From Woolf to Wolf: Cunningham, Dux and Maguire on classic feminist texts

In Woolf to Wolf, Sophie Cunningham, Monica Dux and Emily Maguire came together to discuss three great works of literature. The venue was changed to accommodate the many people who wanted to celebrate these significant books, and we all crammed into the repurposed BMW Edge.

Cunningham was revisiting Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and noted first how much Woolf had contributed – not only to literature, but to the form of the book and life writing. Cunningham read one of Woolf’s famously semicoloned passages to show how unusual the prose itself is, and spoke spiritedly on how the book shows how when women were given the chance to write their stories, they wrote even the sentences themselves differently to anything else that appeared at the time. So, the book is more relevant than it should be today, with Cunningham mentioning particularly Woolf’s writing about a female’s need for an income and education – circumstances that, once filled, would mean ‘a huge rush of women’s words’. But Cunningham opined that women might actually be worse off now that we were 20 years ago: the intense scrutiny that women undergo is still relevant today. Being judged as a writer/a feminist writer a non-feminist writer/as a woman writer is ‘a painful and disabling thing’.

Monica Dux, co-author of The Great Feminist Denial, recently wrote an article in Kill Your Darlings about Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Dux regretted that she wasn’t able to recount a great story of how when she first started menstruating, her mother gave her tampons and a copy of The Female Eunuch; or being handed it by an inspiring lecturer – but couldn’t remember when she first came across the seminal book. It’s a book that ‘floats about in a feminist ether’. Dux asked her friends if they had read the book, and about half confessed that they hadn’t. Yet the book is so strongly held in our consciousness – so strongly that people who haven’t read her work invoke her work or her name in the service of a feminist argument or ideal.

Nevertheless, the fact that Greer and The Female Eunuch are synonymous with feminism doesn’t mean that women have an uncomplicated relationship with her and the book. In fact, particularly  in academic circles, the book was maligned or shunned. However, the book is continually cited by women as the book that ‘changed my life’. In attempting to answer why, Dux cited the bawdy, accessible prose, which set it apart from other contemporary works. In addition – while it held no concrete solutions – it was an inspiration. Further, Greer’s ‘refusal to go away or toe any party line’ has helped perpetuate an aura around the book. It helped unify women in their response to Louis Nowra’s article – which is a pretty good outcome from a feminist classic.

Emily Maguire is the author of Princesses and Pornstars. Secretly self-hating teenager. ‘slathering on self-disgust with every stroke of the make-up brush’. Someone gave Maguire a copy of The Beauty Myth to read, which she only read to keep up with her friends. When she finished it, though, she ‘felt like she’d been slapped’. While Maguire felt her life wasn’t changed immediately by Wolf’s book, it did tear away at the loathing she felt, for herself and other women.

An interesting twist to Maguire’s relationship with the book was that, as her own feminism developed, she found herself disagreeing with as much of the book as she admired. When she was asked to interview Wolf earlier this year, she hesitated. Rediscovering the book in her preparation, however, Maguire felt ‘slapped in the face again’ – at the book’s passion and power.

Today, the beauty myth itself has mutated. Maguire cited the new ways in which all people – not just women – are subject to standards of beauty, with the increase in men’s eating disorders, botox and plastic surgery. This is why The Beauty Myth is a book, Maguire concluded, that we still need today.