tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/second-wave-feminism-25506/articlessecond-wave feminism – The Conversation2022-12-08T19:24:09Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1891392022-12-08T19:24:09Z2022-12-08T19:24:09ZFriday essay: a sex-positive feminist takes up the ‘unfinished revolution’ her mother began – but it’s complicated<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/496669/original/file-20221122-26-j8utbt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C17%2C3976%2C1958&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The main photo is author Nora Willis Aronowitz, with her mother Ellen Willis pictured, in black & white, on right. (Left image is from Unsplash/Gabriel Nune.)</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Bad Sex – like <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/roxane-gay/bad-feminist">Bad Feminist</a> (the title of the essay collection that launched Roxane Gay to literary stardom back in 2014) – is an enticing title for a book. Who hasn’t had bad sex at some time or other, including those of us who identify as feminists? </p>
<p>Bad sex, variously defined and experienced, continues to be depressingly common, even though sex “has never been more normalised, feminism has never been more popular” and “romantic love has never been more malleable”. </p>
<p>Or, so argues Nona Willis Aronowitz, in her genre-defying first book, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/639587/bad-sex-by-nona-willis-aronowitz/">Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure and the Unfinished Revolution</a>. </p>
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<p><em>Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure and an Unfinished Revolution – Nona Willis Aronowitz (Plume).</em></p>
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<p>Aronowitz’s regular writing gigs include a love and sex advice column for Teen Vogue. But in taking “bad sex” as her subject, she’s less concerned with offering remedies than in the “broader question of what cultural forces interfere with our pleasure, desire and relationship satisfaction”. </p>
<h2>What has changed, what remains</h2>
<p>In her cleverly constructed investigation, Aronowitz makes this a personal and historical question, as well as a feminist dilemma. Across 11 chapters, she blends memoir, social history, feminist analysis and cultural commentary in a highly readable, often insightful – and occasionally self-indulgent – fashion. </p>
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<p>Hers is a very US-centric story: the backdrop to her investigations is the election of Donald Trump and his term in office, which heightened the chaos of her personal world, and her feminist framework is almost exclusively US-based. But Bad Sex has wider resonance and appeal.</p>
<p>The starting point is Aronowitz’s own compulsion to understand and move beyond the “bad sex” that eroded her otherwise satisfying (though ultimately short-lived) marriage. Through her “zig zag pursuit of sexual liberation”, Aronowitz ranges across the contemporary sexual landscape – dating apps, ethical non-monogamy, sexual and gender fluidity – while also looking back to feminist and gender history to contemplate what has changed, and what perennials remain. </p>
<p>These include the murky edges of consent (a conversation, she reminds us, that started well before #MeToo), everyday forms of sexual coercion, and the “woke misogynist” – a contemporary type with antecedents like “men’s libbers”. </p>
<p>Yet despite what the title might suggest, sexual harm is not her main concern and Bad Sex is not a #MeToo book. Aronowitz wants to bring both pleasure and nuance back to the centre of feminist sexual politics, including by way of telling the truth about how difficult it can be for women to pursue (or even identify) their desires in an enduringly patriarchal world. </p>
<p>Sometimes this involves poking gentle fun at herself and the whole concept of “feminist sex”. (“I wanted my hook-ups to be both fulfilling and morally sound”.) But there’s no doubting her commitment to the task – which includes knowing her history.</p>
<h2>Feminist sexual revolutions and sex wars</h2>
<p>The “unfinished revolution” of the subtitle is the explicitly feminist sexual revolution launched by women’s liberationists like Anne Koedt, whose essay <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26221179-the-myth-of-the-vaginal-orgasm">The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm</a> was first published in 1968. </p>
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<p>By harking back to it, Aronowitz offers an updated telling of the heady and horny history of early radical feminism – as captured in Jane Gerhard’s <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/desiring-revolution/9780231112055">Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of Twentieth-Century American Thought, 1920 to 1982</a> (2001), and before that, <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/daring-to-be-bad-1">Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975</a> (1989) by Alice Echols. </p>
<p>In this century, “radical feminism” has ossified into a catch-all for what many see as the most negative and obstinate manifestations of feminism – among them transphobia, anti-porn and anti-sex work, gender essentialism, and an agenda dominated by white, middle-class women. </p>
<p>But Gerhard and Echols, among many others, have recuperated a vibrant and multi-faceted lineage of radical feminism in which good sex was integral to liberatory feminist politics. </p>
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<p>The points at which those earlier histories conclude are significant. Echols stops in 1975. She says that’s when “cultural feminism” became the dominant strain of feminism in the US, marked by separatism and a female counterculture that alienated many heterosexual and bisexual women – not to mention lesbians who were turned off by what they saw as the policing of their sexual desires. </p>
<p>Gerhard continues to 1982, the year of the historic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Barnard_Conference_on_Sexuality">Scholar and the Feminist Conference</a> at Barnard College. Entitled “Towards a Politics of Sexuality”, the conference was convened by feminists eager to return to (and extend) feminism’s earlier focus on sexual pleasure – much to the consternation of anti-porn feminists. They protested outside, wearing T-shirts with “For a Feminist Sexuality” on one side, and “Against S/M” on the other. </p>
<p>The Barnard Conference did not launch the “Feminist Sex Wars” – with “pro-sex” feminists on one side and the so-called “anti-sex” feminists on the other. It certainly galvanised them, though. And it has been heavily dissected and narrated ever since, including by those who were there. </p>
<p>Anthropologist Gayle S. Rubin, part of the West Coast lesbian sadomasochism scene, was still a graduate student when she presented an early version of her since much-anthologised essay, <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/1560/chapter-abstract/173938/Thinking-SexNotes-for-a-Radical-Theory-of-the?redirectedFrom=fulltext">“Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”</a>, at the conference. </p>
<p>In her essay, Rubin lamented the “temporary hegemony” of the anti-pornography movement, defended pro-sex feminism as part of a longer tradition of sex radicalism, and provocatively challenged the “assumption that feminism is or should be the privileged site of a theory of sexuality”. This last point partly accounts for why Rubin’s essay is as canonical to queer theory as it is to feminist thought.</p>
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<span class="caption">Amia Srinivisan.</span>
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<p>In a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWjqeAarm2I&t=1762s">lecture</a> delivered earlier this year, Rubin noted a resurgence of interest in the Feminist Sex Wars, post-#MeToo. It’s evident in a surge of books released in 2021. There were two dedicated revisionist histories: Lorna Bracewell’s <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/why-we-lost-the-sex-wars">Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era </a> and Brenda Croswell’s <a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479802708/the-new-sex-wars/">The New Sex Wars: Sexual Harm in the #MeToo Era</a>. </p>
<p>And those Feminist Sex Wars were part of philosopher Amia Srinivisan’s lauded essay collection <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/right-to-sex-9781526612533/">The Right to Sex</a>. Srinivisan also wrote <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/who-lost-the-sex-wars">an essay for The New Yorker</a> on the Sex Wars, extending its preoccupations to the British context.</p>
<p>Each of these books is markedly different in its emphasis. Bracewell spotlights the participation of queer women of colour. Croswell contemplates the limits of the law for addressing sexual assault. And Srinivisan re-evaluates anti-porn feminism in light of contemporary concerns. All three, however – like Aronowitz – see the feminist politics of sex as unfinished business, with the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s offering both guidance and a cautionary tale.</p>
