The Female Eunuch

THE FEMALE EUNUCH

Germaine Greer

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Germaine Greer 1970, 1971

Introduction © Hadley Freeman 2020

Germaine Greer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover illustration by John Holmes

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780007205011

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008436186

Version: 2020-09-30

Dedication

This book is dedicated to LILLIAN, who lives with nobody but a colony of New York roaches, whose energy has never failed despite her anxieties and her asthma and her overweight, who is always interested in everybody, often angry, sometimes bitchy, but always involved. Lillian the abundant, the golden, the eloquent, the well and badly loved; Lillian the beautiful who thinks she is ugly, Lillian the indefatigable who thinks she is always tired.

It is dedicated to CAROLINE, who danced, but badly, painted but badly, jumped up from a dinner table in tears, crying that she wanted to be a person, went out and was one, despite her great beauty. Caroline who smarts at every attack, and doubts all praise, who has done great things with gentleness and humility, who assaulted the authorities with valorous love and cannot be defeated.

It is for my fairy godmother, JOY with the green eyes, whose husband decried her commonsense and belittled her mind, because she was more passionately intelligent, and more intelligently passionate than he, until she ran away from him and recovered herself, her insight and her sense of humour, and never cried again, except in compassion.

It is for KASOUNDRA, who makes magic out of skins and skeins and pens, who is never still, never unaware, riding her strange destiny in the wilderness of New York, loyal and bitter, as strong as a rope of steel and as soft as a sigh.

For MARCIA, whose mind contains everything and destroys nothing, understanding dreams and nightmares, who looks on tempests and is not shaken, who lives among the damned and is not afraid of them, a living soul among the dead.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword to the Paladin 21st Anniversary Edition

Introduction

Summary

Body

Gender

Bones

Curves

Hair

Sex

The Wicked Womb

Soul

The Stereotype

Energy

Baby

Girl

Puberty

The Psychological Sell

The Raw Material

Womanpower

Work

Love

The Ideal

Altruism

Egotism

Obsession

Romance

The Object of Male Fantasy

The Middle-Class Myth of Love and Marriage

Family

Security

Hate

Loathing and Disgust

Abuse

Misery

Resentment

Rebellion

Revolution

Revolution

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Foreword to the Paladin 21st Anniversary Edition

Twenty years ago I wrote in the Introduction to The Female Eunuch that I thought that the book should quickly date and disappear. I hoped that a new breed of woman would come upon the earth for whom my analysis of sex oppression in the developed world in the second half of the twentieth century would be utterly irrelevant.

Many new breeds of woman are upon the earth: there are female body builders whose pectorals are as hard as any man’s; there are women marathon runners with musculature as stringy and tight as any man’s; there are women administrators with as much power as any man; there are women paying alimony and women being paid palimoney; there are up-front lesbians demanding the right to marry and have children by artificial insemination; there are men who mutilate themselves and are given passports as statutory females; there are prostitutes who have combined in highly visible professional organizations; there are armed women in the front line of the most powerful armies on earth; there are full colonels with vivid lipstick and painted nails; there are women who write books about their sexual conquests, naming names and describing positions, sizes of members and so forth. None of these female phenomena was to be observed in any numbers twenty years ago.

Women’s magazines are now written for grown-ups, and discuss not only pre-marital sex, contraception and abortion, but venereal disease, incest, sexual perversion, and, even more surprising, finance high and low, politics, conservation, animal rights and consumer power. Contraception having saturated its market and severely curtailed the money to be made out of menstruation, the pharmaceutical multinationals have at last turned their attention to the menopausal and post-menopausal women who represent a new, huge, unexploited market for HRT. Geriatric sex can be seen in every television soap opera. What more could women want?

Freedom, that’s what.

Freedom from being the thing looked at rather than the person looking back. Freedom from self-consciousness. Freedom from the duty of sexual stimulation of jaded male appetite, for which no breast ever bulges hard enough and no leg is ever long enough. Freedom from the uncomfortable clothes that must be worn to titillate. Freedom from shoes that make us shorten our steps and push our buttocks out. Freedom from the ever-present juvenile pulchritude on Page 3. Freedom from the humiliating insults heaped on us by the top shelf of the newsagents; freedom from rape, whether it is by being undressed verbally by the men on the building site, spied on as we go about our daily business, stopped, propositioned or followed on the street, greasily teased by our male workmates, pawed by the boss, used sadistically or against our will by the men we love, or violently terrorized and beaten by a stranger, or a gang of strangers.

Twenty years ago it was important to stress the right to sexual expression and far less important to underline a woman’s right to reject male advances; now it is even more important to stress the right to reject penetration by the male member, the right to safe sex, the right to chastity, the right to defer physical intimacy until there is irrefutable evidence of commitment, because of the appearance on the earth of AIDS. The argument in The Female Eunuch is still valid, none the less, for it holds that a woman has the right to express her own sexuality; which is not at all the same thing as the right to capitulate to male advances. The Female Eunuch argues that the rejection of the concept of female libido as merely responsive is essential to female liberation. This is the proposition that was interpreted by the brain-dead hacks of Fleet Street as ‘telling women to go out and do it’.

