca/">Margaret Atwood</a>, activist Abbie Hoffman, film director and actor Warren Beatty, art critic John Berger, former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto, film director Federico Fellini, former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, writer and television personality Clive James, feminist writer Dale Spender and many more) protagonists and subjects are very present in Greer’s correspondence: a letter from serial killer <a href="http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/predators/moors/index_1.html">Myra Hindley</a> responds to Greer’s article about her. </p>
<p>In keeping with some of the promise of 1970s feminism, the archive includes many voices and diligently documents sources and influences.</p>
<p>Greer is an accomplished archival researcher, who in her own scholarly works on early modern English writing compares, edits and gives new readings of manuscripts and published editions. Material relating to this scholarship as well as research on women and art (including Greer’s 1979 book <a href="http://example.com/http://www.amazon.com/The-Obstacle-Race-Fortunes-Painters/dp/1860646778">The Obstacle Race</a>) comprises sections of the archive and there is correspondence with academics and librarians on specific questions of sources and interpretation. </p>
<p>Study of women artists in the past informs Greer’s own experiences as a sitter, including runs of correspondence with her British portraitists <a href="http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/paula_rego.htm">Paula Rego</a> and <a href="http://www.tacitadean.net/">Tacita Dean</a>.</p>
<h2>Not much for gossips – but plenty for biographers</h2>
<p>Study of the media and women in the media over the period of Greer’s engagement with the fourth estate is a hefty topic. There are sketches and notes for Cambridge Footlights Theatre and Greer’s work on a translation of Lysistrata for the National Theatre commissioned by <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/apr/25/modern-drama-kenneth-tynan">Kenneth Tynan</a>, which was not produced. Greer’s many appearances on TV from the critical to the comedic are recorded on video.</p>
<p>Greer claims there is nothing for the gossips in her archive. She may not be the Percy Grainger (Australian musician and composer whose sado-masochist whips are on display in the <a href="http://www.grainger.unimelb.edu.au/">Grainger Musuem</a> at the University of Melbourne) of the literary world, but there is plenty of personal material for biographers to work with here.</p>
<p>Greer’s extraordinary archive is a biography of social and intellectual challenge and change. </p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/19625/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Katrina Dean works for the University of Melbourne.</span></em></p>Earlier this week, as you may have read, the University of Melbourne announced it had acquired the archives of a former student, feminist scholar and writer Germaine Greer. The total cost of the archive…Katrina Dean, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.