Sometimes it’s a relief to be a man. Watching, at a safe distance, the collapse of feminism is a bit like seeing a huge chunk of melting glacier falling into the sea. You know it’s a sign of something serious going on, but you’re glad not to be anywhere near when it happens.

Fay Weldon started something this week at the Edinburgh Book Festival when she said that most young women today have no concept of what feminism once meant – and care less. The old battles are history, she said, the new ones don’t interest them very much. The idea that there was a time when a woman was not allowed to buy anything on hire purchase without a man’s signature now seems almost prehistoric.

The early Weldon bestsellers, about women trapped in oppressive, male-dominated societies, have become, she said, “historical documents”, their arguments meaningless to a generation of women who are in charge of their own lives, choose to marry or not, to have children or not, and who generally pursue their careers with exactly the same goals in mind as their male competitors. Only the older career woman, worried about a life ahead without a family to fall back on, still feels there is a battle to be fought.

At a stroke, Ms Weldon seemed also to be disposing of the famous Naomi Wolf argument, which once claimed that the fashion and cosmetics industry, dominated by men, dictated how women should look, forcing them to strive for a state of impossible, male-imagined, perfection. Those goals are still there, of course – in fact if anything they are more demanding than ever – but they are set, or rejected, by women. It is women today who control the fashion industry, the magazines and the television shows that dictate standards of taste, and it is women who decide what they should wear, how much they should drink and how badly they should behave, whether in public or in private. “Most women now feel there is no reason or cause for feminism,” concluded Ms Weldon. It was only as they got older that they might begin to appreciate what a previous generation had achieved.

Enter the great achiever, Germaine Greer. Her new book, Shakespeare’s Wife, presents a most unexpected heroine. The picture of Anne Hathaway that emerges from her meticulous research is so different from the one we are used to that it is bound to arouse the animosity of the Shakespearean Establishment – as, of course, it is intended to do. But if you think that you are going to read about a feisty, independent-minded feminist rebel in ruffles and a wasp waist, who multi-tasked by secretly writing all her husband’s plays herself, think again. Instead, Ms Greer has disinterred the perfect wife. In place of the ill-favoured, scheming seducer from whom Shakespeare is said to have fled, we meet a hard-working, devoted woman who manages the bard’s household, takes care of his finances, restores his new house and keeps the home fire burning while he is away consorting with prostitutes and writing his tragedies, or whatever it is that men did in the Elizabethan era.

Speaking in Edinburgh about her book, Ms Greer made it clear that nothing had dimmed her views about male writers, with their ready-made prejudices about the wives of famous men; from James Boswell to Anthony Burgess, they had all assumed that Anne was either a lustful, scheming woman who lured Shakespeare into a loveless marriage, or an ugly harridan who drove him away by making his life a misery.

What emerges from her own scholarship, however, is a woman of such shining domestic virtue that she would not have been out of place in a novel by Louisa May Alcott, and whose devotion to her husband might well have qualified her as a 16th-century Stepford wife. Where, exactly, does that leave feminism?

Replaced, perhaps, by a rather more fragile, vulnerable and complicated version of womanhood. Diana, Princess of Wales, perhaps? Ten years after her death she still seems to come as close to the modern idea of independent, resilient, flawed but feminine icon as it is possible to get – without having to invent her in celluloid. She seems to fit what the “postpost feminist” writer, Laura Kipnis, describes in her latest book, The Female Thing, as a product of the “feminine-industrial complex” – a woman trying to balance the independence that feminism has won with the idea that female weakness is a virtue. Certainly, the crowds who surged on to the streets of London at her funeral, and the near-worship that she has inspired since her death, would suggest that she represents a modern ideal.

But – whop! Ms Greer sweeps Diana aside with imperious disdain. Instead of seeing her as a postfeminist rebel against the stuffed-shirt royal establishment, she says that Diana undermined the whole idea of womanhood because of the way she behaved after she had split up with the Prince of Wales. By conducting affairs with married men, plaguing them with nuisance calls, and generally exhibiting signs of incipient instability, she qualifies, in Ms Greer’s view, as nothing more than “a devious moron”. Leaving aside that this is something of an oxymoron itself, it seems an overharsh judgment. Diana’s behaviour was evidence, surely, not of stupidity, but of extreme mental and emotional stress, more deserving of sympathy than condemnation; as such she should qualify as martyr rather than minx.

Are we then to hold up the Stepford Anne Hathaway as the ideal woman, standing by her man? Or do we embrace the flawed but fabulous People’s Princess? Ms Kipnis offers us very little help. Her book ends abruptly with the statement: “A full accounting of the female situation at the moment will have to start roughly here.” It doesn’t help much. Luckily, as a mere onlooker, I do not have to reach a conclusion one way or the other. For the other sex it’s not so easy. Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.

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