<p>For Rubin, however, the new literature on the Sex Wars – some of it tainted with errors of fact – is not so much history as a reiteration of myths and recycled narratives. These books reflect what she sees as a “growing tendency to pontificate on these earlier conflicts without actually knowing what was going on in them”, nor the context in which they unfolded (notably – the Reagan administration, the rise of the Christian right and the onset of the AIDS crisis). </p>
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<p>Rubin recalls the Sex Wars as traumatic for many reasons, including because they eclipsed an earlier, more wide-ranging and libidinous feminist sexual agenda. Early radical feminists and women’s liberationists, says Rubin, were “incredibly concerned with sex, sexuality, women’s sexual pleasure, along with violence, rape and battery, and a whole lot of other things”. </p>
<p>One of the most prominent was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/10/arts/10willis.html">Ellen Willis</a>, author of “Towards a Feminist Sexual Revolution” (published in 1982), among other key essays. Two years later, her daughter (with activist and scholar <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/us/stanley-aronowitz-dead.html">Stanley Aronowitz</a>) was born: Nona Willis Aronowitz.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-the-metoo-era-a-reckoning-a-revolution-or-something-else-176565">Is the #MeToo era a reckoning, a revolution, or something else?</a>
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<h2>Like mother, like daughter?</h2>
<p>Like many millennial women, Aronowitz came of age with “pro-sex” feminism on the ascent. But though she was literally raised by one of the recognised progenitors of that feminism, she says while she was growing up, her mother “didn’t pry or even offer” counsel on puberty or sex. </p>
<p>Willis died in 2006, when Aronowitz was in her early 20s. It’s primarily through her mother’s writings that she’s absorbed her views on sex and relationships, including as editor of the posthumous collection <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-essential-ellen-willis">The Essential Ellen Willis</a> (2014). </p>
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<span class="caption">Ellen Willis.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Minnesota University Press</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>In Bad Sex she digs deeper, reading through her mother’s letters and personal papers to piece together her sexual experiences and past relationships – including with Aronowitz’s father. Some of what she finds is confronting (especially about her dad’s first marriage). But there’s also solace, wisdom and solidarity to be found in her mother’s life and writing, and those of others like her, who have made (or continue to make) “good sex” central to their feminism.</p>
<p>Willis began her writing career as a rock critic. She was initially wary of the version of women’s liberation she found in <a href="https://repository.duke.edu/dc/wlmpc/wlmms01037">Notes from the First Year</a> (1968), a collection of writings from New York radical women. </p>
<p>“Sexuality,” writes Aronowitz, “was all over Notes” – including Koedt’s advocacy for the clitoris and call to “redefine our sexuality”, and Shulamith Firestone’s transcription of one of the group’s meetings on sex, a somewhat damning indictment of the sexual revolution. </p>
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<p>Willis wrote at the time that “the tone strikes me as frighteningly bitter” – but within months of meeting the New York women, she was a total convert. She formed the breakaway group <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redstockings">Redstockings</a> with Firestone, who went on to write the feminist classic <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/1853-the-dialectic-of-sex">The Dialectic of Sex</a> (1970). Willis also re-evaluated her relationship with her boyfriend in the light of what consciousness-raising had exposed, and went on to spend much of her thirties single. </p>
<p>By the end of the 1970s, Willis was an eloquent critic of the then-emerging anti-pornography feminism. She warned in a landmark 1979 essay that if </p>
<blockquote>
<p>feminists define pornography, per se, as the enemy, the result will be to make a lot of women afraid of their sexual feelings and afraid to be honest about them. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the same essay, Willis shared that “over the years I’ve enjoyed various pieces of pornography […] and so have most women I know”. A couple of years later, in <a href="https://academic.oup.com/minnesota-scholarship-online/book/14252/chapter-abstract/168135486">“Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?”</a> (1981), Willis surveyed the flashpoints. </p>
<p>She concluded that both “self-proclaimed arbiters of feminist morals” and “sexual libertarians who often evade honest discussion by refusing to make judgements at all” were obstacles to “a feminist understanding of sex”. By her lights, that involved recognising that “our sexual desires are never just arbitrary tastes”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/shulamith-firestone-why-the-radical-feminist-who-wanted-to-abolish-pregnancy-remains-relevant-115730">Shulamith Firestone: why the radical feminist who wanted to abolish pregnancy remains relevant</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A candid narrator</h2>
<p>Aronowitz is clearly indebted to her mother’s style of feminism. Her description of Willis’s particular niche (in the introduction to The Essential Ellen Willis) could well describe her own. She was intellectual, but not academic. She was a journalist, but not primarily an “objective” reporter; she “poached from her life and detailed her thought processes”. </p>
<p>Like her mother, Aronowitz is alert to the grey areas between utopian feminist visions of sexual liberation and the tricky realities of heterosexuality – or in Aronowitz’s case, heteroflexibility. “Reconciling personal desire with political conviction,” she writes, “is frankly, a tall order,” but nevertheless “essential”.</p>
<p>Yet while Willis stopped short of memoir, Aronowitz – reared on social media as much as feminism – is a candid narrator. It’s hard not to bristle with sympathy for her now ex-husband Aaron when she describes their sex towards the end as “metastasizing in the worst way”, or her own experience of it as “some putrid combination of bored, irritable, and disassociated”. </p>
<p>Elsewhere, Aronowitz describes her sexual encounters when her marriage is opened up, while she’s separated and as she moves into a new relationship – in enough detail to possibly tip over into too-much-information territory for some readers.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/496356/original/file-20221121-12-el1m9f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A smiling woman with curly hair in front of a painted red brick wall." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/496356/original/file-20221121-12-el1m9f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/496356/original/file-20221121-12-el1m9f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/496356/original/file-20221121-12-el1m9f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/496356/original/file-20221121-12-el1m9f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/496356/original/file-20221121-12-el1m9f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/496356/original/file-20221121-12-el1m9f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/496356/original/file-20221121-12-el1m9f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nona Willis Aronowitz is a ‘candid’ narrator, but Bad Sex doesn’t descend into ‘an extended confessional’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Emily Shechtman</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What stops Bad Sex from descending into an extended confessional is that her truth-telling (which is different to tell-all) is not a solipsistic exercise. Aronowitz knows the limits of extrapolating from one’s own experience – especially if, like her, you’re a white, middle-class feminist with a big platform – and that the best way to do it is to be honest and to share the stage. </p>
<p>She reveals she enjoyed the social capital accrued from getting married and was terrified of being thirtysomething and single. And how she violated the rules of ethical non-monogamy (crossing over into a far less progressive “affair”), and largely went through the motions of queer experimentation. </p>
<p>Aronowitz indicts herself as much as she does her own generation of so-proclaimed sexual renegades. But hers is not a satirical gaze; her quest to understand what makes sex “good” or “bad” – and why it matters – is genuine.</p>
<p>Aronowitz typically launches each chapter with a personal experience: either her own, or from someone who offers a different perspective. Like her friend Lulu, a Black, queer woman, whose personal and family histories preface a larger discussion of the distinctive trajectories of black feminist sexual thought. </p>
