Germaine Greer
From 3QD. A wonderful history of the women's movement laid out by one of it's seminal figures.
Better half still battling
ALR From: The Australian May 05, 2010 12:05AM 1 comment
THE past 40 years have seen huge changes in the lives and expectations of women all across the world. To the women of the middle classes of the Western world it may well seem that the changes in their situation are the most relevant and the most important, as the proliferating media debate, revise, reformulate and revile feminist ideas. Much of this is mere chatter, which fuels the lifestyle magazines, is dictated by fashion and the endless hunt for novelty, and can safely be ignored.
Feminism was no sooner recognised as a social force than the commercial media were bound to declare that it was over. The odd woman had barely got her bottom on a seat in the boardroom before we were told that high-flying female executives were ditching wealth and power and opting for stay-at-home motherhood. Contrariwise we were told that now that women could have it all, there was no need for feminist activism or even feminist attitudes.
Under the twitter could be heard the rumble of massive change. Something terrible happened to marriage. Why do half of all marriages end in divorce and why are so many of those divorces initiated by the partner who has most to lose, the wife? Is this the end of monogamy and the patriarchal family? Are men and women struggling to arrive at rational systems of child-rearing that do not presuppose the subjection of one partner? Or is it just women? Patterns of cohabitation and parenting are disintegrating and reforming, as women walk away from relationships that are at worst demeaning or dangerous, or at best unfair and unrewarding.
At the same time, lovers of the same sex are demanding and winning the right to marry. This may look very like chaos, but chaos is the matrix out of which viable structures form.
Wherever we look we seem to be reaping the whirlwind. I learn from reports in the Australian media that since January 2007, 48 men have been able to prove by using DNA testing that the children they were paying to support were not their biological offspring, and the Child Support Agency has given them their money back, $434,378 in all. The largest single payment was $70,000.
Actually, hundreds of tests were carried out and many more men learned to their sorrow that the children they were obliged to support were indeed theirs. It begins to look very much as if men are more interested in not being fathers than they are in being fathers. In that case Engels was wrong and the patriarchal family did not evolve as a mechanism to control the means of human reproduction. There may be others, but the only case I know of in which a father had recourse to DNA testing to claim a child rather than reject it is that of British politician David Blunkett, whose claim was disproved. DNA testing is advertised in the lads' magazines solely as a way of disproving paternity.
None of this I foresaw. I sat down at my red Olivetti typewriter in 1969 to write an explanation of why giving women the vote had made very little difference to the masculine power structure. I pitched The Female Eunuch at the youngish individual reader, the discontented woman of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published six years earlier. Unlike Betty, I didn't believe that women's sexuality was the problem; to me it was more likely to be the solution.
The domesticated woman was, in my view, estranged and alienated from her own sexual desires, and hence her creativity and her joy in life. She saw herself as duty-bound to respond to the demands of others, as a sex object, as a carer, as a worker. Her life was an endless struggle to fulfil contradictory demands. Her consciousness of failure in fulfilling those demands was endlessly exploited by the billion-dollar beauty business and by all the other professionals who make a living out of female anxiety.
Among the impossible demands that are still being made of the woman of 2010, as they were of the woman of 1970, is that she stay forever young, when our pedophilic culture makes clear that actual adulthood is already too old. Why else would Kate Moss, who has the body of a 12-year-old, be the rich world's favourite model? The anguish to which The Female Eunuch addressed itself is more acute now than it has ever been. Little girls are frantic about the least sign of fat on thighs or buttocks; girl children are starving themselves; girl toddlers everywhere are hideous in pink, which they wear as a uniform confirming sexual identity. Teenagers are demanding augmentation mammoplasty and their parents are happy to pay for it, because they think it will confer self-esteem and confidence. As if.
The Female Eunuch was part of a process that was already a hundred years old and is now called, for no obvious reason, the second wave of feminism. The women who began to agitate more than a century ago for the right to earn their own living were those women who had no chance of marrying and living off the family wage earned by a husband. In the closing decades of the 19th century, never-married females, particularly those of the middle class, were forced to live in humiliating dependency on their relatives. As the cost of setting up house rose in comparison to real wages, more and more men found that they could not afford to marry. The only work available to unmarried women was menial, unsuitable for ladies of the middle classes.
