"In too many cases female intellectuals are arrogant, aggressive, compulsive and intense", writes Germaine Greer towards the end of a book which her publishers present in the eager certainty that it "will offend many". One is tempted to add that, on the evidence of the present work, in some cases female intellectuals are also irrational, immature, and insufficiently rigorous in distinguishing their mental processes from their emotional reactions. Continuing, one might extend the publishers' list of people who are likely to consider the book offensive: "The conventional moralist. . . The conventional economist. . . The conventional psychologist. . . The conventional woman - the female parasite." Not by the few who might find distasteful Miss Greer's preoccupation with bodily excretions and her brandishing of slogans complete with their quota of four-letter words - most of us remember the day when we first said "bottom", or whatever was the proscribed word of early childhood, and our disappointment when, the flame of defiance having dimmed, nothing much happened - but by the many whose efforts to improve the present situation of women are likely to be hindered rather than helped by this effusion.
The facts of the situation are incontrovertible, and their implications growing in urgency. Theoretically liberated, women still suffer the kind of patronizing paternalism which accepts that a bright girl will become somebody's secretary while a relatively stupid boy becomes a trainee manager. A state which allows them university grants makes it so unremunerative as well as so materially difficult for women to continue a profession after marriage that it seems only a question of time before a down-to-earth government takes a hard look at the cost-benefit-return of their higher education. The fact that some women work for pin-money - as why on earth should they not - is used as an argument, if not against equal pay, at least against equal access to well-paid jobs, in defiance of the statistics about the number of women who are not merely self-supporting but breadwinners also. Domestically, the Gehenna of certain housing estates and the peculiar horrors of high-rise flats bear harder on the mothers of young children than on any other section of society.
Before anything can be done about all that, Miss Greer seems to feel that we must first change our folklore. Fundamentally that is true enough, and such a change might bring the recognition that, as Leonard Cohen puts it, "women really are the minds and the force that holds everything together, and men really are gossips and artists". But folklore is an organic growth, susceptible to alteration only by the mortally slow process of natural mutation. Pending, there is need for a campaign on fronts ranging from changing attitudes in schools to lobbying shop stewards and Cabinet Ministers. Direct action may very properly have a part in it, but the whole must be founded on a logically unassailable case. Miss Greer's dithyrambics, imbued as they are by a frighteningly generalized hostility, are hardly likely to further it.
True, there are extenuating circumstances. The author was brought up in Australia where, according to reliable report, a fairly high degree of male loutishness is socially acceptable. She seems, too, to have been more than normally unfortunate in her parents. All allowances made, it is still irresponsible to say that children are more disturbed by changes of place than by changes in the "personnel" around them, where there is solid evidence that, for young children, it is the people around them who constitute place. It shows a wilful disregard of realities to rhapsodize over the virtues of family life in Calabria without taking into account the grinding poverty and the endless childbearing which makes women hags by the time they are forty, which are the reverse of the medal. Coming from a writer of Miss Greer's intelligence, this kind of thing is particularly sad.
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