<p>Readers with prior knowledge will be familiar with some of the key works and figures Aronowitz showcases (for instance, Audre Lorde’s classic 1978 essay <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50683.Uses_of_the_Erotic">“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”</a>). She weaves these classics together with contemporary literature and activism (like adrienne moore browne’s 2019 book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40549668-pleasure-activism">Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good</a>). And so, she provides entry points for different potential audiences: readers seeking a historical primer, and readers who are after an update. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/496112/original/file-20221118-15-61dji2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/496112/original/file-20221118-15-61dji2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/496112/original/file-20221118-15-61dji2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/496112/original/file-20221118-15-61dji2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/496112/original/file-20221118-15-61dji2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/496112/original/file-20221118-15-61dji2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/496112/original/file-20221118-15-61dji2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/496112/original/file-20221118-15-61dji2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Audre Lorde.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The gap between theory and practice – or the challenge of what Sara Ahmed calls living a feminist life – is of special interest to Aronowitz. She manages to both capture the power of polemic in feminist history and to get behind the scenes. </p>
<p>For instance, Aronowitz reminds us, even Emma Goldman, the defiant anarchist who inspired women’s liberationists with her proclamations of free love, was hardly immune to romantic despair.</p>
<p>Elsewhere, she revisits essays by radical feminists <a href="https://www.greenlion.com/dana.html">Dana Densmore</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxanne_Dunbar-Ortiz">Roxanne Dunbar</a> on celibacy and asexuality as essential and invigorating aspects of second-wave feminist sexual thought. </p>
<p>When Densmore later tells her there wasn’t anyone in their militant group, Cell 16, who was actually celibate, Aronowitz isn’t surprised or judgemental. Instead, she heeds what Densmore saw as the most important sentence of her essay – one Aronowitz had originally overlooked: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is not a call for celibacy but for an acceptance of celibacy as an honourable alternative, one preferable to the degradation of most male-female sexual relationships. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sex, Densmore tells her, was “really bad in 1968”. In the early phase of the sexual revolution, when feminism had yet to happen, “it felt important to tell women they could walk away from bad relationships.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-with-men-i-feel-like-a-very-sharp-glittering-blade-when-5-liberated-women-spoke-the-truth-191496">Friday essay: 'with men I feel like a very sharp, glittering blade' – when 5 liberated women spoke the truth</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>What now?</h2>
<p>Over 50 years later, Aronowitz has a lot to share with readers about sex. But her book is no polemic. In thinking about sex – her own and in general – feminism has clearly been an enormous and generative influence, but Aronowitz also acknowledges its limits and shares her frustrations. “I felt grateful”, she writes, “for the radical feminism that encouraged shame-free sexual exploration but I resented its high bar too.”</p>
<p>Crucially, however, Aronowitz does not disavow feminism or make grand claims about what sex should or should not be. That phase, Aronowitz suggests, was necessary once, but is now over. </p>
<p>This sets Bad Sex productively apart from other recent books, such as Louise Perry’s <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-au/The+Case+Against+the+Sexual+Revolution-p-9781509550005">The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century</a> (2022). Perry’s somewhat unrelenting diatribe against sex-positive feminism concludes with motherly advice to her readers, including “don’t use dating apps” and “only have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children”. </p>
<p>For Aronowitz, ultimately the “unsteady conclusions of liberationists” – including those of her mother – were more inspirational “than any righteous slogan”. Bad Sex offers a rich compendium of these teachings, but its value is more elusive and greater than this. </p>
<p>In sharing her doubts, reflections and vulnerabilities, Aronowitz pushes feminist sexual politics beyond the binaries it is sometimes reduced to: pleasure/danger, positive/negative, pro/anti. Instead, she pushes it towards the complex engagement that Ellen Willis, among others, had encouraged all along.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189139/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Zora Simic 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>Nona Willis Aronowitz, daughter of a second-wave feminist, ranges across the contemporary sexual landscape – and looks back at the history of feminism – in a ‘zig zag pursuit of sexual liberation’.Zora Simic, Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1157302019-08-12T14:48:17Z2019-08-12T14:48:17ZShulamith Firestone: why the radical feminist who wanted to abolish pregnancy remains relevant<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/285865/original/file-20190726-43122-19g74e2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Shulamith Firestone interviewed in 1969. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_jIOt6WIT4">Still from Hezayka News report via babyradfem_tv on YouTube</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When the writer Shulamith Firestone published her feminist manifesto, <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/1853-the-dialectic-of-sex">The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution</a>, in 1970, it became a publishing sensation. Half a century later, it’s her call for the development of artificial wombs for which she has become, often mockingly, remembered. </p>
<p>But with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/04/us-abortion-policy-extremist-hate-torture-un-commissioner-kate-gilmore">abortion rights</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/23/single-women-are-paying-thousands-to-freeze-their-eggs-but-at-what-cost">reproductive technologies</a> both urgent issues today, her arguments about the exploitation of women’s reproductive labour remain very relevant. </p>
<p>The Canadian-born Firestone was an art student and leading figure of the emerging Women’s Liberation movement in Chicago and New York when she published her manifesto. She’s known as a second-wave feminist, part of the vanguard of women organising in the 1960s and 1970s for a regeneration of the feminist movement that had begun in the late 19th century. Her book sold widely and attracted both praise and condemnation from both mainstream commentators and other feminists.</p>
<p>The reason for the controversy was that Firestone announced that “pregnancy is barbaric” and identified women’s childbearing role as the source of female oppression. And, as part of her imagining of a utopian future that had solved the problem of gender inequality, she proposed that biological reproduction be replaced with ectogenesis – the development of embryos in artificial wombs – in order to free women from “the tyranny of reproduction”.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278767/original/file-20190610-52789-13yeq33.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278767/original/file-20190610-52789-13yeq33.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278767/original/file-20190610-52789-13yeq33.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278767/original/file-20190610-52789-13yeq33.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278767/original/file-20190610-52789-13yeq33.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278767/original/file-20190610-52789-13yeq33.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278767/original/file-20190610-52789-13yeq33.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cover of the first edition with a portrait of an anonymous woman by Edgar Degas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dialectic_of_Sex">Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1970, Firestone’s proposals were easy to dismiss as the stuff of science fiction. But in 2017 scientists succeeded in making a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39693851">“biobag” that gestated a lamb foetus</a> for several weeks. The ethical and political implications of any potential human ectogenesis are only starting to be reckoned with. For example, artificial wombs could radically change the <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2017/05/will-artificial-wombs-end-debate-over-abortion-rights">terms of the abortion debate</a>. </p>