One job respectable middle-class women had always done was teaching, either in private houses as governesses or in dame schools. The enactment of laws providing for education of all children was only possible because of the existence of a pool of unmarried women who could take over primary education. The exclusion of married women from the profession seemed only fair: a married woman who was being supported by her husband should not be in a position to displace a woman who had to earn her own living. Marriage would continue to mean instant disqualification from teaching, followed by resignation or dismissal, until well into the 20th century.
The huge manpower losses of World War I meant that the number of never-married women and young widows multiplied. Virtually all single girls went to work and as time went on they worked for longer and longer, before finally making it to the altar. For more and more women, suddenly to lose their independent income and be obliged to stay at home seemed irksome and unnecessary. The standard of living, otherwise known as the level of consumption, was rising fast and the family wage was not rising at the same pace. Working-class women who worked as single girls were used to continuing to work after they were married; middle-class women soon had no choice but to follow their example.
The women who worked in essential industries during World War II were at first happy to stay at home and care for their husbands and have babies when it ended, but it was not long before restlessness set in. Women were by then reluctant to produce more than an ever-decreasing number of children, partly because the cost of parenthood was also rising. Motherhood was no longer a career option. Child-bearing being delayed and optimum family size being reached early meant women were less and less likely to devote their lives to it. Changing economic circumstances meant few of them could afford to.
At the time The Female Eunuch was being written the numbers of married women with dependent children who were having to go to work to finance the family debt and maintain their standard of living was inexorably rising.
Most of those women were not only poorly paid but guilty and harassed, amid much media scaremongering about "latch-key children" and juvenile deliquency. The only child care available was either ruinously expensive or involved exploiting relatives. The work the women were doing was for the most part anything but fulfilling and offered no prospects of advancement. The trade unions clung to the unrealistic notion of the family wage and paid their female staff as badly and provided as poor conditions for them as any other employer.
The paucity of employment options for women with school-age children was not so much depressing as humiliating, but young women leaving school were not much likelier to find well-paid and fulfilling work than their married sisters. Teaching and nursing were conspicuously badly paid. Something had to give. For the first time there was talk of equal pay. The trade unions, which should have known better, turned this into "equal pay for work of equal value", with the consequence that women's work was defined as inferior in value. A woman sewing upholstery for a car, say, was deemed to be doing a job of less value than a man tightening a screw on the assembly line. Women cleaners were doing work of less value than male janitors.
Women's jobs remain systematically undervalued to this day. What is more depressing is that formerly elite occupations, in medicine, for example, are declining in prestige as women come to dominate in the field. The status of teachers has never been lower as hands are wrung over the shortage of male teachers, particularly in primary schools. The dominance of women in caring for children, the disabled and the elderly may be one way of explaining the relentless marginalisation of all three sectors, despite the rhetoric adopted by all political parties when it is time to get out the female vote.
Then there is the perennial problem of housework. Though there was constant talk of men doing their bit, the person who does housework remains female. All the data shows that the bulk of unpaid work across the world is still done by females. As for housework, men were quick to understand the obvious: that housework expands to fill the time available.
If I go into student lodgings, which are nowadays usually mixed, I will find that the girls do the cleaning and buy the toilet paper and the instant coffee, and the boys let them. The boys say they don't mind dirty dishes stacked up in the sink; the girls say they do. At the same time that we are being regaled with dire warnings about the way today's women emasculate men, men are blithely availing themselves of the unpaid services of women, without needing to consider themselves in the least beholden.
Sport occupies twice as many column centimetres as international or domestic politics, and the rhetoric of sport has never been more masculinist. Women's participation in sport increases slowly, and women's support of women's sport increases even more slowly. Being sporty carries certain connotations; most women in the public eye will still insist that they are girly girls who adore dressing-up and shopping.
The feminist revolution has been called "the longest revolution". Extensive change is inevitable but it cannot be hurried or imposed top-down. If in the developed world women cannot take one step forward without being struck by a disproportionate backlash, the situation in the developing world is immeasurably worse.
Asia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's population, and all across Asia the status of women appears to be at best unchanged and at worst deteriorating, despite the best efforts of the international community.
It was Mao Zedong who said that "women hold up half the sky". This was because like other socialist leaders he realised that women were more reliable agents of social change than men, not because he had read The Female Eunuch. (The Chinese language rights were acquired in 1999 by a publisher in Taipei; the famous Inner Mongolian People's Publishing House published it in the same year.)
