The Female Eunuch was published in 1970, five years before the Sex Discrimination Act was passed in parliament, and six years before the Domestic Violence Act. Back in 1970, married women didn’t do their own tax returns because their income was seen as belonging to their husband; health clinics demanded that a married woman obtain permission from her husband before fitting her with a coil; single women struggled to get mortgages; and if your husband raped you he would not be prosecuted because, according to the law, by marrying him you consented to have sex with him, whenever, wherever and however he so pleased.
This was the world that this book—and its Australian author, Germaine Greer—burst into like an electrifyingly disruptive shooting star, and the effects of both the book and the writer are still being felt today. Books had certainly been written about feminism before—from Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1964. But The Female Eunuch arrived among them like an intimidatingly cool new kid at school—by lunchtime everyone is copying her mannerisms, so overawed they don’t know whether they love her or loathe her. It is hard to imagine a feminist book written today that isn’t in some way influenced by The Female Eunuch, even if the author professes to detest Greer.
Let’s not make any bones about this: Greer did not come here to be liked. “Hopefully this book is subversive. Hopefully it will draw fire from all the articulate sections of the community,” she writes at the beginning of The Female Eunuch. Her hopes were fulfilled: the book was subversive, and it did draw fire—and so does she to this day. Greer is the most famous, most instantly recognisable feminist in the world, and her renown is not something that has ever seemed to cause her much unhappiness. You don’t agree to go on Big Brother, and then storm out calling it a “fascist prison,” if you abhor attention. Greer has enjoyed the glories that have come with her success, from posing naked in an erotic magazine to a youthful affair with Martin Amis; true to form, in 2015 she released the 30,000-word love letter she wrote to him 40 years earlier, professing herself to be “helpless with desire” for him. Whatever else anyone wants to say about Greer—and they have said pretty much everything over the past half-century—no one can say she didn’t know how to enjoy herself.
Rereading The Female Eunuch in 2020, it’s still easy to see why it caused such a sensation in its time, even if its influence has in some ways worked against it. Her arguments about how body-shaming is used to oppress women are so familiar that they appear in most women’s magazines on a monthly basis. But it was Greer who wrote about it, if not first, then certainly with the most rage and passion. Feminist tracts aren’t known for their humour, but my God The Female Eunuch is funny: “If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your menstrual blood—if it makes you sick, you’ve a long way to go, baby,” she declares. Greer is famously erudite, and the book is studded with literary references. But The Female Eunuch is the only book I know of that leaps from Charles M Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon to Strindberg’s The Dance of Death to Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House in a single sentence.
The humour in The Female Eunuch is born out of fearless rage: few write anger better than Greer. “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them” is probably the most famous line in the book. But to my mind, the most powerful comes a few pages later: “Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men: following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.”
And yet, The Female Eunuch is not ultimately a sad or even an angry book. It is a joyful book, in which Greer ecstatically imagines a still-yet-to-be-realised utopian future for women, in which they are freed of the shackles of femininity and patriarchy, where they enjoy sex gloriously and raise their children collectively, visited occasionally, and only if necessary, by the fathers of their offspring. That feminism has yet to achieve this—and has failed to save so many women from femininity, disappointing sex and themselves—is not Greer’s fault. But it is part of the reason her book continues to pack such an astonishing punch.
That’s not the only theory of Greer’s that will feel out of lockstep with modern consensus. Her more recently voiced thoughts on trans people, insisting “I don’t think surgery will turn a man into a woman,” have led to her being no-platformed by students. But her opinions are hardly a shock, given Greer’s decades-long abhorrence of the idea of an innate gender and the artifice of femininity. In The Female Eunuch, she writes about April Ashley, one of the first British people to have gender reassignment surgery, and sees her as being as much of a victim as any natal woman: “As long as the feminine stereotype remains the definition of the female sex, April Ashley is a woman,” Greer declares. It may not be the kind of acceptance trans rights activists today campaign for, but Greer was engaging with issues of gender versus sex long before many of them were born. And given that she emerged in an era in which men could abuse women with impunity, it is not surprising that some of her generation might be sceptical about the idea that gender identity trumps physical reality. That many people today think differently is, ironically, thanks in part to Greer, who wrote so powerfully that women should be able to define themselves.
