The Female Eunuch, by Germaine Greer, is remarkable both for its style and for its substance. Stylistically, it presents a nonstop journey of blistering eloquence, as Greer scores point after point against what she sees as the wrongheaded ways that people think about sexuality, love, the family, politics, and society in general. The relatively loose organization of the book gives Greer free rein to search out and destroy myths which promote oppression and unhappiness for women and men alike. Interspersed with Greer’s own prose are boxed quotes from numerous authors, past and present, who—sometimes foolishly, sometimes wisely—have approached the book’s subject matter (sex and gender) in a revealing way. These quotes are not always clearly related to the main text, but they are always provocative and entertaining, which is also true for the book as a whole. Substantively, the book addresses the issues of female sexuality and gender equality in an original and profound way, one which, joined with its provocative style, struck a chord with many women and more than a few men. The book also aroused stern opposition from inside and outside the women’s liberation movement.

As the book’s title indicates, Greer’s central thesis is that, in numerous ways, western culture castrates women (this castration is literal in the case of clitorectomies, formerly a way of controlling female masturbation), thoroughly repressing their natural sexuality and replacing it with the myth of passivity. Women are reduced either to idealized eunuchs—morally pure, odorless, pert, and attractive—or, if they reject their asexual designation, witches and whores. Either way, women’s lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are seriously proscribed. Moreover, this oppression of women does not profit men, at least not in the long run. Men are sexually overburdened, weighed down by overbearing mothers and frustrated by the psychological hobbling of their mates.

In fleshing out her argument, Greer ultimately takes aim at gender role models, marriage (and monogamous relations in general), the family, and even romantic love. Capitalist politics also do not escape unscathed. By the time the book is finished, most of the established social institutions of Western society (circa 1970) have been discarded by Greer as unnatural, counterproductive, and just plain wrong. She even takes a number of potshots at the women’s liberation movement.

According to Greer, boys and girls share much more in the way of a common nature than is usually admitted. This includes, for females as well as males, the potential for a fully active libido and active careers outside the home. Conventional socialization, however, suppresses female sexuality as well as female ambition. Instead, women are geared to seek romantic, monogamous love. This love is supposed to end in marriage, a joyful life devoted to rearing children, and happiness ever after. These prizes are all counterfeit, according to Greer. Romantic love is a fictional concept which has never really existed and never will, monogamy is unnaturally confining, marriage is a trap for both partners, and the modern nuclear family is a disaster for parents and children alike. Yet these myths are perpetuated, partly because they serve to buttress the foundations of the political and economic order, which, according to Greer, also runs counter to human nature.

Greer’s fellow feminists also receive explicit and implicit criticism, though Greer definitely sees herself as a part of the women’s movement. Moderate feminists such as Betty Friedan are criticized for not penetrating deeply enough into the problem and therefore advocating cosmetic remedies that leave essential institutions such as marriage and the family intact. Various sorts of radical feminists are taken to task for their excessive academicism, reductionism (this is true for Marxist feminists, especially), identification of liberation with lesbianism, rejection of the biological relationship between men and women, and flirtation with revolutionary violence. Implicit in this analysis is an overall criticism of contemporary feminists for allowing their movement to be weakened by fragmentation and the quest for liberation to degenerate into a war against men. For Greer, the enemy is not men, since the social manners and mores which oppress women are promoted by men and women alike. (In addition, Greer remains a proponent of healthy heterosexual relationships.)

Greer closes her book with a call for revolution, as opposed to mere radical reaction or reformism. She makes it clear, however, that this revolution is to be one of consciousness rather than physical violence. After all, when the enemy is us, at whom do we point our guns?

The Female Eunuch had an immediate impact on the reading public, becoming a best-seller despite its publisher’s initial hesitancy to put large quantities of the book in print. This surprising marketability, in turn, increased publishers’ interest in other feminist authors, many of whom rode Greer’s coattails to commercial success and, most important, a broader audience. The Female Eunuch also has displayed a certain amount of lasting power.