In Maoist China 40 years ago, the sexes dressed alike and worked side by side. Women workers were as likely to be promoted as men, and party cadres were as likely to be women as men. With the introduction of the one-child policy in 1978 it became apparent that, whatever the official line, in the popular estimation, including that of women themselves, women were worth much less than men. If there was to be only one child per family, most people wanted it to be a son.
Nobody knows how many female foetuses were aborted or how many girl babies were killed. Nobody knows how many unmated men China has now; estimates vary from 30 million to 50 million. Unmated men are both vulnerable and dangerous. They form the majority of prison populations all over the world. How China will deal with many millions of never-married men is imponderable. They could form the largest standing army the world has seen.
In India in 1971 I found among the books spread out on the pavement by an itinerant bookseller a bootleg copy of The Female Eunuch, offset printed on the cheapest paper, and selling for a few rupees. Until it fell to pieces, it was my personal copy. (The first Hindi edition was printed in 1999.) When I went to Deolali in 1985 to research my father's wartime experience in the military hospital there, I met the commanding officers of what is now a cantonment hospital for the Indian army. They were two full colonels, both women, imposing in their khaki saris. When I wrote down my name for them, they cried, "Oh no! Oh no! Is it really you?" They grabbed my hands and held them, their eyes shining.
I was astonished and deeply humbled. How could such women think that they owed me anything? To have an impact among educated women in India is one thing. For the vast majority of women in the subcontinent, survival is the issue: 37 million or so Indian women are missing.
All things being equal, more boys than girls will be conceived, more miscarried and more born. Greater mortality of boys usually means that by adulthood the numbers have reached parity, unless female children suffer from poorer health care and poorer nutrition than their brothers, in which case fewer girls will survive to adulthood. In 2010, in addition to the numbers of girl babies who will die as a consequence of inadequate care, we must add the number of girls who will never be born at all because of selective abortion. A recent report by the UN Development Program has found that in Asia today 119 boys will be born for every 100 girls:
Females cannot take survival for granted. Sex-selective abortion, infanticide and death from health and nutritional neglect in Asia have left 96 million missing women -- and the numbers seem to be increasing in absolute terms.
If market forces can be thought to apply in such a case, we might expect the value of women to rise as they become scarcer. There are some signs in South Korea, for example, that parents are now expressing a preference for daughters over sons, the comparative value of sons having declined as daughters have become more economically active and as able to care for ageing parents, and governments have taken on some of the responsibilities of both. The Korean language rights to The Female Eunuch and my 1999 follow-up The Whole Woman have recently been acquired, one small piece of evidence that a change in consciousness is afoot, at least among the middle classes.
Feminism may come too late for the vast majority of Asian women, who are still struggling against crude oppression, exclusion from the cash economy, illiteracy and systematic violence. The rise and rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the decline of secularism in so many Asian countries has reversed any improvement in the lot of women. In 1970, for example, Iran was a forward-looking pro-American state, with a women's organisation led by Princess Ashraf. The story of what happened then is an object lesson in why outsiders should not impose their notions of reform.
Reza Pahlavi was only shah of Iran because of the joint British-American Operation Ajax, which in 1953 deposed the elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalised Iran's oil industry and Iranian oil reserves. Pahlavi, being ruler only by Anglo-American force majeure, curried favour by summary modernisation along Western lines.
In 1972 I was invited, with Helvi Sipila and Betty Friedan, to address the Organisation of Iranian Women. During that visit I managed to arrange a meeting with Islamic Marxist women who wore the old heavy woollen chador, outlawed since 1936, as a sign of their defiance of the shah and Savak, the ubiquitous secret police. During the protests of 1978-79, in which high numbers of women participated, the chador proved invaluable as a way of evading detection. After the revolution, the top-down reforms of the shah were jettisoned. The status of women reverted: a wife could once more be summarily divorced; a daughter's right to inherit was half of a son's; absolute segregation was re-imposed; all women were required to wear hijab in public.
We are now seeing the growth of an indigenous feminist movement in Iran, itself the outcome of the high level of education traditionally achieved by so many Iranian women. Women account for nearly three-quarters of Iranian university enrolments even in such traditionally male fields as science and engineering. Though women's participation in economic activity remains low, more and more pressure is being brought to bear by educated women keen to use that education in their own interest and for the betterment of society, despite the heavy penalties that feminist activism has incurred. In recent years the Iranian birth rate has steadily fallen.