<p>Firestone saw them as an opportunity to increase women’s reproductive choices and autonomy. But it’s equally possible that this technology could be used to justify new forms of control over the bodies of pregnant persons, with anti-abortionists arguing that abortion is no longer necessary if foetuses can be transferred into artificial gestation.</p>
<h2>Oppression and technology</h2>
<p>Firestone believed the historical origins of women’s oppression lay in the uncontrolled pregnancies undergone by fertile women before effective contraception became widely available. The fact that most women of childbearing age would be caught up in a constant cycle of pregnancy, childbirth and nursing small children, meant that women became dependent upon men for provision of the necessities of life such as food and shelter and excluded from other social functions. This created the first class division among humans – male producers, female reproducers.</p>
<p>Firestone’s point was that all this could be changed. Developments in reproductive technologies including reliable contraception, safe abortion procedures and emerging IVF technologies created the potential for women to gain control over their reproductive capacities. They could choose to enter into motherhood, or not, according to their own wishes and designs.</p>
<p>But the problem was that in 1970 the technologies that promised this autonomy were under the control of patriarchal and conservative forces that denied women abortion, or <a href="https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/book-excerpts/health-article/a-brief-history-of-birth-control/">allowed contraception only to married women</a>. Borrowing from political theorist Karl Marx, Firestone called on women to temporarily take “seizure of the control of human fertility” – to appropriate technologies of reproduction for themselves, just as the proletariat must seize the means of production. By this she meant that women themselves should have control of abortion and IVF, and not be dependent upon male-dominated institutions of politics and medicine.</p>
<p>With women freed from their traditional roles in reproduction, Firestone believed that a different kind of parenting could emerge. The nuclear family, which she saw as a symbol of male power, could be abolished and replaced by a diffuse structure of parenting in which children would be raised by groups of adults, named “households”. Sharing parental responsibilities would enable women to become mothers without having to sacrifice their former occupations and identities. Children would benefit from having nurturing relationships with multiple adults, while parenting would open up to people unable to become biological parents themselves. </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t_jIOt6WIT4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>Re-reading Firestone today</h2>
<p>The evolution of feminist theory since the second wave has revealed serious flaws in Firestone’s work, among them a blindness to the <a href="https://www.blackfeminisms.com/sterilization/">historical abuse of black women’s reproductive capacities</a>, and a <a href="https://www.patheos.com/blogs/foxyfolklorist/somatophobia/">fear of the body</a> that led her to focus one-sidedly on the physical challenges of pregnancy. She characterised childbirth as being “like shitting a pumpkin”. </p>
<p>But today, her manifesto is nonetheless being returned to by feminists <a href="https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/neglected-misunderstood-shulasmith-firestone">such as me</a>. This is partly because her work resonates with the principles of the <a href="https://www.sistersong.net/reproductive-justice">reproductive justice</a> movement, which demands the right not only to end an unwanted pregnancy but also to parent under conditions that allow both children and parents to flourish. </p>
<p>Firestone is also increasingly being cited as an influence by <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Xenofeminism-p-9781509520626">xenofeminists</a>, who advocate the “hacking” of technologies for progressive purposes, and by those seeking to rethink kinship and caring beyond the biological family, such as <a href="https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/para.2018.0277">queer theorists</a> and “<a href="https://www.e-flux.com/journal/99/261641/full-surrogacy-now/">full surrogacy</a>” advocate, Sophie Lewis.</p>
<p>Shortly after the publication of The Dialectic of Sex in 1970, Firestone retreated from the feminist movement and from public view. It appears that she concentrated on her career as a visual artist, while also coping with recurrent mental illness for which she was sometimes hospitalised. She died in New York in 2012.</p>
<p>While it’s the call for artificial wombs that Firestone has been remembered for, her vision of a progressive society was always much richer than a desire to abolish pregnancy entirely, and included recognition that some people might wish to continue reproducing in the “old-fashioned”, biological way. What was most important to her was that “the decision not to have children or to have them by artificial means” become “as legitimate as traditional child-bearing”.</p>
<p>What makes her book worth returning to is its central recognition that the capacity to become pregnant is the ground upon which much exploitation and inequality still operate, and that addressing this will require society to think in radical ways.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/115730/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Victoria Margree 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>Second-wave feminist Shulamith Firestone was mocked when she published a 1970 manifesto advocating artifical wombs, but her arguments about the exploitation of reproductive labour remain timely.Victoria Margree, Principal Lecturer in the Humanities, University of BrightonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/955032018-05-02T10:41:21Z2018-05-02T10:41:21ZFeminist activists today should still look to ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217087/original/file-20180501-135810-63djdy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nancy Miriam Hawley, founder of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, Inc., with different editions of 'Our Bodies, Ourselves' at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Outtakes-AP-A-MA-USA-MABT105-Women-s-Health-Book/a1ea4bad064145fda70fd809b41a1e13/2/0">Bizuayehu Tesfaye/AP Photo</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In April 2018, the Our Bodies, Ourselves collective, the group responsible for publishing the book of the same name, decided to stop offering <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/04/08/600287546/feinist-health-guide-our-bodies-ourselves-will-stop-publishing">new editions</a> of its groundbreaking text. </p>
<p>“Our Bodies, Ourselves” has been remarkably successful. It has sold more than 4 million copies and been translated into 31 languages. In 2011, <a href="https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/history/obos-timeline-1969-present/">Time magazine</a> recognized “Our Bodies, Ourselves” as one of the best 100 nonfiction books published in English since 1923. In 2012, the Library of Congress <a href="https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/history/obos-timeline-1969-present/">included it</a> in its “Books that Shaped America” exhibition.</p>
<p>I first became interested in the collective when I was in <a href="https://search-proquest-com.weblib.lib.umt.edu:2443/docview/304131937?accountid=14593">graduate school</a>, and I revisit the rhetoric of the group in an upcoming article in the Quarterly Journal of Speech.</p>
<p>From years of studying the group, I’ve come to believe that although the book is no longer being updated, it nonetheless provides a useful model for <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10570319709374569">contemporary feminist activism</a> – and could possibly alleviate some of the conflicts that continue to roil today’s feminist movements.</p>
<h2>Feminist roots</h2>
<p>The women who wrote the first edition of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” met at a women’s liberation conference in 1969. </p>
<p>They had gathered to discuss the topic of women and their bodies, but it didn’t take them long to realize they knew little about their health, sexuality or reproduction. Their subsequent efforts to find this information were unsuccessful. Even physicians were unwilling to answer their questions on issues ranging from childbirth to birth control.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216388/original/file-20180425-175035-r79fru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216388/original/file-20180425-175035-r79fru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=787&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216388/original/file-20180425-175035-r79fru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=787&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216388/original/file-20180425-175035-r79fru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=787&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216388/original/file-20180425-175035-r79fru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=989&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216388/original/file-20180425-175035-r79fru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=989&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216388/original/file-20180425-175035-r79fru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=989&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The cover of the 1973 edition of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/cms/assets/uploads/2013/03/1973-cover.jpg">'Our Bodies Ourselves'</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A handful of women decided to take matters into their own hands. They borrowed library cards from medical students, snuck into medical libraries and wrote up what they learned in a series of papers. They included information important to their lives, including anatomy and physiology, sexuality, abortion, pregnancy and prepared childbirth. </p>
