Abstract
In this chapter, Lidström Brock asks whether realist biography can also be feminist. Exploring the critical portrayals of Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer in realist biography, her proposed answer is that these biographies fulfill feminist needs by presenting their respective subjects as warnings to readers, rather than as positive examples and feminist inspiration. By linking the purportedly objective author positions taken up in the two biographies to the genre’s truth-producing practices, Lidström Brock goes on to show that the genre relies on the ideological usurpation of the subject’s own life story. Her readings of the critical depictions of Friedan and Greer clarify how competing definitions of feminism result in distinct types of biographical plots, thereby exposing the ideological dimension of all life writing.
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Notes
- 1.
Gerda Lerner, “The Majority Finds its Past: Placing Women in History,” in Feminisms: A Reader, ed. Maggie Humm (Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 327.
- 2.
Camille Paglia, “Back to the Barricades,” New York Times Book Review, May 9, 1999, 19.
- 3.
Seyla Benhabib, “From Identity Politics to Social Feminism: A Plea for the Nineties,” in Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship and the State, ed. David Trend (New York: Routledge, 1996), 29.
- 4.
Camille Paglia, “Crying Wolf,” Salon.com, February 7, 2001, http://www.salon.com/2001/02/07/inaug/. Other feminists, such as Susan Faludi, have referred to the feminist identity crisis as a myth. This myth proposes the death of feminism, that is, the loss of feminism’s meaning after all its political demands have supposedly been fulfilled. Faludi views this myth as part of a feminist “backlash,” created by the male establishment to undermine the future of organized feminism. The backlash’s main message is that “[w]omen are unhappy precisely because they are free. Women are enslaved by their own liberation” (Faludi’s italics). Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women (London: Vintage, 1992), 2.
- 5.
According to Patricia Bradley, “the second wave of the women’s movement [was] ranging from 1963, the year of the publication of The Feminine Mystique, to 1975, when the initial energy of the movement was over, at least as far as mass media was concerned.” Patricia Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 1963–1975 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), xi.
- 6.
Ibid., 158.
- 7.
Rosen, The World Split Open, 216–217.
- 8.
For example, Bradley writes that “in taking to the public stage to market The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan not only contributed to the success of the book but became famous herself” (29) and “the year Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, Gloria Steinem…was already well on her way to celebrity.” Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 143.
- 9.
According to Bradley, none of the women discussed in this study were leaders who could “call on a body of organized supporters or levers of power.” Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 153. See also Rosen, The World Split Open, 208.
- 10.
Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 160–162.
- 11.
Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 11.
- 12.
For example, see Martin Seymour Smith, The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1998).
- 13.
Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 11–12.
- 14.
Ibid., 15.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid., 22.
- 17.
Ibid., 30–32.
- 18.
Ibid., 364.
- 19.
Ibid., 364.
- 20.
Ibid., 338.
- 21.
Ibid., 103–104.
- 22.
Ibid., 364.
- 23.
Ibid., 382. Friedan argues that “the only thing that has changed so far is our own consciousness…What we need is a political movement,” thereby distancing herself from a radical feminist politics that emphasizes consciousness-raising as a significant political strategy. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 382.
- 24.
Ibid., 374.
- 25.
Ibid., 384–385.
- 26.
Ibid., 384–385.
- 27.
Ibid., 385, 386.
- 28.
Ibid., 385.
- 29.
For instance, see Friedan’s obituary in the New York Times. Margalit Fox, “Betty Friedan, Who Ignited Cause in ‘Feminine Mystique,’ Dies at 85,” NYTimes.com, February 5, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/national/05friedan.html?ex=1296795600&en=30472e5004a66ea3&ei=5090.
- 30.
Betty Friedan, Life So Far: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
- 31.