The Female Eunuch was translated into Farsi in 1970 by Mehrangiz Manoutcherian, Iran's first woman lawyer and founder-president of the International League of Women Jurists. When Mehry told me, I made her a present of the rights, but I don't know if her translation was ever published. Mehry's biography was co-written by heroic Iranian feminist Nooshin Ahmadi, one of the leaders of the One Million Signatures campaign and an important member of the group now struggling to oust President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When I read of the street theatre she and her colleagues, who include Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, have devised, I would be proud to think that they drew some inspiration from my work, but I doubt they need it.
The Female Eunuch would only have been important to Iranian activists because a significant number of Iranian women were well-educated; to a woman who cannot read, a book will mean very little. According to the UN, education is a fundamental human right, yet in 41 of the 195 countries in the world, more than half the female population cannot read. Seven out of eight Afghan women cannot read and, if the Taliban have their way, never will. The language of Afghanistan is Farsi. I would hope that a Farsi edition of The Female Eunuch makes it to Afghanistan, if I did not dread the thought of the punishment that would be meted out to any woman found with one.
In India, and in many other countries undergoing stop-go modernisation, women's literacy is rising faster than men's. In Pakistan this is not the case. In 1975, 36 per cent of men could read and only 11 per cent of women. In 2001, it was estimated that though the literacy rates for both sexes had improved, women were improving at a slower rate than men; 58 per cent of men were literate and only 29 per cent of women. The number of illiterate Pakistanis doubled since 1951, while the number of illiterate women tripled, as the population grew. Concern about female illiteracy is driven by a number of considerations, of which the most commonly stressed is that low female literacy is positively correlated with a high birth rate. It is thought that women who cannot read cannot manage a contraceptive regime; it is at least as likely that a woman who is an unpaid agricultural labourer for her husband's family has no incentive to limit the number of her children, and every encouragement to breed her own replacement workforce.
This is the same woman who will walk many kilometres to find medical treatment for a sick son, but not for a daughter. If you asked her why, she might answer that she did not want to bring up a female child to suffer as she has. Besides, daughters go to work in their husbands' families, taking dowries with them. In terms of the family's survival, a daughter is a dead liability. Until that situation changes, nothing else will change for the better. The rise in the number of bride-burnings in India is a worrying reminder that consumerism may well bring with it changes for the worse in the condition of India's women.
It is a strange fact that when feminist issues are on the table, a semantic opposition is assumed to exist between women and society. Issues such as women's education are not considered primarily in relation to the women's quality of life, but as involving gains for "society". The education of women is to be promoted because it is the most efficient way of bringing down the birth rate, because children of educated mothers are more likely to survive, because women's productivity, even in agriculture, increases when they are educated. The terminology used by Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and director of the US foreign policy and women program at the council, is typical: "Educated women have fewer children, provide better nutrition and health for their families, experience significantly lower child mortality, generate more income and are far more likely to educate their children than women with little or no schooling."
You would not think, given this kind of bias, that women are 51 per cent of society.
From the foundation of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1976, in which 97 per cent of theclients were female, it has been understood that financial aid given to women produces a better return for the investors and for the community. Microcredit, which has expanded enormously, is female business. Developing economies are not learning from the example of the World Bank and the international aid agencies, however.
The growing prosperity of China and India has resulted in an entrepreneurial class that has no interest in enfranchising women or ensuring their economic independence. Prostitution, and its marketing machine, pornography, increases exponentially. Within the capitalist system, this is a more predictable outcome of a demographic shortage of women than any improvement in status. The female minority becomes a commodity to be bought and sold. The resurgence of prostitution in China began with economic liberalisation in 1979 and has kept pace with the growth of the Chinese economy. One Chinese economist believes that in China there as as many as 20 million prostitutes. Chinese prostitutes work all over Asia, including in Afghanistan.
The Female Eunuch was my first book, and not my best. It is only important now because so many women found in it something they were already looking for. I did not create those women; those women created me. When a woman stops me in the street to say, "You changed my life", I always (boringly) reply: "You changed your life. If my work helped, I am glad, but the achievement is yours." When wowsers tell me I destroyed the family, I reply, "You do me too much credit." For the past hundred years women have been gearing up for revolution, but it hasn't begun to happen . When the real thing starts, I shall be forgotten.
