The Whole Woman [Hardcover]

Germaine Greer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 11, 1999

Thirty years after The Female Eunuch galvanized the women's liberation movement, Germaine Greer launches a fiery sequel assessing the state of womanhood and proclaiming that the time has come to get angry again.

With passionate rhetoric, unique authority, and outrageous humor, The Whole Woman reveals how women have been sideswiped and sidetracked in the quest for liberation, duped into settling for an ersatz equality. Greer argues that women have come a long way in the past three decades, but that innumerable forms of insidious discrimination and exploitation persist in every area of life--from the care of the body to the care of the household, from the workplace to the marketplace. She startles us with her demonstration that the oft-repeated claim that "women can have it all" is merely a pacifying illusion--that things are getting worse, and that action is necessary now.

The Whole Woman is a shattering critique of the complacency and denial that have replaced feminist determination and militancy, and of a society that has done little to maintain the momentum for change. It is also a call to arms--forceful and impossible to ignore.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For women born in the immediate postwar period, there were the years BG and AG--"before Greer" and "after Greer." It's all too easy to underestimate its influence, but the fact is that in 1970 every self-respecting woman on the Left owned a copy of The Female Eunuch. Thirty years later, Germaine Greer is ready to get angry again. In The Whole Woman, she analyzes, among other issues, the invasive ways in which the health industry persuades women to have their bodies and reproductive systems "managed." Greer lays out the facts about the high failure rate and devastating side effects of in vitro fertilization and the incongruence between the "success" of breast implants in achieving the "perfect" mammary to please men and the continuing failures in detecting and treating increasingly prevalent breast cancer.

Greer's polemic has the confident virtuosity of wit and maturity. Celebrating women's successes, The Whole Woman is a more positive book than The Female Eunuch. Her unique combination of outrageous humor and assertiveness continues to lead the way forward for women who want to take control of their lives. --Lisa Jardine, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

The blithe spirit of The Female EunuchAa tart, irreverent feminist screed that crackled across the Western world in 1971Ahas given way to the surprisingly curmudgeonly temperament of Greer's latest effort, with its dim view of humanity and our capacity to change. After 30 years and many books, the Australian-born polemicist who lives and teaches in England has attempted to recreate and update the formula that brought her international acclaim. Like its predecessor, this new work is a loosely connected series of short, idiosyncratic, Menckenesque essays larded with statistics, slangy erudition and disembodied quotations set off in half-tones. This time around, the author gambols over such disparate subjects as female circumcision in Africa (Greer urges tolerance for cultural practices so different from our own) and transgendered people (she blazes with antagonism against sexual reassignments). In one of her pet peeves, she excoriates housewives who waste hours in shopping malls in search of the latest prepackaged foodstuffs while remaining immune to the joys of baking a cake from scratch. At her best, Greer argues passionately for the mystic virtues of ecofeminism and stirringly calls for a return to the values of a simpler life, minus its egregious sexist assaults. Occasionally an aphorism sparkles with the old wit and biteA"One wife is all any man deserves"; "The power of Hillary Clinton's well-trained brain is principally demonstrated to the American public in her spirited defenses of her husband against the charges that he has cuckolded and humiliated her"Abut too often the effect is labored and strained. Greer has grievances aplenty with present-day society, but she offers few prescriptives for improvement besides demonstrations of support for embattled Iraqi and Palestinian women. Agent, Gillon Aitken. 100,000 first printing; seven-city author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First edition. edition (May 11, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375407472
• ISBN-13: 978-0375407475
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,104,733 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Who says you have to agree with everything?, June 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Whole Woman (Hardcover)

I love this book. It is amazing, and, it has to be said, very few people still write anything like this. I don't agree with everything Greer says, but then i don't have to: she is forty years older than me and if her book inspires someone of my generation to write the next 'Female Eunuch' then it will have served its purpose. When I read her first novel, the Female Eunuch, it wasn't so much as a piece of feminist literature as a primary historical source. Yet I feel I owe a debt to Greer and her contemporaries for writing such works and creating the workd in which I grew up.

Many criticisms of The Whole Woman have centred on Greer's discussion of 'Pantomine Dames' and supposed defence of female genital mutilation. Whether or not you agree with her conclusions, I think she raises some extremely valid points surrounding these topics, such as, do we construct the Female negatively (ie. by the omission of a male genitalia rather than the possession of female genitalia?) - and, of course, the post-colonial relationship between Western women and women in developing nations. Whilst I will support any woman, anywhere, in her struggle for recognition and emancipation, Greer points out that it isn't my job to tell her how to do it. The West has been doing that for far too long.

This isn't, to me, a book of answers. It's a book of questions which I haven't heard asked before. My greatest problem with Greer is that I still find her somewhat dismissive of men. After all, men are our lovers and our sons, and I think few women want that to change. But she reminds us that we have a long way to go in reconstructing our society and redefining the gender roles within it to improve life for men and women.

To all those twenty year olds out there: our mothers did a hell of a lot for us. We owe it to them to do a hell of a lot more!!!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bravo! The feminist Juvenal returns!, June 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Whole Woman (Hardcover)

Greer returns to tell the 'muddle crass' what a load of tripe and codswallop feminism has become in the nineties. Sure, its full of hyperbole, and short on coolly considered politically-correct solutions. She gives women's 'progress' the lie in stunning rhetorical form. She is a feminist Swift, or perhaps Wyndham Lewis(!!) quaranteed to piss off conventional wisdom of any ilk.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A MALE RESPONSE FROM THE UK, November 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Whole Woman (Hardcover)

I HAVE READ GG's BOOK; IT WAS DEFINATELY WORTH READING- WHATEVER STANDPOINT YOU MAY TAKE ON HER OWN OPINIONS AND RESEARCH- HER BOOK IS DEFINATELY THOUGHT PROVOKING- AND SHOULDN'T THAT BE ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ELEMENTS OF WRITTEN TEXT?- THAT IT ANGERS; ENCOURAGES SYMAPTHY; ENLIGHTENS... THESE SHOULD BE ESSENTIALLY WHAT MATTERS IN ANY PIECE OF LITERATURE:

FOR A MALE'S OPINION; I THOUGHT MOST OF GGS POINTS DID INDEED RING TRUE IN THE SOCIETY AROUND ME: THE WHOLE IDEA OF CONSUMERISM AND IT'S TWISTED GOAL OF CONSTRUCTING MAN'S DESIRED IMAGE OF WOMAN; WHEREAS THE MALE POPULUS CAN SPEND IT'S TIME ON FEEL-GOOD BUYING- IE MUSIC

THE WHOLE IDEA OF THE CAREER MINDED POWER WOMAN HAS BEEN MASCULINISED SO AS TO DETRACT FROM MOST SENSE OF FEMININITY

HOWEVER; THERE WERE SOME IDEAS PROPOSED BY GG WHICH I WOULD NOT HAVE SUPPORTED; AND IN PARTICULAR HER UNDERSTANDING OF THE GAY COMMUNITY (which I prefer to label as a non-heterosexuality) IS FAIRLY INACCURATE:

BUT GREER IS RIGHT; I BELIEVE; IT SHOULD BE TIME TO GET ANGRY AGAIN; FEMINISM ITSELF HAS BEEN MASCULINISED OR DISTORTED INTO A FORM PALATABLE ENOUGH FOR OUR SOCIETY:

THIS WAS A BOOK I FOUND VERY HARD TO PUT DOWN- EVEN BY THE END OF THE LAST CHAPTER; I WOULD HAVE LOVED TO HAVE READ MORE OF THE BOOK