In her autobiography, Friedan states that “I never intended to write a memoir of my so-called life…But my hand was forced, really, when my family, friends and colleagues, past and present, told me a few years ago that they were being contacted for interviews for books other people were writing about my life. Well, really” (Friedan’s italics). Friedan, Life So Far, 13. These words allow for an interpretation of Friedan’s 2000 autobiography as a form of “self-defense,” where she strives to re-establish both her politics and the “authority” over her life story through a full-length, coherent and chronological narrative. On biography as self-defense, see also Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject, 179. See also Larsson, Sanning och konsekvens, 116.
- 32.
Edel, Writing Lives, 174.
- 33.
Ibid., 175.
- 34.
Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 69–70. Friedan refers briefly to this “moment” also in her essay collection. Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (1976; repr. New York: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5.
- 35.
Horowitz’s source is an earlier biography aimed at young readers. See Justine Blau, Betty Friedan (New York: Chelsea House, 1990). Judith Hennessee quotes Friedan from a newspaper interview. See Paul Wilkes, “Mother Superior to Women’s Lib,” New York Times Magazine, November 29, 1970, 140.
- 36.
Friedan, It Changed My Life, 5. According to Friedan, “the feminine mystique permits, even encourages, women to ignore the question of their identity.” Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 71. On her gradual feminist awareness, she writes that “above all, what drove me to consciousness was the fact that…I too embraced and lived that feminine mystique. Determined that I would find that feminine fulfillment which had eluded my mother, I first gave up a psychology fellowship and then even a newspaper reporting job.” Friedan, It Changed My Life, 5.
- 37.
Friedan, Life So Far, 59–60.
- 38.
Ibid., 62. Friedan explains her reasoning further: “I didn’t want to be like my mother. Nothing my father ever did, nothing he bought her, nothing we did ever seemed to satisfy her. When she married my father, she’d have to give up her job editing the woman’s page of the newspaper in Peoria.” Friedan, It Changed My Life, 4.
- 39.
In her autobiography, Friedan stresses the limited future to which girls had to look forward: “Nobody had ever really asked me, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up, little girl?’ The boys were asked that. As for the girls, ‘You’re a pretty little girl, you’ll be a mommy like your mommy.’ But I wasn’t a pretty little girl, and the one thing in the world I didn’t want to be was a mommy like my mommy…But what other kind of woman was there to be? Most of my women professors at Smith were spinsters or mannish, as were the one or two women doctors and lawyers in Peoria.” Friedan, Life So Far, 47.
- 40.
Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 156–157.
- 41.
Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 5.
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
Ibid., 249.
- 45.
Ibid., 101.
- 46.
Ibid., 97.
- 47.
Ibid., 88.
- 48.
Ibid., 89.
- 49.
Ibid., 89–90.
- 50.
Ibid., 19.
- 51.
Ibid., 95.
- 52.
Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 158.
- 53.
Ericsson, “Inledning,” 5.
- 54.
Ibid., 6.
- 55.
Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 247.
- 56.
Ibid., 14–15.
- 57.
Ibid., 14.
- 58.
Weinberg, Telling the Untold Story, 30.
- 59.
Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 246.
- 60.
Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 244. See also Lori E. Rotskoff, who writes that “[Horowitz] often speculates about the hypothetical book ‘[Friedan] was clearly capable of’—the book she ‘might have written’…had she not abandoned her earlier radicalism…[Horowitz] reads The Feminine Mystique primarily as a kind of loss.” Lori E. Rotskoff, “Home-Grown Radical or Home-Bound Housewife? Rethinking the Origins of 1960s Feminism through the Life and Work of Betty Friedan,” Reviews in American History 28, no. 1 (2000): 126.
- 61.
For examples of Horowitz’s interpretation of Friedan’s articles from the 1940s and the 1950s, see Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 1 and 102.
- 62.
About her publications in the 1970s, Horowitz claims that Friedan’s “articles were a complicated mixture of what she wanted to say, what she was willing to say in order to get published, and what those who controlled the media allowed her to say.” Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 234.
- 63.
Friedan, Life So Far, 62.
- 64.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 5.
- 65.
Ibid., 12.
- 66.
Ibid., 10.
- 67.
Ibid., 22.
