The Problems Facing Modern Civilization

From the 12th to the 16th of January, 1987, a conference was held in Vigyan Bhavan, New Delhi, in which philosophers, scientists, writers and artists from 15 countries participated. This five-day conference was arranged by the Government of India on the topic, “Towards New Beginnings.” Many distinguished ladies of the western world, who have now grown old, were among those who participated. They had spent all their lives working for Women’s Lib, but their mood was one of frustration. The Indian Express cites Germaine Greer of Australia as a case in point: They are feminists of different hues — Ms. Germaine Greer, the outspoken, aggressive writer from Australia, and Ms. Gisele Halimi, a Tunisian-born lawyer who spearheaded the women’s movement in France along with Simone de Beauvoir and others. But both voice a concern that is troubling feminists in the West today — Whither women’s lib? Ms. Greer seems more mellow today: the fire that raged in The Female Eunuch is strangely missing. “The movement has solved some problems and left us with a different set of problems,” exclaimed Ms. Greer. “Perhaps the problem was that we didn’t take our mothers with us. We left them behind, found them antiquated. And now that many of us are mothers ourselves with teenaged daughters, perhaps we understand our mothers better.”2 “The West has no answers to the problems of inequality between sexes,” says the internationally acclaimed writer Germaine Greer. The erroneous belief of western women that the females in veils are unequal and the ones with make-up minus the head-cover are free and liberated has to be rejected. Referring to the prevalence of “wife-­beating” even in the so-called civilized West, she asks, how about the unequal treatment meted out to females in the U.S. and England in the areas of wages and jobs? Well, one-fourth of the crimes in England emanate from violence against women. The man-woman relationship understood in the West as an extension of role-models is the primary cause of strain in the sexual relationships. All the western women identify themselves with the bahu — the bride — forgetting that the mother-in-law and the sister-in-law are also the specific role models to be played by females. She feels that child bearing for a woman is a unique investment: “The joys of motherhood fill the blanks that cannot be satiated in the specific husband-wife role models.” Known for her non-conformist and non-traditional views, Ms. Greer advocates “coitus interruptus” in the area of birth-control: “The array of occlusive devices, spermicidal creams, quinine pessaries, douches, syringes, abortifacient pills and rubber goods of all shapes and sizes are the ill-effects of a growing consumer-culture. These have achieved nothing but added strain in the sexual relationships.”3 Ms. Halimi, is more frank. “It is a bad time for the women’s movement” she admitted. “It is down at the moment and we are trying to find the reasons for it. Perhaps we got everything women wanted too fast — contraception, abortion, and divorce. And the problems that face women today are not strong enough to give the movement new force and strength.”