<p>The authors shared their papers with one another, and, through the process, they realized the information became even more relevant when presented alongside their <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10570319709374569">personal experiences</a>. </p>
<p>When discussing menstruation, for example, they realized that they had been taught the basics in school, but the material never really stuck. Once they discussed the topic in terms of their personal experiences, such as how they felt about their first periods, the information became much more meaningful. </p>
<p>The women were interested in sharing this information with others, so they decided to publish their papers, along with their personal reflections, as a book. First called “Women and their Bodies,” in 1971, the group changed the book’s title to “<a href="https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/history/">Our Bodies, Ourselves</a>.” </p>
<p>Updated every four to six years, the collective published the ninth and final edition in 2011. </p>
<h2>Facing up to challenges</h2>
<p>In spite of the collective’s successes, the group has experienced its share of problems. In its early years, the group struggled to offer suggestions and guidance while also acknowledging that not all women’s experiences or beliefs are the same. </p>
<p>In the 1984 edition, for example, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=n0q2MAUpUM8C&pg=PA31&dq=our+bodies+ourselves+1984+primarily+we+disagree+with+one+another+to+any+clear+positions&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjw2dWw4eTaAhVLj1kKHdcMBs8Q6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=our%20bodies%20ourselves%201984%20primarily%20we%20disagree%20with%20one%20another%20to%20any%20clear%20positions&f=false">they included a note</a> indicating that they chose not to discuss pornography “primarily because we disagree with one another and/or have not come to any clear positions yet on some crucial issues.” They continued: “We recognize that some of us will find offensive what others view as erotica, and vice versa… But this need not keep us from speaking out against what we believe is degrading to women and, ultimately, everyone.”</p>
<p>A recognition of this – and other – differences led to debates over strategies and goals.</p>
<p>Yet unlike other feminist groups that were torn apart by such issues, the collective prospered for close to <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/1230/chapter-abstract/160714/The-Book-and-Its-Travels?redirectedFrom=fulltext">50 years</a>. </p>
<h2>An inclusive model for feminist activism</h2>
<p>The group’s success can be attributed to the model of feminist activism they illustrate in their book. </p>
<p>Based in consciousness-raising, it is a model that prompts women to explore issues in the context of their personal experiences, the experiences of others and the best factual knowledge available to them. As they revised the book, the collective incorporated the voices of more and more women, and they urged their readers to consider the issues being discussed in terms of their own lives. </p>
<p>In early editions of the book, the collective focused on women’s health and reproduction. As they updated and rewrote the book, they expanded their coverage to include body image, agriculture and food businesses, environmental and occupational health, and violence against women, among other topics. </p>
<p>The authors discussed these issues in a feminist political context. And, they explained how they and others responded to the problems they unearthed. </p>
<p>Importantly, though, the collective did not direct their readers to a particular course of action. </p>
<p>Recognizing that women’s experiences differed, they offered readers guidelines for finding other women who shared their concerns. In addition, they offered a series of questions designed to help women determine the actions they might want to take.</p>
<p>In the 1996 edition, for example, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=JFI4AQAAIAAJ&q=%22Are+the+women+most+affected+centrally+involved+in+efforts+to+create+solutions?%22&dq=%22Are+the+women+most+affected+centrally+involved+in+efforts+to+create+solutions?%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjY9oX24eTaAhXBqlkKHY-sCDUQ6AEIJzAA">they ask their readers to consider</a>: “Are the women most affected centrally involved in efforts to create solutions?” They add: “Will our work give women a sense of power? Will our work help inform the public and motivate it to work for more improvements in women’s health?”</p>
<p>Most significantly, the collective urged readers to seek out and listen to the voices of women from different backgrounds and circumstances. They included such voices in the pages of their book.</p>
<h2>Making the world a better place</h2>
<p>“Our Bodies, Ourselves” doesn’t offer a simple, consistent message – there is no prescriptive dogma. </p>
<p>In fact, there are many places where the collective acknowledges that expert opinions vary. The range of testimonies included in the book illustrate the diverse ways women have responded to similar problems, whether it’s dealing with a cancer diagnosis or trying to eliminate health hazards in the workplace. </p>
<p>What “Our Bodies, Ourselves” does offer is a model for taking action in the face of diversity and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10570319709374569">uncertainty</a>. </p>
<p>Contemporary feminists are facing many of the same challenges their predecessors faced. Whether addressing the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual assault uncovered by the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/4/5/17157240/me-too-movement-sexual-harassment-aziz-ansari-accusation">#MeToo movement</a> or determining the next steps to take in the wake of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2017/01/09/women-and-their-march-on-washington">women’s marches</a>, feminists struggle over strategies and goals. </p>
<p>Many of these struggles reflect differences based in <a href="https://moneyish.com/ish/the-case-against-pussyhats-ahead-of-this-years-womens-march/">race</a>, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/intergenerational-feminist-divide-over-metoo-both-painful-necessary-ncna838936">age</a> and even <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/us/womens-march-anniversary.html">geographic location</a>. </p>
<p>Organizers of the original Women’s March on Washington, for example, are focused on social justice protests. Another group of activists who participated in the women’s marches believe that social justice protests will not be well-received in red states. They want to turn the energy of the women’s marches <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/us/womens-march-anniversary.html">toward electoral politics</a>. </p>
<p>What “Our Bodies, Ourselves” teaches is that there is no one correct course of action. Women differ from one another, and various experiences will lead to a range of priorities and goals. This is okay – and it probably has the best chance to make the world a better place.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95503/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sara Hayden does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Like their predecessors, today’s feminists can get mired in disagreements over strategies and goals. The celebrated feminist text suggests a more constructive approach.Sara Hayden, Professor of Communication Studies, University of MontanaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/683252016-11-07T19:05:54Z2016-11-07T19:05:54ZWhat’s gender solidarity got to do with it? Woman shaming and Hillary Clinton<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/144791/original/image-20161107-4708-13etu2c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Hillary Clinton: she has been shamed by women as every kind of bad feminist.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brian Snyder/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Shame has its hands all over the US presidential campaign, whether through slut-shaming, fat-shaming, vote-shaming or just plain old Hillary-shaming. </p>