- 68.
Ibid.
- 69.
Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 249.
- 70.
Ibid., 233.
- 71.
In 1974, Friedan writes: “After the war, I had become very political, very involved, consciously radical. Not about women, for heaven’s sake!…[Y]ou certainly didn’t think about being a woman, politically. It was only recently that we had begun to think about ourselves as women. But that wasn’t political—it was the opposite of politics.” Friedan, It Changed My Life, 8.
- 72.
See Chapter 2.
- 73.
Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 247.
- 74.
In line with Steve Weinberg, Horowitz argues that “the task of the historian is not only to be sympathetic but also to develop a story that makes connections that someone who lived the life might miss or see differently.” Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 247.
- 75.
Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, 61–63.
- 76.
Shapiro, The Politics of Representation, 6.
- 77.
Michael J. Shapiro argues the inevitably ideological nature of political analysis by claiming that, although “ideological production is not the goal or intention informing the field of social and political analysis, it is a consequence of the practices that shape a field, that is, of the prevailing boundary commitments that separate one domain of knowledge/practice and its objects of attention from another.” Shapiro, The Politics of Representation, 7.
- 78.
Ibid., xiii.
- 79.
Ibid., 65.
- 80.
In his biography of Friedan, Horowitz argues that a “significant result of McCarthyism was that left-wing feminists had to go underground in the 1950s. Left-wing feminists later emerged as second-wave feminists.” Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 11.
- 81.
Judith Shulevitz, “A Mother’s Day Mash Note, of Sorts, to Betty Friedan,” Slate.com, May 9, 2000, http://www.slate.com/id/1005267.
- 82.
Ibid.
- 83.
Ibid.
- 84.
Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 10.
- 85.
Benita Roth, “What Are Social Movements and What Is Gendered about Women’s Participation in Social Movements? A Sociological Perspective,” Women and Social Movements in The United States 1600–2000, http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/socm/intro.htm.
- 86.
Ibid.
- 87.
Ibid. See also Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 135–137.
- 88.
Roth, “What Are Social Movements.”
- 89.
Judith Shulevitz, “Outside Agitator,” NYTimes.com, May 9, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/reviews/990509.09shulevt.html.
- 90.
Shulevitz, “Outside Agitator.”
- 91.
Hennessee, Betty Friedan, xv–xvi.
- 92.
Ibid., xvi.
- 93.
Ibid., xvi–xvii.
- 94.
Richard Ellman on how psychoanalysis has shaped biography: “Freud’s predominant legacy, the ‘conviction that a secret life is going on within us that is only partly under our control,’ focuses biographical inquiry on the private, unconscious, motivational drives, particularly those imprinted in childhood, understood to shape public, conscious life.” Richard Ellmann, “Freud and Literary Biography,” The American Scholar 53, no. 4 (Autumn 1983/1984): 465, qt. in Parke, Biography, 25.
- 95.
Hennessee, Betty Friedan, xvii.
- 96.
Ibid., 113.
- 97.
Mary Evans, Missing Persons: The Impossibility of Auto/biography (London: Routledge, 1999), 23.
- 98.
Ibid.
- 99.
Hennessee, Betty Friedan, 40. Friedan describes her political commitment at the time in similar terms: “It was, indeed, chic for our generation to be radical long before they dubbed it ‘radical chic.’” Friedan, Life So Far, 57.
- 100.
Hennessee, Betty Friedan, 36.
- 101.
Ibid.
- 102.
Hennessee argues that Friedan’s “male counterparts at Ivy League schools [were treated differently.] Unlike [Friedan], they were regarded as future leaders, the next generation that would run the country. It was that expectation, that tacit support system, that had launched them and kept them afloat, she believed.” Hennessee, Betty Friedan, 37.
- 103.
Ibid., 35.
- 104.
Ibid., 40.
- 105.
Evans, Missing Persons, 139.
- 106.
Ibid., 139.
- 107.
