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The year 1970 saw the publication of Germaine Greer's famous book, The Female Eunuch. This book was without doubt an intellectual landmark within what is called the second feminist wave. The scope of both the book and the wave surpass feminist territory alone and aim at liberation as such, since they are directed against authoritarian political structures, the nuclear family, and power in general. Greer expresses this quite clearly in the last paragraph of her first chapter: “The anti-feminists have complained that the emancipation of women will imply the end of marriage, the end of morality and the end of the state…When we reap the harvest which the unwitting suffragettes sowed, we shall see that the anti-feminists were after all right.”
Meanwhile, a quarter of a century has elapsed, we are ready to reap this harvest, and indeed Greer's prophetic words turn out to be true. However, there is one snag: she herself does not seem to be very happy with the result. Quite the contrary. In an interview with The Sunday Times Magazine (March 3, 1996), she tells us that if women were in charge, the UK would return to the status of a kind of third-world country. The rest of the interview follows the same lines.
Since this reversal is rather a surprise, one is tempted to look for reassuring ad hominem explanations: she is probably frustrated, it has something to do with her age, etc. Strange as it may seem, we find an analogous, although more subtle, reversal in the work of another prominent figure of that movement, Doris Lessing. Anyone who has read her Martha Quest quatrology cannot doubt her literary talent or her left-wing feminist commitment. Nevertheless, in her recent autobiography and the ensuing interviews, she takes her distance and even goes so far as to say that she deplores its impact upon her personal life.
The crowning touch came in 1990 when Camille Paglia stormed onto the scene with her Sexual Personae, which immediately turned her into a cult figure. Indeed, her