Better half still battling
ALR From: The Australian May 05, 2010 12:05AM 1 comment
THE past 40 years have seen huge changes in the lives and expectations of women all across the world. To the women of the middle classes of the Western world it may well seem that the changes in their situation are the most relevant and the most important, as the proliferating media debate, revise, reformulate and revile feminist ideas. Much of this is mere chatter, which fuels the lifestyle magazines, is dictated by fashion and the endless hunt for novelty, and can safely be ignored.
Feminism was no sooner recognised as a social force than the commercial media were bound to declare that it was over. The odd woman had barely got her bottom on a seat in the boardroom before we were told that high-flying female executives were ditching wealth and power and opting for stay-at-home motherhood. Contrariwise we were told that now that women could have it all, there was no need for feminist activism or even feminist attitudes.
Under the twitter could be heard the rumble of massive change. Something terrible happened to marriage. Why do half of all marriages end in divorce and why are so many of those divorces initiated by the partner who has most to lose, the wife? Is this the end of monogamy and the patriarchal family? Are men and women struggling to arrive at rational systems of child-rearing that do not presuppose the subjection of one partner? Or is it just women? Patterns of cohabitation and parenting are disintegrating and reforming, as women walk away from relationships that are at worst demeaning or dangerous, or at best unfair and unrewarding.
At the same time, lovers of the same sex are demanding and winning the right to marry. This may look very like chaos, but chaos is the matrix out of which viable structures form.
Wherever we look we seem to be reaping the whirlwind. I learn from reports in the Australian media that since January 2007, 48 men have been able to prove by using DNA testing that the children they were paying to support were not their biological offspring, and the Child Support Agency has given them their money back, $434,378 in all. The largest single payment was $70,000.
Actually, hundreds of tests were carried out and many more men learned to their sorrow that the children they were obliged to support were indeed theirs. It begins to look very much as if men are more interested in not being fathers than they are in being fathers. In that case Engels was wrong and the patriarchal family did not evolve as a mechanism to control the means of human reproduction. There may be others, but the only case I know of in which a father had recourse to DNA testing to claim a child rather than reject it is that of British politician David Blunkett, whose claim was disproved. DNA testing is advertised in the lads' magazines solely as a way of disproving paternity.
None of this I foresaw. I sat down at my red Olivetti typewriter in 1969 to write an explanation of why giving women the vote had made very little difference to the masculine power structure. I pitched The Female Eunuch at the youngish individual reader, the discontented woman of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published six years earlier. Unlike Betty, I didn't believe that women's sexuality was the problem; to me it was more likely to be the solution.
The domesticated woman was, in my view, estranged and alienated from her own sexual desires, and hence her creativity and her joy in life. She saw herself as duty-bound to respond to the demands of others, as a sex object, as a carer, as a worker. Her life was an endless struggle to fulfil contradictory demands. Her consciousness of failure in fulfilling those demands was endlessly exploited by the billion-dollar beauty business and by all the other professionals who make a living out of female anxiety.
Among the impossible demands that are still being made of the woman of 2010, as they were of the woman of 1970, is that she stay forever young, when our pedophilic culture makes clear that actual adulthood is already too old. Why else would Kate Moss, who has the body of a 12-year-old, be the rich world's favourite model? The anguish to which The Female Eunuch addressed itself is more acute now than it has ever been. Little girls are frantic about the least sign of fat on thighs or buttocks; girl children are starving themselves; girl toddlers everywhere are hideous in pink, which they wear as a uniform confirming sexual identity. Teenagers are demanding augmentation mammoplasty and their parents are happy to pay for it, because they think it will confer self-esteem and confidence. As if.
The Female Eunuch was part of a process that was already a hundred years old and is now called, for no obvious reason, the second wave of feminism. The women who began to agitate more than a century ago for the right to earn their own living were those women who had no chance of marrying and living off the family wage earned by a husband. In the closing decades of the 19th century, never-married females, particularly those of the middle class, were forced to live in humiliating dependency on their relatives. As the cost of setting up house rose in comparison to real wages, more and more men found that they could not afford to marry. The only work available to unmarried women was menial, unsuitable for ladies of the middle classes.