David Ellis, Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 30. Ellis quotes William McKinley Runyon, Life Histories and Psychobiography: Explanations in Theory and Method (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 58.
- 108.
Hennessee writes about Friedan’s meeting with Indira Gandhi that they “got on beautifully.” Hennessee, Betty Friedan, 95. She also describes Friedan’s more enduring relationships: “Throughout the years, people fell in and out of favor with Betty, but the family of choice endured…[O]ne of the group said: ‘She has a strong sense of communal life and friendships that have a history.…’” Ibid., 150.
- 109.
Ibid., xv.
- 110.
Hennessee describes both Friedan and Abzug as “women of single-minded purpose who convinced themselves that they and the cause are one” (ibid., 164). She acknowledges ideological differences between Friedan and Abzug/Steinem, but only in passing: “beyond their jockeying for position, there were ideological differences between them. Bella and Gloria wanted the caucus to be a voice for humanist values…Betty thought attention to such issues as Vietnam and welfare would interfere with the main goal, which was electing women…She was an equality feminist” (ibid., 167–168). On the same page, however, Hennessee then questions Friedan’s politics by quoting Nikki Beare: “Betty had her own agenda, and nobody knew what it was.” Hennessee, Betty Friedan, 168.
- 111.
Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 18.
- 112.
Ibid.
- 113.
Ibid., 21.
- 114.
Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, 248.
- 115.
Ibid. See also Casper, Constructing American Lives, 111.
- 116.
Yet Hennessee also believes that “the media had trivialized and distorted the movement, turned power struggles into catfights and attached sexual innuendos to serious issues.” Hennessee, Betty Friedan, 159.
- 117.
Ibid., 152–153.
- 118.
Ibid., 153–154.
- 119.
Ibid., 154.
- 120.
Ibid.
- 121.
Ibid., 153–154, 287.
- 122.
According to Hennessee, Carl “taunted Betty with being a lesbian, an unspeakably insulting word, then, perhaps the worst thing anyone could call a woman” (ibid., 109). She writes further that “[Betty] continued to attack [lesbians] long after the rest of the movement had embraced them. The use of the word ‘lesbian’ (as Carl had called Betty) had always been the first line of attack against feminists, and Betty was far from the only woman in the movement to fear the label. She saw secret plots, a faceless enemy” (ibid., 131–132).
- 123.
Friedan, Life So Far, 232.
- 124.
Ibid., 338–378.
- 125.
In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan asks: “Does the image by which modern American women live also leavesomething out…? This image—created by the women’s magazines, by advertisements, television, movies, novels, columns and books by experts on marriage and the family, child psychology, sexual adjustment and by the popularizers of sociology and psychoanalysis—shapes women’s lives today and mirror their dreams. It may give a clue to the problem that has no name.” Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 34.
- 126.
Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 5.
- 127.
Parke, Biography, 26.
- 128.
For example, see Shulevitz, “Outside Agitator.”
- 129.
Edel, Writing Lives, 15.
- 130.
Ellen Willis, No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 122.
- 131.
Ibid., 124, 132.
- 132.
For example, see Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970; repr. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
- 133.
Willis, No More Nice Girls, 118.
- 134.
Here, “psychoanalysis” stands for a general, rather than a particular, psychoanalytical approach. Freudian psychoanalysis, especially, has been criticized by advocates of feminist consciousness-raising. Yet, Freudian psychoanalysis has also been the subject of feminist revisionism: see, for example, Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973) and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990; repr. New York: Routledge, 1999).
- 135.
The belief in the therapeutic effects of listening to others’ life stories (especially through auto/biography) is not uniquely feminist. Casper writes that “psychological ideas have helped change the ways people read biographies, not just the ways authors write them.” He identifies a more general “culture of autobiography,” in which “hearing the self-told stories by others…offer examples in how to tell one’s own life.” Casper, Constructing American Lives, 326.
- 136.
Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 19.
- 137.
Weinberg, Telling the Untold Story, 19.
- 138.
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971).
- 139.
Evans, Missing Persons 113.
