Oh no, it’s Germaine Greer. Or: oh yes, it’s Germaine Greer. I always feel a bit of both when she makes one of her re-eruptions into public consciousness — this time, on account of a reissue of her 1970 polemic The Female Eunuch, with an excellent new introduction by Hadley Freeman. The “oh yes” is for the obvious reason, which is that Greer is ferociously interesting. She might be appalling (how people love to be appalled by the things she’s said), but she is not dull, and cleverly outrageous beats bland rectitude any day for me.
The “oh no”, though: that’s because, while Greer herself is interesting, the people talking about her very rarely are. Most discussions of Greer turn rapidly into a trial of her as a woman, then veer into trashing, and finally reach their ecstatic consummation in a ritual expulsion of her from the entire history of feminism. According to her critics, she’s old, outdated, unrepresentative, a betrayal of the movement she helped to inaugurate — in short, flawed. And women are not supposed to be flawed. Feminists, especially, are not supposed to be flawed. There’s no room in the sisterhood for damaged goods.
Feminist histories tend to devolve into what Helen Lewis calls (in her book Difficult Women) “a shallow hunt for heroines”. First there’s the role-model business, where women are plucked out of their context and shined up into secular saints; then come the debunkers to point out all the ways in which this or that woman was problematic and therefore not worthy of remembrance, never mind celebration. It is, on both sides, a tedious and exhausting process, and one that serves to knock all the politics out of the story of women’s liberation.
Turning feminism into a hunt for good women is not exactly new. Actually, it would be fair to say that the hunt for good women is a kind of proto-feminism. When the fifteenth century writer Christine de Pizan took issue with men’s characterisation of women, she did it by writing The Book of the City of Ladies — essentially, an epic work of revisionism. Where men had portrayed women as dim, scheming and slutty, she would refute the slander by filling her allegory with angels. “Only ladies who are of good reputation and worthy of praise will be admitted into this city. To those lacking in virtue, its gates will remain forever closed.”
It’s a brilliant, witty and defiant piece of writing. It’s also perverse. When she writes about the mythological witch Medea, de Pizan lavishes praise on her subject’s learning and power. What she doesn’t mention is that in all tellings, Medea is a murderer, and in most tellings she murders her own sons in revenge against their father for deserting her. In miniature, this preempts all the problems with heroine-hunting: de Pizan purifies Medea into being actually a bit boring, and all anyone has to do if they want to debunk her argument about feminine virtue is copy out the relevant section of Ovid.
Nearly 400 years later, Mary Wollstonecraft was wise to all this. She recognised that purity was a trap. When you are praised for being something beyond human excellence, you are simply being put on notice of your inevitable failure. “Why are girls to be told that they resemble angels; but to sink them below women?” she asked in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Not, of course, that this observation stopped future generations from putting her through exactly the same mill — and if it’s misguided when applied to a mythical witch, it’s flat-out inane done to a real-life, flesh-and-blood woman.
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