Greer, on the other hand, offers us millennial feminism UK-style: the reflex of Britain under Thatcher, the Greenham Common women, the pre-pubescent appeal of The Spice Girls and the dubious credentials of Cherie Booth QC. Greer is also very clear about ‘generationalism’ as it was called when birth dates became a convenient, if clichéd, weapon for beating Australian feminism over the head. ‘Old feminists’ exist to be sneered at by young feminists, and when the young feminists, who are usually not as young as they think they are, bait them they can expect to be chastised.

Greer’s contribution here to what is now recognised as a tradition of debate, about the state of feminism within feminism, is important. There is no mention of the phrase ‘political correctness’. Young women, gen-X or the thirty-somethings, are neither singled out for criticism nor castigated for alleged failures. Identity politics is absent. As is the word ‘punitive.’ This perspective on the current state of feminism – which is not to be confused with a lament for the ‘good old days’ or the ‘good old girl ‘for that matter – is contoured by a different set of feminist practice and histories.

British feminism, with its strong threads of socialist theory, welfare idealism and empirical research, has been an important influence on Australian feminism, in particular on the disciplines of History and Women’s Studies. While Greer has by no means been subsumed into British feminism (in any of its varieties), this book offers Australian readers a perspective which usefully complicates and diversifies the local effects of global (read US) feminisms.

Greer’s project in The Whole Woman is to oppose the ‘lifestyle feminists’, who assert that feminism has served its purpose by going ‘just far enough in giving them the right to “have it all”, i.e., money, sex and fashion and the equality feminists’, who are wrong in having sold out feminism’s main goal. ‘Unpopular feminists “fight” for liberation; popular feminists work for equality’. This book, her eighth since The Female Eunuch, takes the form of two short preliminary sections, four main sections (‘body,’ ‘mind,’ ‘love’ and ‘power’) and a set of notes to the quotations boxed in each section. Each of these sections deals with a specific area of feminist critique: ‘body’ engages arguments about the economics of women’s bodies; ‘mind’ deals with various mind-sets about work, housework, shopping etc; ‘love’ analyses the family romance from the perspectives of present-day abuse and possible good in what remains of familial relations; ‘power’ is the most overtly focused on popular culture and the public domain.

Within the four main sections are further smaller parts, each offering analysis of and arguments against a prevailing orthodoxy. ‘Breasts’, for example, argues against the assumption that women have the right to choose whether or not to have their breasts enlarged by analysing the role of multinationals in the production of silicone and the fate of those women who have sought legal redress against such companies. Again, for Australian readers, some of this material is familiar. Kaz Cooke’s book Real Gorgeous, published in 1994, offered school aged girls (and their teachers and mothers buying the book) a thorough and snappy analysis of the economics and politics behind the beauty industry and its effects on self-esteem, good health and the bank balance.

Greer proceeds by argument in three main forms: first, set up a line of reasoning which is accepted as axiomatic with neatness, economy and clarity and then have the gall to reverse the logic. The discussion of anorexia ends:

All discussions of eating disorders focus upon the disorderly eater rather than chaotic food. No attempt is made to treat the food or the representation of food in our culture, though it is obvious that eating disorders are unlikely to arise in conditions where food is relatively scarce and hunger familiar.

You might not agree with this line of argument, but Greer’s move here reverses the accepted trend of pathologising the (usually) young woman’s alimentary canal and seeks to read the discourse of food within which the young woman is located.

Her second mode is a determination not to be fazed by technical language or statistics. She uses the former with smooth familiarity (oestrogen is traced through its exogenous and devious synthetic forms) and rattles the latter until they confess their prejudices. (Is depressed serotonin the root cause of depression, as statistics suggest, or have we got the equation back to front?) The third mode is perhaps predictable but nevertheless scintillating: textual analysis. The talent that Greer has made her profession. Or that made Greer a professional. Her reading of Blake Morrison’s autobiographical account of his daughter in As If is careful and nuanced. Its power lies in its restraint: ‘I am grateful to the artfulness of Morrison’s writing for the insight into how the distant father and the sexualizing father can be one and the same’.

This sounds as though The Whole Woman is a set of measured arguments set out as a sustained manifesto. It is not. It is in fact a polemic. Part analysis, part argument, part sensation, a modicum of the first-person pronoun, racy prose, sections that are not too long, a certain tone – the genius of this book is its mimicry of media discourses.

This is where Greer has spent a good deal of her time in the last thirty years: inside the media culture which pitches to a very particular aspect of the public domain in Britain. The ‘quality press’, pretty much unknown in Australia, uses phrases like ‘the rise and rise’, ‘the corridors of power’, ‘it is a truism’ and ‘this phony war’. From an Australian perspective, this is the book’s real limitation: Greer’s unselfconscious assumption of the Guardian mantle – a born-to-rule stance bounded by the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ – threatens to reduce the book (almost) to an ethnography of rarefied and arcane imperialism.

Greer has always been ‘a compelling public figure’, a ‘feminist icon’. This is media speak for contradictory when her arguments should be straightforward; lyrical when she should be pragmatic; waffling when she should be precise; irritatingly personal when what’s at stake is the collective good of women. This book is no different. In a now obscure interview with Greer, published in 1979, David Plante suggested that Greer is fascinating because she is difficult and difficult because, rather than there being a personal behind the public, with Greer the personal is entirely negotiated through the public. In other words, Greer fills her whole world; her whole world is public; Greer fills our whole world. And it’s true that reading The Whole Woman, you could be forgiven for thinking that between The Female Eunuch and this book not too many feminists have published much of any consequence.

But none of this is to gainsay the book’s most dangerous, risky, and exhilarating move. Taking on what she thinks of as the simpering lifestyle of feminists and the dim-witted equity feminists, Greer responds by writing, not the ‘sequel’ to The Female Eunuch, but by dealing with the unfinished business of her first book. The Whole Woman recuperates issues ignored or dismissed in The Female Eunuch to produce a grand narrative for feminism at the end of the millennium. This is the key sentence: ‘Women’s liberation must be mothers’ liberation, or it is nothing’. Always the Andersonian anarchist, Greer offers no political strategies, no policy innovation, no proposed legislative change, nor any structural analysis for this new feminism of the maternal. Instead, she returns to the brilliant polemic which uses affect with strategic precision: ‘the women of the rich world had better hope that when female energy ignites, they do not find themselves on the wrong side.’ Believe it. This is your mother speaking.