Greer: feminist revolution yet to begin

Want to hear the latest from Australian feminist icon, Germaine Greer?

Well, she's written a column for the Melbourne Age. It starts off predictably enough. She celebrates the decline of the traditional family, calling it "the most important change in the last 40 years".

She then throws in a bit of liberal autonomy theory. She wants women to be careerists because this makes them more independent of men. In support of this position, she argues that from the 1960s men could no longer afford to support a wife on a single wage anyway, given all the new gadgetry such as fridges and vacuums that had to be paid for.

That's all standard feminism. But then she ups the ante. She gets very nasty toward women who don't do as feminists want them to do:

Working for your living is part of an honourable grown-up existence. Nobody wants to be a parasite.

Greer thinks that women who stay home to bring up children and care for their families are parasites. So much for the idea that feminism is just about choice and letting women do what they want.

And there's more. Greer interprets the high divorce rate as a progressive thing, as women exercising their independence to ditch cruel and abusive men:

As women's economic independence increased, their tolerance of infidelity, cruelty, neglect and emotional and physical abuse on the part of their spouses dwindled steadily. Divorce rates throughout the developed world rose in unison.

The Australian rate plateaued at the current rate of about 40 per cent of marriages ending in divorce.

She then interprets the rise of cohabitation rather than marriage as another progressive development, as it allows relationships to be "negotiated" (i.e. something we can self-determine or self-direct in line with autonomy theory):

Many such couples have children, and will refer to a cohabiting relationship of many years as an engagement. One way of interpreting this trend is to see it as keeping the relationship in a state of constant negotiation, in which nothing can be taken for granted and both partners are equally involved in decisions affecting family life.

Then she goes back to divorce. She claims she didn't expect divorce rates to be so high. She thinks that women have it much tougher than men after divorce, so much so that if a woman opts for divorce,

she faces 15 or 20 years of poverty and unremitting hard work, both inside and outside the home.

But Greer thinks that women are to be praised for choosing divorce as it means preferring an honourable life over a servile one:

Women who face this fate with equanimity have my unstinting admiration. They are choosing a tough but honourable life over a servile and dishonourable one.

I do know a woman who divorced because of her husband's infidelity. And I do admire her efforts to raise her children in difficult circumstances. But Greer here is praising divorce in a general sense as a pathway to an honourable life over a servile one. I can't help but feel that once again what she is admiring is the act of autonomy itself, a woman's willingness to act for herself even if it makes her life more difficult, over the goal of family stability.

Greer didn't always follow the line of "divorce is great". Back in 1991, perhaps when she still felt more keenly her own failure to marry or have children, she took a very different line. She wrote that "Most societies have arranged matters so that a family surrounds and protects mother and child" and complained of "our families having withered away" with relationships becoming "less durable every year".

Finally, Greer lets us know that the massive transformations in family life and relationships over the past 40 years count for hardly anything compared to what must come in the future:

The feminist revolution has not failed. It has yet to begin. Its ground troops are fast developing the skills and muscle that will be necessary if we are to vanquish corporate power and rescue our small planet for humanity.

What an absolute fantasy world Greer inhabits. She has some kind of unreal idea of transformative revolution in her mind.

And she believes that feminism will help to vanquish corporate power. What a joke. She herself wants women to place themselves increasingly at the service of the corporate world. To the point that she calls women who want to devote their energies elsewhere "parasites".

Greer was catapulted into fame and fortune after writing The Female Eunuch because her views fitted those of the liberal establishment. She is an establishment intellectual and not the iconoclast she imagines herself to be.