Germaine Greer: Mother of all feminists

WHEN Germaine Greer's rallying cry for sexual liberation, The Female Eunuch, was published in 1970, it was an immediate sensation.

With its deliberately shocking premise that "women don't know how much men hate them" and its exhortation to women to "taste their menstrual blood", it imposed itself on the national consciousness in a way few books have done before or since.

Tales of its impact on women whose lives had been limited by the social mores of the day are legion: some are said to have carried it in brown paper bags to conceal it from the eyes of disapproving husbands; others to have hurled it across the dinner table in heated debates. Some are even said to have walked out of their marriages.

The book put issues such as the oppressive nature of the nuclear family and the objectification of women's bodies on the political agenda for the first time. As the 40th anniversary of its publication approaches, not everyone is in celebratory mode. Fellow Australian writer Louis Nowra has dismissed Greer's most famous work as hopelessly middle-class and accused her of having "no idea what makes women tick".

What's not in question is that the UK is experiencing a resurgence of interest in feminism. A growing irritation with the way our celebrity culture regards women and a frustration with the intractability of the gender pay gap has spawned a flurry of websites (The F-Word); books (Natasha Walter's Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism and Kat Banyard's The Equality Illusion); and campaign groups (Object).

This week, Greer – who published her follow-up, The Whole Women, to a lukewarm reception in 2001 – will be speaking at the Aye Write! Book Festival in Glasgow. So, four decades after The Female Eunuch exploded onto the literary scene, and as the world prepares to celebrate International Women's Day tomorrow, is the work still seen as a "feminal" text? Does Greer merit her reputation as a champion of the women's liberation movement? And what relevance does her polemic have for girls born into an era when contraception, abortion and the right to (if not the realisation of) equality are taken for granted?

Before The Female Eunuch was published, Greer already had a reputation as a strident maverick and defier of convention. Professor Lisa Jardine, a contemporary at Cambridge, has told how she made her presence felt at a formal dinner at all-female Newnham College. As a hush descended before the speeches, Greer could be heard explaining that "there could be no liberation for women, no matter how highly educated, as long as we were required to cram our breasts into bras constructed like mini-Vesuviuses, two stitched white cantilevered cones which bore no resemblance to female anatomy".

A combination of erudition and swagger made The Female Eunuch stand out from other feminist texts. Littered with literary, sociological and anthropological references, its central themes are that women are taught rules which disempower them and that the nuclear family perpetuates female subjugation and is a pernicious environment for the raising of children.

But – as many critics have pointed out – The Female Eunuch also has undercurrents of misogyny. It belittles "wives", claiming they are so oppressed by their marriages that they are incapable of contributing to "civilised conversation" and scorns those who fail to break free of male dominance. Most contentiously, it suggests victims of domestic abuse sometimes bring their suffering on themselves because violence excites them.

"One of the effects the book had on me was it gave me a better understanding of the way things were for my mum," says Glasgow author and feminist Zoe Strachan. "I love Greer's sweeping statements and shocking, challenging style. Although she did have some very bizarre ideas, it must have been very liberating back in the 1970s to realise that it was okay not to feel completely fulfilled by your husband, your children and your food processor.

"She was very much ahead of her time, too, in challenging the nuclear family as the best environment in which to raise children. Studies now show that as long as there is stability, children will do just as well with single parents or gay parents."

For those women who – like Strachan – read the book 15 or 20 years ago, the excerpt that sticks out is the one in which Greer calls on women to "taste their menstrual blood" – a prospect which tends to make even the most zealous women's libbers blanche. But in taking on a natural function which had for so long been the source of male revulsion, didn't Greer force women to confront, for the first time, the way they had been made to feel insecure about their own bodies? And isn't that message even more pertinent in a culture where Botox and plastic surgery are increasingly mainstream?

"Not only is menstruation still considered disgusting, so is body hair and excess fat and all the other things women are not supposed to be allowed to show," says Strachan. "I don't know if Greer tackles the capitalist agenda in all of this, but it probably pays quite well to keep women feeling insecure and that they need to buy a million things so men find them acceptable."

Certainly, The Female Eunuch slaughtered some sacred cows. But like everything involving Greer there were ideological contradictions.

Just as the woman who scorned reality TV shows later appeared on Celebrity Big Brother, so she veers from championing women's rights to launching bitter attacks on female rivals. In 2001, for example, she got embroiled in what male commentators would brand a verbal catfight with fellow feminist Suzanne Moore, describing her appearance as "hair birds-nested all over the place, f***-me shoes and three fat layers of cleavage".

Julia Long, of the London Feminist Network, once walked out of an event at which Greer made comments about rape that Long deemed trivial and offensive. In her opinion, while The Female Eunuch was written with a zeal that accounts for its abiding popularity, other books of the time – such as Kate Millett's Sexual Politics – made a greater contribution to the feminist movement.

"The Female Eunuch is definitely of its time," says Long, who is doing a PhD on the Re-emergence of Feminist Antiporn Activism. "Where Greer is critical about femininity, she can sound quite contemptuous of other women. It is as if she adopts an almost masculine voice when writing."

Another criticism has always been that while the book pointed out the way in which women were being discriminated against, it didn't give them a road map for a better future. Long says that while Greer was writing The Female Eunuch, other feminists were attending the first women's liberation conference at Ruskin College, which led to the drawing up of a list of four revolutionary demands: equal pay; equal education and job opportunities; free contraception and abortion on demand.

"The whole feminist movement was based on consciousness-raising groups sharing their experiences and then developing political analysis, and though Greer certainly helped to highlight some important issues, it strikes me she was not part of that collective consciousness-raising. She is not the voice of feminism," says Long. In the Glasgow Women's Library – an initiative Greer has supported – copies of The Female Eunuch sit alongside the rough and ready women's lib leaflets which were distributed around the same time.

For strategy development manager Sue John, they are a reminder the book was not created in a vacuum. "Greer encapsulated the momentum, but her book was part of a much broader movement," she says.

Now there is a resurgence in interest in feminism, with the likes of Walter pointing out that women's aspirations are being limited by our hypersexual culture and the return of biological determinism. "I'm not saying the feminist backlash is over," John says. "The word still has negative associations for those who are that way inclined, but I think the fear is going."

While younger voices like Walter may be taking the lead, Greer is still there, at 71, busting taboos and shattering our preconceptions. Nowra may say she resembles "a befuddled old grandmother", but neither she, nor the book that made her name have lost their capacity to shock or impress. Indeed, when Long asked a number of young feminists what had motivated them to take up the cause, a surprising number of them cited The Female Eunuch.

To raise money for its move to the Mitchell Library, the Glasgow Women's Library is asking people to sponsor a book or even a shelf on the new site. "We hope someone will sponsor a shelf and dedicate it to Greer," Long says. "She certainly deserves a place here."