War & Peace Quote by Germaine Greer

Greer lands the punchline where polite feminism likes to pose for photos: the corporate boardroom. The line is built as a bait-and-switch. You expect a liberation story about rescuing women from domestic drudgery, and she snaps it into a critique of what counts as “progress.” Hoover isn’t just a brand; it’s the emblem of the mid-century home that sold women both the problem (the spotless house) and the solution (the appliance). Moving a woman from pushing the vacuum to governing the vacuum company reads, in Greer’s framing, less like emancipation than a reshuffling of who gets to manage the machinery of the same old life.

The intent is pointedly anti-congratulatory. Greer is taking aim at a version of feminism that measures victory by access to elite institutions rather than by changing the conditions that make most women’s lives narrow, exhausting, and economically dependent. Subtext: if liberation ends at “a seat at the table,” it can become an aspirational brand campaign for a small class of women, while the majority still do the labor - just with better marketing and maybe a “female-led” logo.

Context matters. Coming out of second-wave feminism’s more radical critique of family, work, and sexual politics, Greer is suspicious of assimilation. The board of Hoover is shorthand for corporate respectability and “choice” rhetoric: the system offers women advancement so long as they don’t question the system’s priorities. It’s a deliberately abrasive reminder that equal opportunity can coexist with deeply unequal outcomes - and that optics-heavy empowerment is often the easiest reform because it threatens the fewest people.