In addition, Greer herself became a widely exposed spokeswoman for women’s liberation. She was the first of the contemporary feminists to become a media star, more than holding her own with various television interviewers and discussion panelists. Tall, articulate, and unremittingly provocative, Greer made an impressive role model for young and not-so-young women working toward greater independence and a stronger personal identity. Both Greer and her book made significant contributions to the “sexual revolution” of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, helping to legitimize female sexuality as well as a more free orientation toward sexual activity for both men and women.

On the other hand, Greer’s influence on feminist thought pales beside that of figures such as Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, and Mary Daly. While Greer is occasionally quoted and her books have been avidly reviewed in periodicals, she really has been channeled into the role of entertainer and pop-culture commentator, while the women mentioned above have made a sustained effort to develop and adapt their theories to changing conditions. In particular, Greer has never refined her concept of “revolution.” While she calls for radical change, she has never offered a tangible description of how change may be brought about, how long such change will take, and what its costs will be. This, doubtlessly, has reduced her impact on movement intellectuals and, ultimately, on the women’s movement itself.

Greer’s own view on the impact of The Female Eunuch may be found in her foreword to the book’s 1991 edition. She is not optimistic, pointing out that, though appearances may have been to the contrary, things had not changed very much in the more than twenty years since the book’s original publication. Obviously, the revolution in consciousness Greer advocated is not making the headway for which she hoped. Indeed, society had complemented the illusions of romantic love, marriage, and family with that of a revolution which, in reality, has changed little or nothing in essential human relationships. Yet Greer makes no attempt to update or refine her theories. Instead, she offers her brief lamentations and offers the book in its 1970 form. She seems unwilling to consider the possibility of a positive correlation between the book’s disappointing impact on everyday behavior and its lack of theoretical specificity and rigor.

The Work

Germaine Greer, who taught at Warwick University in England and wrote for journals such as The Listener and The Spectator, became a popular voice in the second wave of the women’s movement, or the “second feminist wave,” in the early 1970’s. A rousing public speaker, she debated male chauvinists and called for a shaking up of contemporary society. Australian by birth, Greer held a unique position in Anglo- American culture, spanning continents and reaching millions of readers and listeners. The Female Eunuch, translated into twelve languages, called for nothing less than a revolution in women’s thinking about themselves and how society treated them.

In the introduction to The Female Eunuch, Greer allies herself with the New Left, a political movement she sees as a broad amalgamation of forces working toward the liberation of the oppressed. As part of the New Left, feminists must not be content with the middle- class protest of earlier feminists such as the suffragists, who demanded participation in society as it was already constituted. Progressive women at the turn of the twentieth century were concerned with winning voting rights and becoming part of the status quo, Greer observes. Her generation, on the other hand, should reject society as such, which has promulgated a male chauvinist, predatory view of women.

The Female Eunuch, as its title suggests, deplores the degradation of women. If men have turned women into stereotypes, women have abetted their own dehumanization. The first section, titled “Body,” emphasizes how every aspect of the female anatomy has been isolated into desirable parts (bones, curves, hair, and so on). Women worry about “tummy control” and fashion themselves into walking dummies, inhumanly contorting themselves into the culture’s conceptions of beauty, Greer concludes.

This stripping down of women into their body parts is paralleled by what is done to their interiors, Greer points out in the second section, “Soul.” Women are described as dependents—babies and girls, malleable and passive. Women are so much raw material or playthings—dolls available to male fantasy.

In section 3, Greer explores “Love,” caustically showing how women become the objects of male fantasy and succumb to the “middle-class myth of love and marriage.” In this myth, women are deprived of their individuality and character and must constantly suit themselves to the unreal and abstract conceptions of the male-dominated workplace and home.

In section 4, Greer analyzes the results of this unnatural repression of women and uncovers the roots of the second feminist wave: loathing and disgust, misery, resentment, and rebellion. Women turn against themselves—if not against their society—because they have become eunuchs, almost literally deprived of what should make them truly appealing as sexual and mental beings. Only a revolution could wrest back for women their own identities. Anything less means simply cooptation by society and another abasement to the male standards of beauty and success.