<p>Donald Trump body-shamed and slut-shamed former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, by drawing attention to her weight and an alleged <a href="http://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/donald-trump-accuses-beauty-queen-and-miss-universe-alicia-machado-of-sex-tape-when-she-was-on-reality-tv-show-the-farm/news-story/a8a5b478c03befd739a3fb4de1aa4eb7">“sex tape”</a>, sparking a shower of feminist protest. Hillary Clinton has been shamed by everyone and anyone for being both womanly and unwomanly as she stood by her man during his countless sexual scandals.</p>
<p>Attempting to smear political opponents is hardly a new thing. Politicians are renowned for engaging in dirty wars. What is notable about the smearing in this campaign, however, is that a lot of it is being done by women – many of them feminists. Women across the nation – across the globe – are shaming Hillary and each other. It seems the feminist community is imploding.</p>
<p>Women have shamed Clinton as every form of bad feminist. “Her entire record suggests she is bad news for women,” says journalist Liza Featherstone in her essay collection, False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/144776/original/image-20161107-4718-1blph4h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/144776/original/image-20161107-4718-1blph4h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/144776/original/image-20161107-4718-1blph4h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=772&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144776/original/image-20161107-4718-1blph4h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=772&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144776/original/image-20161107-4718-1blph4h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=772&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144776/original/image-20161107-4718-1blph4h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=970&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144776/original/image-20161107-4718-1blph4h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=970&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144776/original/image-20161107-4718-1blph4h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=970&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Susan Sarandon.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gary Cameron/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>She is a bad pacifist feminist. Actress Susan Sarandon argues that <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/3/susan-sarandon-says-hillary-clinton-more-dangerous/">war is catastrophic for women</a> and, as secretary of state, Clinton audaciously supported interventionist policies on the grounds that they could liberate women. </p>
<p>She is a bad intersectionalist feminist. Academic and activist, Yasmin Nair, declares that Clinton’s policies serve <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2016/07/28/the-flawed-feminist-case-against-hillary-clinton/">only middle-and upper-class white women</a>. </p>
<p>Perhaps even more damningly for a proclaimed feminist, she is a sexist wife who joined in the slut-shaming of Monica Lewinsky after her affair with Bill, which for Lewinsky confirmed Hillary’s anti-feminist propensity to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2016/07/28/the-flawed-feminist-case-against-hillary-clinton/">“blame the woman”</a>. </p>
<p>Ordinary women voters have also been targets of vote-shaming by other women. Second Wave feminist icon, Gloria Steinem, smeared young women voters who championed Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton as frivolous, boy-chasing girls.</p>
<p>Former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright meanwhile, told <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-steinem-albright-and-clinton-dont-get-about-millennial-women/2016/02/09/7d156d80-cf73-11e5-abc9-ea152f0b9561_story.html">women who supported Sanders</a> that there was </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Shame and the political woman</h2>
<p>Women shaming women in the political arena is not isolated to this extraordinary election campaign. It has a long history as a gendered political tool. The early women’s rights movements – those aimed at securing the female vote in the first place – were characterised by woman shaming. </p>
<p>In the late 19th and early 20th century, women like phenomenally popular British celebrity novelist <a href="http://mariecorelli.org.uk/">Marie Corelli</a>, attacked their political sisters as gender abominations – as creatures of “no sex” – ugly, unwomanly spinsters who only wanted the vote because they couldn’t find husbands.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/144775/original/image-20161107-4704-2lzobi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/144775/original/image-20161107-4704-2lzobi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/144775/original/image-20161107-4704-2lzobi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=958&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144775/original/image-20161107-4704-2lzobi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=958&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144775/original/image-20161107-4704-2lzobi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=958&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144775/original/image-20161107-4704-2lzobi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1203&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144775/original/image-20161107-4704-2lzobi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1203&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144775/original/image-20161107-4704-2lzobi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1203&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An anti suffragette postcard circa 1909.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There was also inter-feminist shaming. In the early 20th century, militant feminists across Britain and the US shamed their more conservative sisters for being slaves to patriarchal notions of respectability. Constitutional suffragists shamed their more radical sisters for their unwomanly lack of decorum. Racial shaming also prevailed in the 1860s and 1870s, after the Civil War, as African American feminists called out those white feminists who refused to support moves to give black men the vote.</p>
<p>In all of these cases, shame was invoked in an attempt to protect the existence of a community of shared values. Shame is an intensely social emotion. Despite its increasingly negative reputation, many continue to believe that a healthy dose of shame has the power to inspire political action for the good of the community. </p>
<p>Shame works on people’s fears of being judged and found defective. If people value their connection to a particular group, they will hesitate from doing or saying things that might risk their exclusion from that group. </p>
<p>Shame is a highly gendered emotion. Historically, it has been used to police notions of femininity. Women participating in the intensely visible, public world of politics – a world that was once exclusively masculine – draw attention to their gender transgressions. </p>
<h2>The one woman to rule them all</h2>
<p>What has become apparent during Hillary Clinton’s campaign is the ripe division between older and younger American feminists. Feminism – in the US and elsewhere – has never been homogenous. Race, class and political tactics have always divided the movement.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/144794/original/image-20161107-4683-1maghj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/144794/original/image-20161107-4683-1maghj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144794/original/image-20161107-4683-1maghj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144794/original/image-20161107-4683-1maghj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144794/original/image-20161107-4683-1maghj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144794/original/image-20161107-4683-1maghj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144794/original/image-20161107-4683-1maghj8.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">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jay Morrison/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But now there is a category that bundles up many of these divisions: Intersectionality. Intersectional feminism draws attention to the many overlapping layers of oppression that women might experience, for example, on the grounds of gender, race, class and/or sexuality.</p>
<p>The younger generation of feminists today, who often identify as intersectional feminists, argue that the <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-feminism-27981">Second Wave feminists</a> of the Women’s Liberation era concentrated solely on gender oppression; on the Woman. This single focus is now outdated. “Woman” as a category of oppression can be joined or trumped by others like race and sexuality.</p>
<p>Still, ageing Second Wave feminists today call for unity over diversity as they draw nearer to realising one of their ambitions, namely, a woman in the highest political position in the state.</p>
<p>Representatives of each cohort attempt to shame the other into accepting viewpoints they hold to be critical.</p>
