Germaine Greer versus the new feminism: Gender politics in the United Kingdom and United States

This article takes as its departure point the contemporary debate between feminists about the future of feminism and its status with a new generation of women given particular public prominence by Greer's best-selling book, The Whole Woman. While the interchanges have aroused much media interest, the focus of this article is the debates as they are articulated in feminist writing, academic, political, and journalistic, rather than as they are represented in secondary accounts by professional media observers. The current controversy is located in the response of self-identified feminists to the context of changing socioeconomic and political conditions of the last two decades of the twentieth century and identifies issues around sexuality and the family as critical in polarizing feminist opinion. The article traces the discursive patterns and shifts of orientation in the ways in which feminists relate to the family and examines why certain positions gain greater credence at particular times. Greer's feminist writing over thirty years, while idiosyncratic in many ways, is taken as a paradigm of a continuity of purism in feminist thought which resists the current pragmatic approaches of the "new feminists.".