- 140.
See, for instance, Laura Miller, who writes that “members of the media, who once found Greer’s long legs, bawdy braggadocio and paeans to group sex irresistible…are crestfallen to learn that she has recanted the doctrine of free love and now condemns all men as brutal, lazy sperm factories incapable of offering women emotional or sexual satisfaction.” Laura Miller, “Brilliant Careers: Germaine Greer,” Salon.com, June 22, 1999, accessed May 13, 2003, http://www.salon.com/people/bc/1999/06/22/greer/.
- 141.
See Turner and Hector, “Greer on Revolution Germaine on Love.”
- 142.
See Germaine Greer, White Beech: The Rainforest Years (2013; repr. London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
- 143.
Examples of Greer’s contradictory statements include those she has made about her mother. Since the 1970s Greer has argued that she was physically abused by her mother. Yet in 1996, Greer “flatly denied that [her mother’s behavior] constituted abuse at all.” Wallace, Germaine Greer, 286.
- 144.
When Wallace’s biography was first published, Greer lived mainly in the UK. In 2001, she moved back to Australia, where she has since worked to conserve and re-establish the rainforest on a piece of land in Queensland. See Greer, White Beech, 2.
- 145.
For example, Life magazine referred to Greer as the “saucy feminist that even men like” after the publication of The Feminist Mystique. N.a., “Saucy Feminist that Even Men Like,” Life, May 7, 1971, 30–34. The epithet became a catchphrase that is still associated with Greer. See, for instance, Louise France, “Who are you calling a feminist? Interview: Periel Aschenbrand,” The Observer, Observer Woman Section, April 9, 2006, 28; and Laura Miller, “Brilliant Careers: Germaine Greer.”
- 146.
See Greer, The Female Eunuch, 17.
- 147.
- 148.
In The Female Eunuch Greer argued that women’s “sexuality is both denied and misrepresented by being identified as passivity” (ibid., 17). She further stated that “we must reject femininity as meaning without libido, and therefore incomplete, subhuman, a cultural reduction of human possibilities, and rely upon the indefinite term female, which retains the possibility of female libido” (ibid., 79).
- 149.
Ibid., 358.
- 150.
Ibid., 77.
- 151.
Ibid., 16.
- 152.
Ibid., 327.
- 153.
Ibid., 13.
- 154.
Ibid., 333. In an article shortly after Friedan’s death, Greer once again distanced her views on sexuality’s role in the oppression of women. Unlike Friedan, Greer did not see women as oversexualized in the 1970s, but rather as sexually repressed: “What Betty saw as sexuality, I saw as the denial and repression of female sexuality. The Female Eunuch was conceived in reaction to The Feminine Mystique.” Germaine Greer, “The Betty I Knew,” The Guardian, February 7, 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/07/gender.bookscomment.
- 155.
Greer, The Female Eunuch, 335. To radical feminists, Greer writes, men “are the enemy in much the same way that some crazed boy in uniform was the enemy of another like him in most respects except the uniform. One possible tactic is to try to get the uniforms off” (ibid.).
- 156.
In The Female Eunuch, Greer states that “much lesbianism…may be understood as revolt against the limitations of the female role of passivity, hypocrisy and indirect action, as well as rejection of the brutality and mechanicalness of male sexual passion” (ibid., 330). However, Greer also points out that the “lecherous curiosity and violent insult” that homosexuals attract from mainstream culture causes too many women to conceal their sexual orientation (ibid., 331).
- 157.
Ibid., 346.
- 158.
See Margaret Talbot: “In 1970, The Female Eunuch made Germaine Greer famous, and it made feminism famous, too. ‘Every self-respecting woman on the Left owned a copy or still owns a copy somewhere around the house, dog-eared and coffee-stained with use,’ Lisa Jardine recently recalled in the London Observer. ‘For women born in the immediate postwar years, there was ‘before Greer’ and ‘after Greer.’’” Margaret Talbot, “The Female Misogynist,” The New Republic, May 31, 1999, 34. Talbot quotes Lisa Jardine, “Growing Up with Greer,” The Observer, March 7, 1999, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1999/mar/07/society.
