Go girl

Jacqueline Rose

  • Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier
    Virago, 398 pp, £17.99, March 1999, ISBN 1 86049 685 7
  • Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-98 by Adrienne Rich
    Norton, 75 pp, £14.95, March 1999, ISBN 0 393 04682 6

The language of survival has always been fundamental to feminism. Germaine Greer seems to be convinced that the species is heading for extinction. (Some time ago, in an article in the Observer, she envisaged a time ‘when, far in the future, the human race has exterminated itself.’) For a time, Adrienne Rich believed that what was destroying itself was patriarchy: ‘The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out,’ she wrote in 1971, ‘what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction’ (‘When We Dead Awaken’). Women’s task in advancing its end was simple, brutal and clear: ‘As women, we have our work cut out for us.’

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