Chairing a panel at the All About Women festival last weekend I admit to being a little surprised by the smash-the-system rhetoric of the panellists. It was invigorating and yet also frustrating, writes Geraldine Doogue.

It all felt rather last century, around the early 1970s in fact, when I chaired the big panel at last weekend's All About Women festival at the Sydney Opera House for International Women's Day.

"How to be a feminist" was the question at hand. It never promised an easy answer. But it was even more challenging given the six feisty women sitting on the stage beside me: Germaine Greer; two activists from the US, Roxane Gay and Anita Sarkeesian; model-turned-best-selling novelist, Tara Moss; and two other popular Australian writers, Celeste Liddle (an Arrernte woman from the NT) and Clementine Ford from Melbourne.

However, their calls to arms, their strident indignation about the state of affairs, their smashing-the-system rhetoric, took me a little by surprise, I confess. In some ways it was utterly invigorating yet also frustrating. It sometimes sounded like wailing at the moon, expending lots of energy on furious indignation without any real acknowledgement of what had been achieved during the last generation. Am I just aging?

It reminded me that though a big dreamer about women's progress, I am no revolutionary. Question to self: would people (like me) who tilt at tough achievable goals within the system ever really motivate people to start new movements? Does my impatience with sturm-and-drang language predispose me towards tolerating the status quo? I hope not, but the whole event left me wondering.

My feminism, ironically, was formed at the feet of those 20th century giants - Germaine, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem - when there was plenty of hot air that gave way to more strategy and tactics over the years.

Here in Australia, as I left university and entered the world of journalism in that fateful year of 1972, I was very influenced by people like Susan Ryan, Anne Summers and Sydney community activist turned influential woman and mother of three, Wendy McCarthy. She wrote in the 1980s:

I've always had a strong view, ever since I identified as a feminist, that it must be possible to be a feminist, have a good relationship with a man and be a parent. If you can't be all these things, it means that 90 per cent of women can't be feminists. If only 10 per cent of women can be true feminists, there is no future in it. And I believe there is a lot of future in being a feminist. It's a whole new perception of the world.

That sentiment influenced me enormously. Its moderation welcomed me. I'm extremely wary of aspirations to smash-the-system ... to replace it with what? The big sufferers from chaos and vacuum after systems have fallen are women and children, in my view.

My big take-out from The Female Eunuch back in the '70s was Germaine's invitation to women to assume a private and public life, just like men, not one that focussed only on the domestic sphere and children. She also insisted that we couldn't have it all, that we had to make choices: which again appealed to my practical side.

I thought she was emphasising clear-eyed strategy, which appealed. But last weekend, with her usual dazzling if self-indulgent flair, she insisted that "I am a liberation feminist not an equality feminist", adding that she was, as ever, an old libertarian anarchist.

And, I should add, a performer above all. Alerted beforehand in the Opera House Green Room to the possibility of protests by the trans-sexual community over her controversial attitudes, she sighed and languidly announced to me: "Oh, I'm already bored!" Well she certainly didn't behave that way on stage.

The impressive Roxane Gay, professor of English and an astute African-American commentator, had said publicly last week that Greer was a "hate-filled bigot". She was primed, she told me later, to have a go during the panel but decided against it, probably because Germaine applied her usual unique dose of intellect-plus-bomb-throwing. She read the mood of the capacity crowd, their frustration with ongoing domestic violence statistics among other stubborn obstacles, and she ramped up her message.

"Really I do feminist stand up ... I don't know why people haven't realised it yet," she proclaimed later as we settled down with a post-discussion white wine. Quite so, methinks.

Like me, she couldn't help but admire some of the younger panellists like Anita Sarkeesian. She has tackled the gaming industry's depiction of females and as a result, is subject to virtually constant death threats. Considerable security was available if necessary, I had been advised. Her bravery took my breath away. She has literally changed the agenda, with Rolling Stone magazine adding last year that the backlash she's suffered "has only made her point for her: gaming has a problem".

Anita acknowledged, however, that she'd had to learn feminism's collective, structural analysis; that growing up during the 1980s-90s she had absorbed the era's hyper-individualism and was obsessed with "choice feminism". Gradually, after much learning, she grasped that true feminism meant accepting that her privileged choice could have a bad impact on another woman's lesser choice. And it literally changed her life. Feel-good-personal-growth feminism was simply not good enough.

I spent much of 2013-14 compiling a book about the experiences of 14 Australian women of power and influence called The Climb. It explores what my version of feminism has accomplished. I highly doubt the book could have even been written 40 years ago, as I entered my career, because the candidates simply didn't exist.

Germaine may dismiss this as mere equality feminism. But I call it real progress.

Geraldine Doogue a journalist and television presenter. She presents Saturday Extra for ABC Radio National and Compass for ABC TV.