<p>So, does all this feminist in-fighting demonstrate that gender solidarity does not trump all, as many have triumphantly claimed? No, I think it confirms the opposite.</p>
<p>This woman shaming reveals – as it has since the earliest women’s rights movements – that the issue of gender solidarity is at the heart of the matter. Much of this shaming of women voters and women candidates, such as Clinton, is not about denying the notion of gender solidarity. Rather, it is about women attempting to construct a relevant and workable model of 21st century feminism. It is about women trying to reach a consensus about what a female president should look and sound like.</p>
<p>Doubtless, if American women had had 44 female presidents to represent them they would not need this one woman – Hillary Clinton – to embody all facets of what has always been a highly diverse and fractured community of feminist womanhood. </p>
<p>Whatever we think about the desirability of feminist shaming, one good thing that has resulted from this campaign is the passionate body of debate centred on 21st century feminist values.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68325/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sharon Crozier-De Rosa 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>The US election has exposed deep divisions between older and younger feminists. Women have shamed Hillary Clinton as every kind of bad feminist.Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Senior Lecturer in History, University of WollongongLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/606172016-06-07T20:22:56Z2016-06-07T20:22:56ZThe f-word enters the campaign and trips up both major parties<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125480/original/image-20160607-31951-19a32qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bill Shorten, launching Labor's childcare policy, inadvertently set off a debate about the major party leaders' respective feminist credentials.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Joel Carrett</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The “f” word has made an unexpected entrance into the election campaign – and that “f” word is of course “feminist”.</p>
<p>The launch of Labor’s childcare policy in turn raised questions of who could call themselves a feminist, with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2016/election-2016-malcolm-turnbull-declares-himself-a-feminist-and-chokes-up-over-his-family-history-20160606-gpcp73.html">readily claiming the moniker</a> on Monday. </p>
<p>The debate started when Labor offered to <a href="https://theconversation.com/policycheck-labors-3-billion-child-care-plan-60523">bring on new subsidies</a> plus some eligibility changes 18 months earlier than those offered by the government. </p>
<p>Bill Shorten unintentionally fired the feminism debate by saying the changes were targeted at women, both as the major users and household organisers of childcare. <a href="http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/06/06/12/27/bill-shorten-defends-women-doing-childcare-comments">Nationals deputy Fiona Nash and Today show host Lisa Wilkinson</a> branded this statement “prehistoric”, so Shorten then had to defend his stance by saying men rely on women to handle childcare arrangements.</p>
<p>Nash and Wilkinson’s comments suggested they were taking a much more radical view of the correct allocation of family responsibilities than they believed Shorten to be espousing. Nash went on to say:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m extremely surprised that (deputy Labor leader) Tanya Plibersek and other Labor women haven’t come out and condemned Bill Shorten for making those comments.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This raises questions about whether these policies assume childcare is a “women’s issue”, or a feminist one. That is, one that is committed to raising the status of women to equality, however defined, rather than simply being <em>directed at</em> women. </p>
<p>For the purpose of this analysis, I am offering my definition of equality, which may be much more stringent that those popularly accepted. It is expressed in a 1970s slogan that stated “women who want equality with men lack ambition”. I believe feminist policies need to be about changing gender inequities and values, not just about women making it on male terms. </p>
<p>The use of the term “women’s issues” illustrates this difference, and probably underpins the concerns raised above about the Shorten approach. To some degree, it both accepts the lesser importance of these issues compared with, say, economic issues, and assumes that these have no universal value. Therefore, explicitly excluding men from childcare responsibilities lowers its status.</p>
<p>I understand that argument and agree with it. But it should also be noted that Nash ignores the flaws in her own Coalition’s policies that undermine its feminist credentials. </p>
<p>Maybe Nash’s term “prehistoric” is a useful starting point. In the early days of 1970s feminism, childcare was seen as an essential part of the liberation of women from the confines of the household, but not just to find jobs. We wanted more collective or communal ways of sharing the care of children as a means of changing gender-based family roles, allowing tasks and responsibilities to be more broadly shared by both sexes and beyond the parents. </p>
<p>We managed to get the first ever daycare funding and subsidies for community-based services. To do so we used arguments about the needs of both children and parents, and included the increased need for childcare because more women were choosing to take on paid work. But our ambitions remained broader. </p>
<p>The neoliberal shift in the 1980s saw our arguments becoming more economic, but we still hoped that changing female roles, and more women assuming positions of power, would continue feminist dreams of redrawing the roles of both men and women to remove gender inequality.</p>
<p>Instead, this change meant women’s groups too often assumed that adopting male roles was the best option on offer. So now we have children’s services that commodify, commercialise and marketise their services.</p>
<p>Fast forward to the current campaign and we have the government and opposition proposing some major changes to childcare policy, with questions being raised about the leaders’ feminist credentials.</p>
<p>This in turn created a wider debate. The Sydney Morning Herald <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2016/election-2016-malcolm-turnbull-declares-himself-a-feminist-and-chokes-up-over-his-family-history-20160606-gpcp73.html#ixzz4Aqk9ug00">reported</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has declared himself a feminist – something Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Minister for Women Michaelia Cash have previously refused to do … “I am a feminist, yes,” Mr Turnbull proclaimed twice on Monday afternoon, saying his father ingrained in him a deep respect for women and he believes they are “taking the world by storm”, even in traditionally male-dominated fields. “Girls can do anything and in particular they can do engineering,” he told a Melbourne event celebrating women in science, technology, engineering and manufacturing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>However, Turnbull has apparently failed to recognise that his party policy has serious feminist flaws built in, which are even lauded by his minister, Simon Birmingham. The flaw is the so-called activity test that excludes from any subsidy those families who have no work-related need for care, or defined disadvantaged.</p>
<p>Childcare is redefined as funded to increase women’s workforce participation. These changes therefore exclude the children of stay-at-home mothers, once the core constituency of the conservative parties and used to criticise “working mothers”.</p>
<p>Now the Coalition’s activity policy may exclude an estimated 149,000 families and leave them worse off, says <a href="https://theconversation.com/policycheck-labors-3-billion-child-care-plan-60523">the Australian National University’s Ben Phillips</a>, compared to the government’s estimate of just 37,000. Either way, the message is that these services are only for women who have paid jobs or do approved volunteering.</p>
<p>Yet Birmingham sees this as a valuable money-saving policy. <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2016/s4476114.htm">On ABC AM he said</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We want to make sure that the families who are in the workforce, studying or volunteering, are the ones who are getting first priority in terms of government support for childcare places. Not people who are staying-at-home families. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Labor has done the right thing by clearly saying it will not impose the activity test, so Shorten deserves a feminist thank you for that. Labor also receives credit for the decision to retain and extend the budget-based funding model, the last vestige of the old community-based direct-funded service that serves many Indigenous and remote communities. </p>
<p>The Coalition policy loses more feminist points by cutting this program, as it is non-market program funding that allows for the social role changes that market models don’t.</p>