- 159.
According to Wallace, “The American hardback rights reportedly sold for $30,000 and the paperback rights for the then-phenomenal sum of $135,000.” Wallace, Germaine Greer, 177.
- 160.
Ibid., 160.
- 161.
Ibid., x.
- 162.
Ibid., 160, 302.
- 163.
Ibid., ix.
- 164.
Ibid., ix.
- 165.
Ibid., 38.
- 166.
Ibid., 229. Germaine Greer, Sex & Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
- 167.
Ibid., 262. Germaine Greer, The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991).
- 168.
Reviewers have compared Greer’s third book, Sex and Destiny (1984), with The Female Eunuch (1970) and drawn attention to what they saw as a dramatic and troubling shift in Greer’s perception of women’s sexuality. For example, see Carol Iannone, who writes that: “Sex and Destiny contains so many startling shifts in thought that one might expect they would be accompanied by deep soul-searching and lengthy explanations. In fact, they are barely acknowledged.” Carol Iannone, “Feminism Ad Absurdum,” Commentary Magazine (August 1984), https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/sex-and-destiny-by-germaine-greer/. See also Rhoda Koenig, “The Cradle Will Rock,” New York Magazine, April 23, 1984, 98–99.
- 169.
Wallace, Germaine Greer, 213.
- 170.
Ibid., 162, 157, 160.
- 171.
Ibid., 163.
- 172.
Ibid.
- 173.
Ibid., 153, 163.
- 174.
Ibid., 163. Wallace quotes Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, Sweet Freedom, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 12.
- 175.
According to Wallace, criticism of the 1960s (non-feminist) sexual liberation movement was an important step in the development of women’s consciousness-raising. Wallace, Germaine Greer, 164.
- 176.
Ibid., 15.
- 177.
Ibid., 122.
- 178.
Ibid.
- 179.
- 180.
In Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989), Greer describes her search for information about her dead father, who lied to his family about his past. Greer does not make any overt feminist statements in the biography, nor does she include many autobiographical details, but the obvious admiration she expresses for a distant and uncaring father supports Wallace’s interpretation of Greer as needing to seek the approval or attention of the men around her. Germaine Greer, Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (New York: Ballantine, 1989).
- 181.
Wallace, Germaine Greer, 91.
- 182.
Ibid., 34.
- 183.
Ibid., 67. Wallace quotes John Anderson, “Art and Morality,” in Art and Morality: John Anderson on Literature and Aesthetics, ed. Graham Cullum and Kimon Lycos (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1982), 90.
- 184.
Ibid., 107.
- 185.
Ibid.
- 186.
Ibid., 148.
- 187.
Ibid.
- 188.
Ibid., 296.
- 189.
See Muriel Bradbrook, The James Bryce Memorial Lecture delivered in the Wolfson Hall of Somerset College, Oxford on 6 March 1975 by Professor M. C. Bradbrook, Litt. D. Cantab, Mistress of Girton College (Oxford: Holywell Press, 1975), discussed in Wallace, Germaine Greer, 295.
- 190.
Ibid., 295.
- 191.
Ibid., 296–297.
- 192.
Ibid., 164.
- 193.
Ibid., 284.
- 194.
Ibid., 291, 283, 286.
- 195.
The socio-historical perspective may also have been introduced to cover a “lack” of material pertaining specifically to Greer’s later and “personal” life, a lack that Wallace acknowledges already in the introduction to the biography: “Biographies which follow—especially those written, as she would prefer, after her death—will obviously provide more detail on her years in Britain” (ibid., xi).
- 196.
Ibid., 157.
- 197.
Ibid.
- 198.
Ibid., 163.
- 199.
Ibid.
- 200.
Ibid., 79.
- 201.
Ibid., 44.
- 202.
Ibid.
- 203.
