The Whole Woman - Hardcover

Greer, Germaine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375407472 ISBN 13: 9780375407475

Publisher: Knopf, 1999

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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 the Back Cover

"Compulsively readable."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Right on."--Los Angeles Times

"She is deliberately irate and humorous, challenging and disarming as she seeks to undermine firmly held beliefs."--Newsday

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0375407472
• ISBN 13: 9780375407475
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384