It is a profoundly narcissistic endeavour to read books from the past and expect them to reflect the morals of the present day. But from a 2020 perspective, there are some shocking clangers in The Female Eunuch about sexuality (“Most homosexuality results from the inability of the person to adapt to his given sex role”) and race (“That most virile of creatures, the ‘buck’ negro…” she wrote, invoking a popular cliché of the time). Anyone who defends Greer for her work in feminism, as I do, without acknowledging her—to put it mildly—more problematic sides is helping neither themselves nor her. There is an oddly Freudian tendency among young women to trash the feminists from the generation before, a kind of mother-killing, a means for the new generation to make room for themselves (although, ladies, please: there’s always room). Figurehead feminists are especially vulnerable to expectations of perfection, and any infractions result in them being flung overboard.
I have never understood this hardline approach of rejecting everything about a person because you object to some things about them. And what a waste it would be to discard her, because Greer was right—so thrillingly right—about misogyny and self-loathing, and the lies women were and are sold about what constitutes a good life. Greer was and is far from perfect, but learning to accept female imperfection is the moral of this book. Just like her book, she is astonishing, brilliant, absurd, infuriating, incendiary and part of the canon forever.
This is an edited version of the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of “The Female Eunuch,” out on 15th October from 4th Estate
This was the world that this book—and its Australian author, Germaine Greer—burst into like an electrifyingly disruptive shooting star, and the effects of both the book and the writer are still being felt today. Books had certainly been written about feminism before—from Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1964. But The Female Eunuch arrived among them like an intimidatingly cool new kid at school—by lunchtime everyone is copying her mannerisms, so overawed they don’t know whether they love her or loathe her. It is hard to imagine a feminist book written today that isn’t in some way influenced by The Female Eunuch, even if the author professes to detest Greer.
Let’s not make any bones about this: Greer did not come here to be liked. “Hopefully this book is subversive. Hopefully it will draw fire from all the articulate sections of the community,” she writes at the beginning of The Female Eunuch. Her hopes were fulfilled: the book was subversive, and it did draw fire—and so does she to this day. Greer is the most famous, most instantly recognisable feminist in the world, and her renown is not something that has ever seemed to cause her much unhappiness. You don’t agree to go on Big Brother, and then storm out calling it a “fascist prison,” if you abhor attention. Greer has enjoyed the glories that have come with her success, from posing naked in an erotic magazine to a youthful affair with Martin Amis; true to form, in 2015 she released the 30,000-word love letter she wrote to him 40 years earlier, professing herself to be “helpless with desire” for him. Whatever else anyone wants to say about Greer—and they have said pretty much everything over the past half-century—no one can say she didn’t know how to enjoy herself.
***
Greer was never part of the traditional feminist group, or, indeed, any group at all. She was and remains feminism’s naughty, troublemaking sister—the Lydia Bennet to Gloria Steinem’s Elizabeth. While her contemporaries were getting bogged down in the politics of 1970s feminism, Greer was hanging out with the Rolling Stones and having her vagina photographed. (If you want to see what Greer very much wasn’t interested in, read Nora Ephron’s 1972 essay “Miami,” about the National Women’s Political Caucus.) Greer is, characteristically, pretty dismissive of Betty Friedan et al in The Female Eunuch—like I said, she did not come here to make friends. But then, she is not an activist, like Friedan and Steinem. She would describe herself as an academic, but, really, she is an iconoclast.Rereading The Female Eunuch in 2020, it’s still easy to see why it caused such a sensation in its time, even if its influence has in some ways worked against it. Her arguments about how body-shaming is used to oppress women are so familiar that they appear in most women’s magazines on a monthly basis. But it was Greer who wrote about it, if not first, then certainly with the most rage and passion. Feminist tracts aren’t known for their humour, but my God The Female Eunuch is funny: “If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your menstrual blood—if it makes you sick, you’ve a long way to go, baby,” she declares. Greer is famously erudite, and the book is studded with literary references. But The Female Eunuch is the only book I know of that leaps from Charles M Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon to Strindberg’s The Dance of Death to Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House in a single sentence.