Ibid., 43.
- 204.
Ibid., 195.
- 205.
The result is a biography to which Wallace’s own criticism of Greer could apply: a biography where “philosophical flights of fancy [are] at odds with statements…made elsewhere, sometimes even within the same work”; in other words, an “inconsistent” realist biography (ibid., 191).
- 206.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (1979; repr. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 15.
- 207.
Wallace, Germaine Greer, 284.
- 208.
Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism 138–139.
- 209.
Town Bloody Hall, dir. Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker, April 3, 1979 (New York: Pennebaker Hegedus Films, USA), DVD.
- 210.
Wallace, Germaine Greer, 188.
- 211.
Ibid., 189.
- 212.
Ibid.
- 213.
Ibid., 188, 201.
- 214.
Ibid., 197.
- 215.
Ibid.
- 216.
Ibid., 302.
- 217.
Cohen, The Sisterhood, 249.
- 218.
Ibid.
- 219.
Friedan, It Changed My Life, 203–211.
- 220.
Greer’s insistence on sexual freedom also anticipates so-called third-wave feminists, who encouraged women to explore sexuality in whatever ways they felt comfortable. See, for example, Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (New York: Ballantine, 1997).
- 221.
In a 1993 foreword to the book, Greer insists that The Female Eunuch is about women’s “right to sexual expression [but also] the right to reject penetration by the male member, the right to safe sex, the right to chastity.” Greer, The Female Eunuch, 10.
- 222.
Ibid., 21.
- 223.
Steedman, “La Theorie qui n’en est pas une,” 39, 43.
- 224.
Ibid., 38.
- 225.
Ibid., 44.
- 226.
Ibid.
- 227.
Ibid. According to some critics, a strict feminist psychological approach further disregards the possible legal and political effects of patriarchal society on women’s lives. The ability to explore one’s identity can be seen as a privilege, which offers few practical solutions to end women’s poverty or protect women against domestic violence. For example, see Naomi Rockler-Gladen, “Third Wave Feminism: Personal Empowerment Dominates This Personal Philosophy,” feminism.suite101.com, May 3, 2007, http://feminism.suite101.com/article.cfm/third_wave_feminism.
- 228.
Steedman, “La Theorie qui n’en est pas une,” 34.
- 229.
Stanley refers to realist biography as the “purity of characterization approach.” Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 11.
- 230.
Elizabeth A. Kaiden, “Don’t Force a Size 10 into a 4,” Straits Times, July 20, 1999, 6. Kaiden continues: “Don’t look at one and hope to understand thousands. Don’t ask anyone to stand in for everyone. Don’t give the story a moral it never had” (ibid.).
- 231.
Jennifer Wicke, “Celebrity Material: Materialist Feminism and the Culture of Celebrity,” in Feminism, the Public and the Private, ed. Joan B. Landes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 385–408. Jennifer Wicke emphasizes the “dizzy indeterminacy” of celebrity feminism, yet categorizes it broadly as “celebrity pronouncements made by and about women with high visibility in various media” (ibid., 389, 386). The celebrity zone, she argues, is “a powerful political site” that does not produce “role models or exemplary ‘feminists’” (ibid., 390). Instead, Wicke argues, it is “a space for registering and refracting the current material conditions under which feminism is partly practiced” (ibid.). Nor should the celebrity zone be dismissed as empty imagery, she continues, since there are “no authentic images to compare with supposedly false ones” (ibid., 397). As such, the zone promises new perspectives on “Greer,” whose “life” seems to gain meaning largely in and through popular mass media, such as reports about her “kidnapping” by a female student in April 2003 and her participation in the reality-television show Celebrity Big Brother in 2005.
- 232.
Ibid., 390.
- 233.
Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 120–121.
- 234.
Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 3–4.
- 235.
Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 8.
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Lidström Brock, M. (2016). Negotiating the Tradition—Feminist Realist Biography. In: Writing Feminist Lives. Breaking Feminist Waves. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47178-5_3
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