The Female Eunuch is a powerful polemic against male arrogance, but like her predecessor, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Greer has been equally critical of women. She shares Wollstonecraft’s verve and savage wit. A brilliant polemicist, Greer uses words to incite action, to inspire, and to aggravate people. Her fine sense of style gives her diatribes grace as well as fervor. Her writing, in other words, is not merely utilitarian or instrumental—it has an aesthetic life of its own. What Greer presents is a vision of subjugated and then liberated women.

The Female Eunuch documents Greer’s charges and observations, not only citing statistics and other sources in the notes but also strategically placing quotations from statements about women in bracketed passages in each chapter. Thus, Greer maintains a balance between past and present views of women and shows how her own point of view grows out of or reacts against previous polemics, poems, scholarly reports, and philosophical essays.

Greer’s background was in literature, but The Female Eunuch is noteworthy not only for its literary criticism but also for its analysis of history, sociology, and psychology. Both popular culture and the classics inform Greer’s discussions. Thus, her work complements the interdisciplinary experiments of the 1960’s and 1970’s, and her ability to shift between different genres and levels suffuses her book with extraordinary unity and breadth.

Greer’s catholicity broadened the reach of the second feminist wave. Her example showed that feminism was not a single issue or an isolated obsession. A feminist approach could be applied to many different categories of argument and to all aspects of culture. Feminism, in fact, provided an interdisciplinary paradigm, a holistic view of human culture that went beyond earlier studies of women defined by the disciplines.

Greer’s specific arguments are open to challenge, and like all polemics (works written to persuade the reader to adopt a point of view), The Female Eunuch exaggerates. The title, for example, is overstated and threatens to torpedo Greer’s argument. For if women are indeed eunuchs, they suffer from a ruin that would be impossible to repair. The title is a metaphor dramatizing “female emasculation” in the psychological sense, and Greer’s message of hope is that women can change their poor image of themselves and recoup their losses.

The Female Eunuch is part of a period in which certain people believed that society could be changed fundamentally and rapidly. The book was part of the literature of protest. Some of its confidence in the human will may seem naïve. The book speaks, however, to a periodic need not only in the feminist movement but in society itself, when large numbers of people begin to follow the logic of revolution and to seek to overturn the status quo.

Bibliography

Castro, Ginette. American Feminism: A Contemporary History. Translated by Elizabeth Loverde-Bagwell. New York: New York University Press, 1990. This book provides an eminently accessible introduction to the range and varieties of contemporary American feminism. Chapter 5, in which Greer is treated as an advocate of feminist androgyny, is especially relevant.

Coole, Diana. Women in Political Theory: From Ancient Misogyny to Contemporary Feminism. 2d ed. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Though this book does not include Greer’s book in its bibliography, it helps to put her work in perspective both by placing contemporary feminism into the context of Western political thought and by showing the incredible range, depth, and complexity of feminist political ideas.

Greer, Germaine. Daddy, We Hardly Knew You. New York: Viking Penguin, 1989. An investigation into the life of her father after he dies in 1983, this book sheds light on Greer’s skeptical attitude toward the idealized nuclear family.

Greer, Germaine. The Madwoman’s Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings 1968-85. London: Picador, 1986. This highly diverse collection illustrates Greer’s pungent, eclectic—critics might say ad hoc and undisciplined—brand of commentary. Topics range from an analysis of Jimi Hendrix’s tragic demise to Greer’s dealings with self-proclaimed critic of feminism Norman Mailer to her brief association with Suck (a pornographic newspaper that she helped to found).

Mailer, Norman. The Prisoner of Sex. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971. Mailer’s swipe at feminism. Greer, however, is treated rather favorably, a fact that neither she nor other feminists appreciated. Greer later appeared in a televised debate with Mailer, describing the experience in an essay entitled “My Mailer Problem.” The essay is included in The Madwoman’s Underclothes (listed above).