Women’s legitimate pain, sorrow and frustration are medicalized without sufficient knowledge of their physiology or psychology. The privileged American and European woman is still a eunuch in her eyes, who lets a steroid be prescribed for every phase in her life, whether billed as birth control or hormone replacement therapy. The personal experiences she gathered from travelling in India and Africa are brought to bear on the issue of fertility and population control in Sex and Destiny (1984), in which she not only faults scientists, medical doctors and psychologists, but also western women who don’t even know what is meant by their slogan of “sisterhood,” as they continue to buy into consumerism while globally poverty is being feminized. In this work and in later texts ( The Change, 1991 The Whole Woman, 1999) Greer argues both for and against women, not always consistently. For my generation Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) along with Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969) remains a classic of the so-called “second wave” of feminism. Women had been castrated after centuries of oppression and Greer called for a radical change, even for a female version of sexual promiscuity. She issued a call to “womanpower,” not equality but liberation from the patriarchy with its perverted expectations of femininity.
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