One job respectable middle-class women had always done was teaching, either in private houses as governesses or in dame schools. The enactment of laws providing for education of all children was only possible because of the existence of a pool of unmarried women who could take over primary education. The exclusion of married women from the profession seemed only fair: a married woman who was being supported by her husband should not be in a position to displace a woman who had to earn her own living. Marriage would continue to mean instant disqualification from teaching, followed by resignation or dismissal, until well into the 20th century.
The huge manpower losses of World War I meant that the number of never-married women and young widows multiplied. Virtually all single girls went to work and as time went on they worked for longer and longer, before finally making it to the altar. For more and more women, suddenly to lose their independent income and be obliged to stay at home seemed irksome and unnecessary. The standard of living, otherwise known as the level of consumption, was rising fast and the family wage was not rising at the same pace. Working-class women who worked as single girls were used to continuing to work after they were married; middle-class women soon had no choice but to follow their example.
The women who worked in essential industries during World War II were at first happy to stay at home and care for their husbands and have babies when it ended, but it was not long before restlessness set in. Women were by then reluctant to produce more than an ever-decreasing number of children, partly because the cost of parenthood was also rising. Motherhood was no longer a career option. Child-bearing being delayed and optimum family size being reached early meant women were less and less likely to devote their lives to it. Changing economic circumstances meant few of them could afford to.
At the time The Female Eunuch was being written the numbers of married women with dependent children who were having to go to work to finance the family debt and maintain their standard of living was inexorably rising.
Most of those women were not only poorly paid but guilty and harassed, amid much media scaremongering about "latch-key children" and juvenile deliquency. The only child care available was either ruinously expensive or involved exploiting relatives. The work the women were doing was for the most part anything but fulfilling and offered no prospects of advancement. The trade unions clung to the unrealistic notion of the family wage and paid their female staff as badly and provided as poor conditions for them as any other employer.
The paucity of employment options for women with school-age children was not so much depressing as humiliating, but young women leaving school were not much likelier to find well-paid and fulfilling work than their married sisters. Teaching and nursing were conspicuously badly paid. Something had to give. For the first time there was talk of equal pay. The trade unions, which should have known better, turned this into "equal pay for work of equal value", with the consequence that women's work was defined as inferior in value. A woman sewing upholstery for a car, say, was deemed to be doing a job of less value than a man tightening a screw on the assembly line. Women cleaners were doing work of less value than male janitors.
Women's jobs remain systematically undervalued to this day. What is more depressing is that formerly elite occupations, in medicine, for example, are declining in prestige as women come to dominate in the field. The status of teachers has never been lower as hands are wrung over the shortage of male teachers, particularly in primary schools. The dominance of women in caring for children, the disabled and the elderly may be one way of explaining the relentless marginalisation of all three sectors, despite the rhetoric adopted by all political parties when it is time to get out the female vote.
Then there is the perennial problem of housework. Though there was constant talk of men doing their bit, the person who does housework remains female. All the data shows that the bulk of unpaid work across the world is still done by females. As for housework, men were quick to understand the obvious: that housework expands to fill the time available.
If I go into student lodgings, which are nowadays usually mixed, I will find that the girls do the cleaning and buy the toilet paper and the instant coffee, and the boys let them. The boys say they don't mind dirty dishes stacked up in the sink; the girls say they do. At the same time that we are being regaled with dire warnings about the way today's women emasculate men, men are blithely availing themselves of the unpaid services of women, without needing to consider themselves in the least beholden.
Sport occupies twice as many column centimetres as international or domestic politics, and the rhetoric of sport has never been more masculinist. Women's participation in sport increases slowly, and women's support of women's sport increases even more slowly. Being sporty carries certain connotations; most women in the public eye will still insist that they are girly girls who adore dressing-up and shopping.
The feminist revolution has been called "the longest revolution". Extensive change is inevitable but it cannot be hurried or imposed top-down. If in the developed world women cannot take one step forward without being struck by a disproportionate backlash, the situation in the developing world is immeasurably worse.
Asia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's population, and all across Asia the status of women appears to be at best unchanged and at worst deteriorating, despite the best efforts of the international community.
It was Mao Zedong who said that "women hold up half the sky". This was because like other socialist leaders he realised that women were more reliable agents of social change than men, not because he had read The Female Eunuch. (The Chinese language rights were acquired in 1999 by a publisher in Taipei; the famous Inner Mongolian People's Publishing House published it in the same year.)
