'DAY ONE : The Tulips
They enter the room and its silence enters them. The predictable motel furniture is unnaturally and watchfully still. This is one of several honeymoon suites in the long west wing that faces the sea. There are two plastic-sealed slices of dark fruit cake on a tray with a half-bottle of champagne. She goes across to the vase of tulips courtesy of the management and touches one flower so that it shivers on its stalk. He closes the door and puts the cases down. It is as if the wedding, its dinner, speeches, dancing and drinking, tears and hugs and bad but sweetly affectionate jokes have all sunk into a cold black sea. The two of them might be a couple married for more than half a century and now close at last to the end of it all.' (Introduction)
''The whole woman' argues that for all women's hard-won advances, many of the problems that concerned second-wave feminists are still with us and, in some cases, have grown worse. This might be a powerful argument to someone who has been around long enough to compare then with now, but it isn't a winning line to run on a generation that has grown up with a revulsion towards radical feminism. You can draw a direct link from Greer to impressive younger writers like the Australian media feminist Catharine Lumby, whose book about tabloid culture, Gotcha, has recently been published. Lumby is the quintessential postmodern girl intellectual, an Arts- Law graduate who studied the postmodern thinkers as well as the law of torts. Not unlike the young Greer, she has had two overlapping careers, one as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Bulletin, and the other as an academic at Macquarie and Sydney Universities. Her first book. 'Bad girls: the media, Sex and Feminism in the 90's' had strong affinities with The female eunuch. It touched on some similar issues, and its approach-Lumby described it as 'roam[ing] across traditional boundaries between academic theory, reportage and journalistic polemic''-was the same as Greer's a generation before. Its cover was a raunchy send-up of the famous female torso displayed on Greer's bestseller. The book was praised, deservedly, as one of the most readable feminist works published in Australia in a very long time.' (Publisher's summary)
