The freedom I pleaded for twenty years ago was the freedom to be a person, with the dignity, nobility, passion and pride that constituted personhood. Freedom to run, shout, to talk loudly and sit with your knees apart. Freedom to know and love the earth and all that swims, lies and crawls upon it. Freedom to learn and freedom to teach. Freedom from fear and freedom from hunger, freedom of speech and freedom of belief. - Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer was the Che Guevara of the feminist revolution in Australia and the UK. Her book, The Female Eunuch, was soaked in towering rage, coated in icy intellectualism and it should be required reading for all high school students today. Not only does it draw a clear picture of how far we have come, it throws into sharp relief the things that should have changed by now and haven’t.

It is her personal tragedy that winning her war left her with nowhere to focus the anger that drove her so effectively in the early years. In recent times she has become something of a caricature of herself, but after the media blips of feminist articles prompted by International Women’s Day has passed, I think it is fitting to re-visit the battles Germaine Greer fought and how much reason we still have to be grateful to her.

We should acknowledge our successes graciously and turn our hands to other things - Jill Matthews

The days of entrenched sexism, where common law said that women and children could not testify credibly to their own rape, where single women could not access a bank loan, tertiary education, no-fault divorce, equal property right, recourse from sexual harassment or safe abortion, where lower pay for women was mandated and married women were not allowed to work at all are long gone. To the generation of women flooding our universities and workforce now it is almost beyond belief that they ever existed and it was Greer who gave voice and focus to many of the changes that we now take for granted.

I didn’t fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover. – Germaine Greer

While it is certainly true that there are fewer women than men in senior positions in the public/corporate world, it does not necessarily follow that this is because men are conspiring to deny those positions to bright, dedicated, ambitious women - the fact that our Governor General, Prime Minister, CEO of our second largest bank, and CEO of our largest industry group are women, is testament not only to their own considerable abilities but to their acceptance in a world dominated by men.

The disparity occurs because, where people are faced with the inevitable choice between professional success and family or personal goals (and it is only the most exceptional who can have it all, regardless of gender), it is predominantly women who choose family and men who choose career.

The only issues with this, from a feminist view point, should be ensuring that this choice continues to be freely available to women and the ongoing discussion about why is the predominantly female choices that choices do not bring social or financial recognition.

The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough – Germaine Greer

Rather than blaming men for the dearth of senior corporate women, perhaps the better solution would be to give men more options by which they can define success. Allowing men to take pride in domestic, personal or creative success would do much more for gender equality than mandated quotas that will effect change for only a small group of already wealthy, privileged women.

What do women want? Freedom. Freedom from being the thing looked at rather than the person looking back. – Germaine Greer

The other cause celebre in mainstream media’s version of feminism is the issues around female body image and how a pernicious media is responsible for low self esteem and eating disorders in teenagers.

It’s certainly worthwhile recognising and exposing the idiocy of photoshopped images and their unrealistic portrayal of beauty, but it’s not just a female issue, nor is it the only standard by which women (or men) measure their self worth. And the implication that vanity is the sole cause of eating disorders grossly diminishes the horror of these deeply complicated diseases.

Women are not just things to be looked at; our feelings of self worth, our recognition of our own personhood beyond the physical and our relationship with our bodies and sexuality is extremely complicated. Narrowing the source of these things down to the images of female beauty as portrayed by Cleo et al denies all the experiences culminate in how we feel about ourselves.

The argument in the Female Eunuch is still valid… it holds that a woman has the right to express her own sexuality; which is not at all the same thing as the right to capitulate to male advances. – Germaine Greer

The other problem with focus on body image is that it can make all celebration of the female form suspect. Recognising, celebrating and delighting in sexuality or beauty is not objectification. Feminism, as pertains to sex, is about giving power over female sexuality back to women. They are then free to glory in it, deny it, play with it, hide it, use it for financial gain, share it joyfully with men (or with other women) or ignore it and turn their attention to other things. No-one should dare to tell them their choice is wrong or that they do not have the right to make that choice.

The act is one of murderous aggression... enacted upon the hated other - Germaine Greer.

One of the few remaining areas that need the sort of activism Greer displayed is the way we view sexual violence against women.

Over 98% of sexual assaults against adults are committed by men against women and as many as 1 in 3 women will be the victim of sexual assault at some point in her life. Somewhere between 60% and 90% of sexual assaults are never reported. Of the 9674 rapes that were reported in NSW last year only 20% went to trial and, of those, 13%, recorded convictions. By comparison, non-sexual assault recorded a 39% conviction rate.

Every state in Australia has had a law reform commission on sexual assault and they have all recommended changes to the laws, the definition of consent, the way witnesses and victims (particularly children) are dealt with by the justice system. Almost none of those recommendations have been implemented and no-one seems to have an explanation for this.

The Female Eunuch does not deal with poor women (for when I wrote it I did not know them) but with the women of the rich world, whose oppression is seen by poor women as freedom.- Germaine Greer

Now that, for the most part, women in Australia are richer and freer than any women in history have been, surely we can take some attention away from our first world problems and focus it on the less fortunate women in the rest of the world? Places where women are denied access to money, education and medical attention, where violence against women is accepted and they have no means of freeing themselves from oppression. We may not be able to change their lives, but we can, at the very least, not forget about them.

There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women. – Madeleine Albright

Feminism is, and should be, a broad church. There is room for Leslie Cannold, Anne Summers, Larissa Behrendt, Germaine Greer, Mia Freedman and even Melinda Tankard-Reist to take their stance and argue their case. Equally, we should all be able to dispute their arguments and disagree with their premise. They’re all strong opinionated people, they can take it.

Where we start running into trouble is when we start saying that because your take on feminism is different to mine, you are not a proper feminist, your voice should not be heard. When we tell women that their choices about their bodies, children, careers, sexual partners, clothes or opinions are wrong and stupid, we are denying women the freedom Greer and so many others fought so hard to give them. Feminism should not be about removing male opprobrium of our choices only to replace it with the same thing from other women.

If a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run? - Germaine Greer

The freedom Germaine Greer craved is the freedom we all want - the freedom to be not confined to a particular role by our gender, birth or race but to be able to choose how we live without having to struggle against the expectations or condemnations or even the comments of others.

The feminist battle is largely won in the Western world but the wider war for self-fulfillment could be lost if we confine ourselves to re-contending the positions already won by the revolutionaries of the 70s.

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