‘Though I disagreed with some of the strategies and was as troubled as I should have been by some of the more fundamental conflicts [of feminism], it was not until feminists of my own generation began to assert with apparent seriousness that feminists had gone too far that the fire flared up in my belly.’

Thus, Germaine Greer on the origin of her latest book. For Australian readers, this statement positions The Whole Woman as a response to Helen Garner’s book The First Stone. Greer’s response, though, owes nothing to the right-wing backlash feminism which prevailed in the United States in the early 1990s and found its way into Australian public life via a, by and large, misinformed and naïve media.