In Maoist China 40 years ago, the sexes dressed alike and worked side by side. Women workers were as likely to be promoted as men, and party cadres were as likely to be women as men. With the introduction of the one-child policy in 1978 it became apparent that, whatever the official line, in the popular estimation, including that of women themselves, women were worth much less than men. If there was to be only one child per family, most people wanted it to be a son.
Nobody knows how many female foetuses were aborted or how many girl babies were killed. Nobody knows how many unmated men China has now; estimates vary from 30 million to 50 million. Unmated men are both vulnerable and dangerous. They form the majority of prison populations all over the world. How China will deal with many millions of never-married men is imponderable. They could form the largest standing army the world has seen.
In India in 1971 I found among the books spread out on the pavement by an itinerant bookseller a bootleg copy of The Female Eunuch, offset printed on the cheapest paper, and selling for a few rupees. Until it fell to pieces, it was my personal copy. (The first Hindi edition was printed in 1999.) When I went to Deolali in 1985 to research my father's wartime experience in the military hospital there, I met the commanding officers of what is now a cantonment hospital for the Indian army. They were two full colonels, both women, imposing in their khaki saris. When I wrote down my name for them, they cried, "Oh no! Oh no! Is it really you?" They grabbed my hands and held them, their eyes shining.
I was astonished and deeply humbled. How could such women think that they owed me anything? To have an impact among educated women in India is one thing. For the vast majority of women in the subcontinent, survival is the issue: 37 million or so Indian women are missing.
All things being equal, more boys than girls will be conceived, more miscarried and more born. Greater mortality of boys usually means that by adulthood the numbers have reached parity, unless female children suffer from poorer health care and poorer nutrition than their brothers, in which case fewer girls will survive to adulthood. In 2010, in addition to the numbers of girl babies who will die as a consequence of inadequate care, we must add the number of girls who will never be born at all because of selective abortion. A recent report by the UN Development Program has found that in Asia today 119 boys will be born for every 100 girls:
Females cannot take survival for granted. Sex-selective abortion, infanticide and death from health and nutritional neglect in Asia have left 96 million missing women -- and the numbers seem to be increasing in absolute terms.
If market forces can be thought to apply in such a case, we might expect the value of women to rise as they become scarcer. There are some signs in South Korea, for example, that parents are now expressing a preference for daughters over sons, the comparative value of sons having declined as daughters have become more economically active and as able to care for ageing parents, and governments have taken on some of the responsibilities of both. The Korean language rights to The Female Eunuch and my 1999 follow-up The Whole Woman have recently been acquired, one small piece of evidence that a change in consciousness is afoot, at least among the middle classes.
Feminism may come too late for the vast majority of Asian women, who are still struggling against crude oppression, exclusion from the cash economy, illiteracy and systematic violence. The rise and rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the decline of secularism in so many Asian countries has reversed any improvement in the lot of women. In 1970, for example, Iran was a forward-looking pro-American state, with a women's organisation led by Princess Ashraf. The story of what happened then is an object lesson in why outsiders should not impose their notions of reform.
Reza Pahlavi was only shah of Iran because of the joint British-American Operation Ajax, which in 1953 deposed the elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalised Iran's oil industry and Iranian oil reserves. Pahlavi, being ruler only by Anglo-American force majeure, curried favour by summary modernisation along Western lines.
In 1972 I was invited, with Helvi Sipila and Betty Friedan, to address the Organisation of Iranian Women. During that visit I managed to arrange a meeting with Islamic Marxist women who wore the old heavy woollen chador, outlawed since 1936, as a sign of their defiance of the shah and Savak, the ubiquitous secret police. During the protests of 1978-79, in which high numbers of women participated, the chador proved invaluable as a way of evading detection. After the revolution, the top-down reforms of the shah were jettisoned. The status of women reverted: a wife could once more be summarily divorced; a daughter's right to inherit was half of a son's; absolute segregation was re-imposed; all women were required to wear hijab in public.
We are now seeing the growth of an indigenous feminist movement in Iran, itself the outcome of the high level of education traditionally achieved by so many Iranian women. Women account for nearly three-quarters of Iranian university enrolments even in such traditionally male fields as science and engineering. Though women's participation in economic activity remains low, more and more pressure is being brought to bear by educated women keen to use that education in their own interest and for the betterment of society, despite the heavy penalties that feminist activism has incurred. In recent years the Iranian birth rate has steadily fallen.