<p>So Turnbull’s idea of feminism seems out of step with that of his colleagues, who are happy to stick with “women’s issues” and equality defined as success in male terms. Was Nash really showing a commitment to more serious gender equity, or just looking for a cheap shot at Labor? </p>
<p>What is clear is that acceptance of feminist goals – or at least ease with the term – is not widespread in the Coalition. Mathias Cormann’s failure to follow Turnbull’s acceptance of the feminist tag suggests caution, as did the earlier rejections of the term by Bishop and Cash.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/60617/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Eva Cox 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>Talk of ‘women’s issues’, such as childcare, both accepts they are less important than other issues and assumes they have no universal value.Eva Cox, Professorial Fellow, Jumbunna IHL, University of Technology SydneyLicensed 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/554412016-03-07T19:01:10Z2016-03-07T19:01:10ZFeminism has failed and needs a radical rethink<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113822/original/image-20160304-9486-1ms89vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Women need to recalibrate feminist action so that it's not just about them advancing in society on men's terms.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>There was a 1970s badge that declared:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Women who want equality with men lack ambition. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This statement neatly sums up the broad intentions of second-wave feminists to create radical shifts of gender power. On International Women’s Day 2016, looking back, I suggest we failed to pursue that agenda and settled for much less. We achieved formal legal equality over the subsequent decade, but moving past that into wider social equity changes seems definitely to have stalled.</p>
<h2>What went wrong?</h2>
<p>We knew then that legal equality was only the starting point. We understood that real gender equity would require radical changes to macho cultural power structures. So we planned and discussed the ways we could revalue what matters and eliminate gender-biased, macho-designed cultural dominance.</p>
<p>Despite fixing most of the legal barriers, the cultural changes failed to follow. There were other changes happening. By the 1980s the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/neoliberalism">arrival of neoliberalism</a> as the dominant political paradigm slowed most social progress, as market models took over. These changed the political focus from progressive social change to market choices and individualised material success. </p>
<p>This approach also emphasised machismo and reinforced gender inequities, because market competition rewards materialist views of what matters. The more collectivist social roles that are part of our social infrastructure – and often heavily feminised – are devalued and considered private concerns.</p>
<p>Our early support for increasing the proportion of women in positions of power was not driven by wanting more women sharing male privilege, but a belief that feminists could infiltrate and make the social and cultural changes we wanted. Now, the increasing numbers of women allowed to join men in positions of power and influence are mostly prepared to support the status quo, not to seriously increase gender equity.</p>
<p>So 41 years after International Women’s Year, Australian women are still the very much the second sex, insofar as we are permitted limited share of power and resources in the public sphere, but on macho market terms.</p>
<p>What is the second sex? It was neatly defined in Simone de Beauvoir’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/books/excerpt-first-chapter-second-sex.html?ref=review">The Second Sex</a> analysis of how gender roles were socially designed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>and</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Still the second sex</h2>
<p>In Australia, women are still clearly the “other”. Our once radical social movement has been diverted into good works such as women’s refuges, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/destroy-the-joint/counting-dead-women-australia-2015/819933134721099/">counting female victims of violence</a> and calling out sexism. While all these are necessary, there is little focus on offering serious alternatives. </p>
<p>Too many women’s groups are plaintively asking for better access to the options open to men, on men’s terms. The current groups seem to have lost the necessary optimism to identify and lead serious changes to the nasty, inequitable and fading market model which not only excludes the social but is showing serious flaws.</p>
<p>The damage to social well-being that results from the reliance on unfettered markets is much wider than just the continued poor status of women. There are clear indications of social distress in many developed countries whose austerity cuts have created serious inequality.</p>
<p>A review of current public policy priorities at the local level shows few social goals and policies that indicate any serious efforts to make Australia fairer and create better social well-being. The long-term over-emphasis on GDP and financial growth is exacerbating inequalities, with changes focused mainly on punishing the unemployed.</p>
<p>The market model stresses paid work only, completely ignoring feminised unpaid, underpaid, often uncounted roles and tasks, most notably the raising of children. These are not included in GDP, but are essential to good social functioning. </p>
<p>This shift is clearly illustrated by proposed changes to the funding of children’s services, whose role will move from complementing community/family to servicing GDP growth. In the process, “progress for women” has been reduced to increasing their participation in paid work. </p>
<p>This pattern appears in parenting payments and other areas where unpaid contributions are ignored. Similar issues arise in Closing the Gap failures, which emphasise white male models and ignore the value of good social relationships that were once also more important in Western societies.</p>
<h2>Time for a radical rethink</h2>
<p>In the lead-up to the 2016 election, voters increasingly distrust the major parties, whose economic emphasis turns them off. Rather than leave solutions to the current holders of power, or some populist alternatives, we need feminist-led setting of social equity goals.</p>
<p>Can some good feminist ideas reignite the light on the hill to find ways out of current political dilemmas? Let’s commemorate International Women’s Day this year by offering some bold initiatives that show our concerns are universal, albeit from feminist standpoint. Here are some starting points:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>devise and discuss good social policy goals, which prioritise gender and other equity outcomes, and make them central to the coming election;</p></li>
<li><p>revalue the rewarding the skills and time put into care, relationships, feelings and other social needs that require attention and commitment;</p></li>
<li><p>broaden the agenda and revise our assumptions about what matters to make sure that gender biases are removed from roles such as caring;</p></li>
<li><p>ensure that men recognise their need to be liberated from the limited assumptions about masculinity that also limit their choices and lives;</p></li>
<li><p>abolish the term “women’s issues”: these are social issues that affect everyone, and the label stereotypes women as the second sex who have special interests; and</p></li>
<li><p>acknowledge that women cannot “have it all” because men can’t either, but ensure that both can take on fairly shared responsibilities for essential paid and unpaid roles.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>These are starting points for addressing deficits in mainstream politics and putting social well-being high on political agendas. We require feminist perspectives to set social goals that are sustainable, and create social resilience. </p>
<p>These necessary strengths are undermined by the macho tendencies in current political directions. We need to recognise the importance of social connections, cultural needs and care of others that economics doesn’t cover; to balance material and social stability. </p>
<p>And, as de Beauvoir said, women need to decline to be the “other”, to refuse to be a party to the deal. This would mean for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste. That’s feminism.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Eva will be on hand for an Author Q&A between 3:30 and 4:30pm AEDT on Tuesday, March 8, 2016. Post your questions in the comments section below.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/55441/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Eva Cox 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>The second-wave feminists of the 1970s wanted to create radical shifts in gender power. Instead, women have settled for much less.Eva Cox, Professorial Fellow, Jumbunna IHL, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.