Comment by Helen Lobato
Generation Xers feel ripped-off by feminism because they have not been able to fulfil the high expectations of themselves that feminism has created. This is the finding of a recent sociological study of Victorian women aged 30-45 years, undertaken by Deakin University.
For the baby boomer women in the study, the women's movement is an unbridled success. There was disquiet among the younger women about the incompatibility of mothering and paid work, and society's devaluation of the former, and this is seen as a betrayal by feminism.
So what has gone wrong?
As Germaine Greer wrote in The Whole Woman, her latest book, when the name "women's libber" was dropped in favour of "feminist", the idea of liberation faded with the word. The women's movement settled for equality.
Liberation is not about assimilation, it is about asserting difference. Feminists of the late 1960s and 1970s were aware that women would not find freedom by living the lives of men. As Greer puts it: "... seekers after equality clamoured to be admitted to smoke-filled male haunts". She talks about lifestyle feminism, the type that sees the achievement of membership at male-only establishment clubs as a triumph, even though it is supporting the system that oppresses women worldwide.
Greer says: "A women's body is the battlefield where she fights for liberation". Every year vast numbers of women have hysterectomies without sufficient cause and we dare not miss our regular smears and mammograms — it all smacks of control. Greer points out that men are not directed to front for annual prostate checks!
Women's acceptance of medical control over their bodies is described by Greer: "Women are driven through the health system like sheep through a dip". The disease they are being treated for is womanhood, she writes.
Greer's solution to the problem of child-care is that every woman who decides to have a child should be paid enough money to raise that child. If she continues in paid employment, she can use this money to pay for professional child-care or stay at home to look after the child.
Where would society get the money for this? It is a matter of priorities — we could spend less on the military and more on the children. Dignified motherhood is a feminist priority.
Maybe if Greer was listened to, the women of generation X would not be questioning feminism. True feminism is about liberation, for all human beings, not a search for equality in a flawed system.