The Female Eunuch was translated into Farsi in 1970 by Mehrangiz Manoutcherian, Iran's first woman lawyer and founder-president of the International League of Women Jurists. When Mehry told me, I made her a present of the rights, but I don't know if her translation was ever published. Mehry's biography was co-written by heroic Iranian feminist Nooshin Ahmadi, one of the leaders of the One Million Signatures campaign and an important member of the group now struggling to oust President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When I read of the street theatre she and her colleagues, who include Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, have devised, I would be proud to think that they drew some inspiration from my work, but I doubt they need it.
The Female Eunuch would only have been important to Iranian activists because a significant number of Iranian women were well-educated; to a woman who cannot read, a book will mean very little. According to the UN, education is a fundamental human right, yet in 41 of the 195 countries in the world, more than half the female population cannot read. Seven out of eight Afghan women cannot read and, if the Taliban have their way, never will. The language of Afghanistan is Farsi. I would hope that a Farsi edition of The Female Eunuch makes it to Afghanistan, if I did not dread the thought of the punishment that would be meted out to any woman found with one.
In India, and in many other countries undergoing stop-go modernisation, women's literacy is rising faster than men's. In Pakistan this is not the case. In 1975, 36 per cent of men could read and only 11 per cent of women. In 2001, it was estimated that though the literacy rates for both sexes had improved, women were improving at a slower rate than men; 58 per cent of men were literate and only 29 per cent of women. The number of illiterate Pakistanis doubled since 1951, while the number of illiterate women tripled, as the population grew. Concern about female illiteracy is driven by a number of considerations, of which the most commonly stressed is that low female literacy is positively correlated with a high birth rate. It is thought that women who cannot read cannot manage a contraceptive regime; it is at least as likely that a woman who is an unpaid agricultural labourer for her husband's family has no incentive to limit the number of her children, and every encouragement to breed her own replacement workforce.
This is the same woman who will walk many kilometres to find medical treatment for a sick son, but not for a daughter. If you asked her why, she might answer that she did not want to bring up a female child to suffer as she has. Besides, daughters go to work in their husbands' families, taking dowries with them. In terms of the family's survival, a daughter is a dead liability. Until that situation changes, nothing else will change for the better. The rise in the number of bride-burnings in India is a worrying reminder that consumerism may well bring with it changes for the worse in the condition of India's women.
It is a strange fact that when feminist issues are on the table, a semantic opposition is assumed to exist between women and society. Issues such as women's education are not considered primarily in relation to the women's quality of life, but as involving gains for "society". The education of women is to be promoted because it is the most efficient way of bringing down the birth rate, because children of educated mothers are more likely to survive, because women's productivity, even in agriculture, increases when they are educated. The terminology used by Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and director of the US foreign policy and women program at the council, is typical: "Educated women have fewer children, provide better nutrition and health for their families, experience significantly lower child mortality, generate more income and are far more likely to educate their children than women with little or no schooling."
You would not think, given this kind of bias, that women are 51 per cent of society.
From the foundation of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1976, in which 97 per cent of theclients were female, it has been understood that financial aid given to women produces a better return for the investors and for the community. Microcredit, which has expanded enormously, is female business. Developing economies are not learning from the example of the World Bank and the international aid agencies, however.
The growing prosperity of China and India has resulted in an entrepreneurial class that has no interest in enfranchising women or ensuring their economic independence. Prostitution, and its marketing machine, pornography, increases exponentially. Within the capitalist system, this is a more predictable outcome of a demographic shortage of women than any improvement in status. The female minority becomes a commodity to be bought and sold. The resurgence of prostitution in China began with economic liberalisation in 1979 and has kept pace with the growth of the Chinese economy. One Chinese economist believes that in China there as as many as 20 million prostitutes. Chinese prostitutes work all over Asia, including in Afghanistan.
The Female Eunuch was my first book, and not my best. It is only important now because so many women found in it something they were already looking for. I did not create those women; those women created me. When a woman stops me in the street to say, "You changed my life", I always (boringly) reply: "You changed your life. If my work helped, I am glad, but the achievement is yours." When wowsers tell me I destroyed the family, I reply, "You do me too much credit." For the past hundred years women have been gearing up for revolution, but it hasn't begun to happen . When the real thing starts, I shall be forgotten.
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