- Hardcover: 373 pages
- Publisher: Alfred a Knopf; First edition edition (May 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0375407472
- ISBN-13: 978-0375407475
- Product Dimensions: 23.9 x 15.5 x 4.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,626,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Amazon.co.uk Review
For women born in the immediate post-war 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. Greer's book broke the ground that women of today stand on--her unique stance combined outrageous humour and assertiveness to lead the way forward for women who wanted to take control of their lives.
Thirty years later in The Whole Woman, Greer is ready to get angry again. Picking up where she left off, she analyses the invasive ways in which the health industry persuades women into having their bodies and reproductive systems "managed". Greer lays out the facts about the high failure rate and devastating side effects of in vitro fertilisation, and the incongruity 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. Yet again, Greer has put her head above parapets others still fear to scale, and looked into the realities of the present as well as the possibilities for the future for the whole of women's lives. --Lisa Jardine. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
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.
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.
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First Sentence
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
The woman question is answered. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book is essential reading.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Whole Woman (Paperback)
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It ought to be compulsory reading for all complacent women (and men) who, for some inexplicable reason, believe that we live in an egalitarian society.The goals that feminism set out to achieve have not yet been realised. In "The Whole Woman", Greer forces readers to face up to this fact with a venom and passion that cannot fail to inspire. You may not agree with all her arguments, but there is no avoiding the fact that Greer will force you to examine your stance on feminism and equality. I know many women my age (27)who cannot bear the word feminism and its connotations. To them I can only say one thing: sit up and take notice. This book ought to change your life.
45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read it and Weep,
By
This review is from: The Whole Woman (Paperback)
Book review: Gemaine Greer, The Whole Woman"You've come a long way baby!" Remember the cigarette ad from the 70s? To hear Germaine Greer tell it we haven't, unless progress is having won the right to smoke thin cigarettes in public and take our chemotherapy like a man. Since writing The Female Eunuch, Dr. Greer is still angry after these thirty-two years--with good reason. In The Whole Woman, Greer carefully and wittily lays out excruciating truths. Women still earn 60% of a man's salary and shoulder most of the household tasks including child rearing. When fathers abscond it's the single impoverished mothers who bear the blame for rearing the maladapted children that contribute to the ills of society. Greer also states that the incidence of rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence is much higher than it was thirty years ago. In all cultures, women (especially when pregnant) continue to be insulted, threatened, molested, beaten, raped and murdered by men with impunity. So just how far have we come? Are the starved, hobbled, high-heeled, battered celebrity babes with their lifted faces, tucked tummies and liposuctioned hips our new role models? Has boob inflation replaced bra burning as the symbol of liberation? Erudite, witty and unapologetic The Whole Woman is better than a shot of HRT. Read it and weep.
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Flashes of brilliance and loony paranoia,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Whole Woman (Hardcover)
Poor old Germaine! Just when you're thumping the page and crying a quasi orgasmic "yes! yes!" she lets you down in the next chapter with a diatribe on some imagined male conspiracy against women. Hers is a brain that takes logical arguments to such an extreme that, eventually, she loses the plot entirely. It's a shame, because when she gets it right there is no-one to compare with her. I was disappointed that she has done such an about turn on the subject of female circumcision, and amazed that her usually well-toned encephalon didn't grasp the glaring truth. It's so blind to justify the act on the grounds that women themselves perform the operation. Of course they do! They have no choice. They are impoverished and uneducated and if they don't mutilate their fannies they won't find a man to rescue them from the gutter. Now THAT is the kind of invidious sexual injustice that I would expect Germaine Greer to challenge. Instead, she concentrates her energies on implying some Orwellian subjugation lies behind health screening for women in this country. Women, she says, are being falsely alarmed about their bodies and this fear is disempowering. I would have thought women can only be empowered by improved healthcare. Isn't it more alarming that testicular cancer is one of the greatest modern killers, but we hardly dare mention it because, well, it's embarrassing! The chapter on fathers is great, and Greer at her best. She shows a softer side here, and one we always suspected was lurking under her pissed-off exterior. In spite of the mass of contradictions, I'd still recommend this book. It is intelligent (rather than academic) in an appealingly chaotic way and, even if your disagree with most of what is written, at least it fires you up.
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