The humour in The Female Eunuch is born out of fearless rage: few write anger better than Greer. “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them” is probably the most famous line in the book. But to my mind, the most powerful comes a few pages later: “Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men: following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.”
And yet, The Female Eunuch is not ultimately a sad or even an angry book. It is a joyful book, in which Greer ecstatically imagines a still-yet-to-be-realised utopian future for women, in which they are freed of the shackles of femininity and patriarchy, where they enjoy sex gloriously and raise their children collectively, visited occasionally, and only if necessary, by the fathers of their offspring. That feminism has yet to achieve this—and has failed to save so many women from femininity, disappointing sex and themselves—is not Greer’s fault. But it is part of the reason her book continues to pack such an astonishing punch.
***
Greer is unfashionably clear on how women need to achieve liberation. Hers is a feminism that is miles away from today’s incarnation, which celebrates all women’s choices and sees censure as patriarchal. Greer has no time for such niceties, and she is uncompromising on what women need to do to lead fulfilling lives: not be tied down by a man or children, not wear certain clothes, not accept femininity on any level. In today’s feminist landscape, in which sex work is fiercely defended as just another form of work, The Female Eunuch feels, in many ways, like it’s not from another era, but another planet.That’s not the only theory of Greer’s that will feel out of lockstep with modern consensus. Her more recently voiced thoughts on trans people, insisting “I don’t think surgery will turn a man into a woman,” have led to her being no-platformed by students. But her opinions are hardly a shock, given Greer’s decades-long abhorrence of the idea of an innate gender and the artifice of femininity. In The Female Eunuch, she writes about April Ashley, one of the first British people to have gender reassignment surgery, and sees her as being as much of a victim as any natal woman: “As long as the feminine stereotype remains the definition of the female sex, April Ashley is a woman,” Greer declares. It may not be the kind of acceptance trans rights activists today campaign for, but Greer was engaging with issues of gender versus sex long before many of them were born. And given that she emerged in an era in which men could abuse women with impunity, it is not surprising that some of her generation might be sceptical about the idea that gender identity trumps physical reality. That many people today think differently is, ironically, thanks in part to Greer, who wrote so powerfully that women should be able to define themselves.
It is a profoundly narcissistic endeavour to read books from the past and expect them to reflect the morals of the present day. But from a 2020 perspective, there are some shocking clangers in The Female Eunuch about sexuality (“Most homosexuality results from the inability of the person to adapt to his given sex role”) and race (“That most virile of creatures, the ‘buck’ negro…” she wrote, invoking a popular cliché of the time). Anyone who defends Greer for her work in feminism, as I do, without acknowledging her—to put it mildly—more problematic sides is helping neither themselves nor her. There is an oddly Freudian tendency among young women to trash the feminists from the generation before, a kind of mother-killing, a means for the new generation to make room for themselves (although, ladies, please: there’s always room). Figurehead feminists are especially vulnerable to expectations of perfection, and any infractions result in them being flung overboard.
I have never understood this hardline approach of rejecting everything about a person because you object to some things about them. And what a waste it would be to discard her, because Greer was right—so thrillingly right—about misogyny and self-loathing, and the lies women were and are sold about what constitutes a good life. Greer was and is far from perfect, but learning to accept female imperfection is the moral of this book. Just like her book, she is astonishing, brilliant, absurd, infuriating, incendiary and part of the canon forever.
This is an edited version of the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of “The Female Eunuch,” out on 15th October from 4th Estate
