Sisters ...

... Join me in a little feisty singalong?
Right, I'm off to read a little Female Eunuch (all the while wishing I could still get away with tight, black, leather trousers, sigh).
Speaking of which/whom, I actually have been rereading Ms Greer’s Female Eunuch, in the lead up to today, International Women’s Day. She and it have been in the press quite a bit lately. A grumpy gent, Louis Nowra, had a piece published in The Monthly, dissing Ms Greer and the book. As this piece points out, it’s all fine and dandy to criticize, but he made it a personal attack. In discussing her book, and her ideas, he chose to attack her looks, her personality, and her style. That makes him a prick. Anyhoo, you know how people are often asked “what book changed your life?” Well this book, this book actually did change my life. It opened my eyes, it made me think about what was accepted as “the norm”, it made me question my place, my role, in life. I was questioning anyway, being a stroppy, bolshie girl in a Catholic High School does lead to much questioning, but The Female Eunuch clarified things for me. I suspect it was Ms Greer who first planted the seed in my mind, the seed that girls did not have to have babies, they could, but they didn’t have to. She certainly caused me to look at my father in a different way, as well as my mother, brother and sister. Well, everyone really. The book made me a very, very angry young woman for a number of years. Or perhaps I was already an angry young woman and the book just helped me articulate all that internal rage. Perhaps I’d have exploded had it not come along. This copy can’t have been my first, it’s dated 1986 (yes, that’s right NOT 1786), I was 19 then, and I do recall the angry feminist days started much earlier than that, high school days. I suspect I borrowed the first copy I read, and went out and got my own copy later. The underlining and comments are, slightly embarrassing and slightly funny. Goodness I was a serious young thing. A serious young thing who did complicated mathematical computations it would appear. I have no idea what this is for, it appears to be birth-date related. It was my bookmark.