Feminism Is Not Over

Germaine Greer takes part in a Women's Liberation march in Sydney in 1972. To claim the movement is a failure is not only wrong, it fails to grasp its complexity. In the past decade we've become used to gloom-and-doom announcements - that feminism has let women down, has been unsuccessful in delivering on its promises, and that the hoped-for feminist utopia has failed to materialise. And, of course, it's true that women everywhere still face problems, some of them enormous and daunting. But is this a sign of feminism's failure, or simply of how much work remains to be done? No feminist that I have ever met thinks feminism has ''succeeded'' in the sense that it is a completed program, with its work finished and all its goals achieved. Advertisement: Story continues below Indeed, I think the feminist revolution has only just begun. Gender inequality is complex and pervasive, and it manifests in many different contexts around the globe. There is no quick fix; no simple solution to all the problems that women face. Let me give an example. I recently came across a 19th-century discussion of so-called conjugal rights; a man's legal right to have sex with his wife - rape her, in effect - whenever he wanted. For the first wave of feminists in Australia, active in the 19th and early 20th century, the abolition of conjugal rights was an important goal. Yet it took a century for rape in marriage to be outlawed in this country - 1985 in the state of Victoria. Should we see these early feminists and their ideals as failures because it took a long time to achieve this goal? Or should we see them as heroic women whose fight would be continued by other women, and whose aims would ultimately be achieved? Saying that feminism has failed is short-sighted and simplistic, because it misunderstands and underestimates both feminism and the problems feminism is seeking to solve. After all, who are these feminists that are said to have failed? We've usually got that archetypical feminist in mind - often she is the second-wave activist who marched for women's lib in the 1970s and became a femocrat in the '80s, hammering away at the glass ceiling. The feminists who fit that description did incredible work - they helped secure many of the fundamental reforms that we take for granted Rosetta Stone Korean today - but still, they represent only one strand of feminism, and one approach. Real feminism is constantly evolving and splintering; it's broad, it's dynamic. Feminism attempts to articulate and redress injustices against women in a dazzling variety of contexts. We don't have a bible. It's not a cult. And there never was a feminist central command, with Germaine Greer at the head of the coven, declaring that by the year 2010 a specific set of demands must be met. Yet reducing feminism to a simplistic stereotype, then declaring it a failure, is far easier, more entertaining and probably more satisfying than grappling with nuance. It makes a better headline for a Sunday magazine supplement. It just happens to be completely wrong. Yes, some feminists have failed to achieve their goals. Others manifestly have not. There have been mistakes made, and unintended consequences that still need figuring out. Yet feminism will continue anyway, even if there are occasional setbacks and failures, because at the heart of all feminist activity is a simple desire to create a better, more just world for women. This does not mean that we should never be critical of feminist ideas. It's not a love-in. Disagreement among feminists is a sign of health, not failure. The very fact that we are able to define and discuss the many complex problems that women still face is due to feminism; that words such as sexual harassment, domestic violence, sexism - words we now take for granted - have entered the vernacular. Feminism has given us a language to talk about these issues. And in doing this, in putting them on the public agenda, feminism has succeeded even if women's problems have not all been ''solved''.

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