The freedom I pleaded for twenty years ago was freedom to be a person, with the dignity, integrity, nobility, passion, pride that constitute personhood. Freedom to run, shout, to talk loudly and sit with your knees apart. Freedom to know and love the earth and all that swims, lies and crawls upon it. Freedom to learn and freedom to teach. Freedom from fear, freedom from hunger, freedom of speech and freedom of belief. Most of the women in the world are still afraid, still hungry, still mute and loaded by religion with all kinds of fetters, masked, muzzled, mutilated and beaten. The Female Eunuch does not deal with poor women (for when I wrote it I did not know them) but with the women of the rich world, whose oppression is seen by poor women as freedom.

The sudden death of communism in 1989–90 catapulted poor women the world over into consumer society, where there is no protection for mothers, for the aged, for the disabled, no commitment to health care or education or raising the standard of living for the whole population. In those two years millions of women saw the bottom fall out of their world; though they lost their child support, their pensions, their hospital benefits, their day care, their protected jobs, and the very schools and hospitals where they worked closed down, there was no outcry. They had freedom to speak but no voice. They had freedom to buy essential services with money that they did not have, freedom to indulge in the oldest form of private enterprise, prostitution, prostitution of body, mind and soul to consumerism, or else freedom to starve, freedom to beg.

You can now see the female Eunuch the world over; all the time we thought we were driving her out of our minds and hearts she was spreading herself wherever blue jeans and Coca-Cola may go. Wherever you see nail varnish, lipstick, brassieres and high heels, the Eunuch has set up her camp. You can find her triumphant even under the veil.

Introduction

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 The Female Eunuch – and its author, Germaine Greer – burst into like a thrillingly 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 who arrives in school unexpectedly one day, and 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, still. 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 in the Big Brother house, 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 notoriously boggy politics of 1970s feminism, Greer was otherwise engaged 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 (NWPC), although it actually becomes about the power struggles between, on the one side, Friedan, and, on the other, Steinem and Bella Abzug, via the deadening media of NWPC meetings in ‘airless, windowless rooms decked with taffeta valances and Miami Beach plaster statuary’. Greer is, characteristically, pretty dismissive of 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, as Friedan and Steinem were and are. She would describe herself as an academic, but, really, she is an iconoclast.

Rereading The Female Eunuch in 2020, it’s still very 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 thrilling 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 one single sentence.

The humour in The Female Eunuch is born out of searing, fearless rage, and 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 still packs 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 just 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.

Hadley Freeman, 2020

Summary

‘The World has lost its soul, and I my sex’

(TOLLER, Hinkemann)

This book is a part of the second feminist wave. The old suffragettes, who served their prison term and lived on through the years of gradual admission of women into professions which they declined to follow, into parliamentary freedoms which they declined to exercise, into academies which they used more and more as shops where they could take out degrees while waiting to get married, have seen their spirit revive in younger women with a new and vital cast. Mrs Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan, leader of the Six Point Group, welcomed the younger militants and even welcomed their sexual frankness. ‘They’re young,’ she said to Irma Kurtz, ‘and utterly unsophisticated politically, but they’re full of beans. The membership of our group until recently has been far too old for my liking.’[1] After the ecstasy of direct action, the militant ladies of two generations ago settled down to work of consolidation in hosts of small organizations, while the main force of their energy filtered away in post-war retrenchments and the revival of frills, corsets and femininity after the permissive twenties, through the sexual sell of the fifties, ever dwindling, ever more respectable. Evangelism withered into eccentricity.

The new emphasis is different. Then genteel middle-class ladies clamoured for reform, now ungenteel middle-class women are calling for revolution. For many of them the call for revolution came before the call for the liberation of women. The New Left has been the forcing house for most movements, and for many of them liberation is dependent upon the coming of the classless society and the withering away of the state. The difference is radical, for the faith that the suffragettes had in the existing political systems and their deep desire to participate in them have perished. In the old days ladies were anxious to point out that they did not seek to disrupt society or to unseat God. Marriage, the family, private property and the state were threatened by their actions, but they were anxious to allay the fears of conservatives, and in doing so the suffragettes betrayed their own cause and prepared the way for the failure of emancipation. Five years ago it seemed clear that emancipation had failed: the number of women in Parliament had settled at a low level; the number of professional women had stabilized as a tiny minority; the pattern of female employment had emerged as underpaid, menial and supportive. The cage door had been opened but the canary had refused to fly out. The conclusion was that the cage door ought never to have been opened because canaries are made for captivity; the suggestion of an alternative had only confused and saddened them.

There are feminist organizations still in existence which follow the reforming tracks laid down by the suffragettes. Betty Friedan’s National Organization for Women is represented in congressional committees, especially the ones considered to be of special relevance to women. Women politicians still represent female interests, but they are most often the interests of women as dependants, to be protected from easy divorce and all sorts of Casanova’s charters. Mrs Hunkins-Hallinan’s Six Point Group is a respected political entity. What is new about the situation is that such groups are enjoying new limelight. The media insist upon exposing women’s liberation weekly, even daily. The change is that suddenly everyone is interested in the subject of women. They may not be in favour of the movements that exist, but they are concerned about the issues. Among young women in universities the movement might be expected to find strong support. It is not surprising that exploited women workers might decide to hold the government to ransom at last. It is surprising that women who seem to have nothing to complain about have begun to murmur. Speaking to quiet audiences of provincial women decently hatted and dressed, I have been surprised to find that the most radical ideas are gladly entertained, and the most telling criticisms and sharpest protests are uttered. Even the suffragettes could not claim the grass-roots support that the new feminism gains day by day.

We can only speculate about the causes of this new activity. Perhaps the sexual sell was oversell. Perhaps women have never really believed the account of themselves which they were forced to accept from psychologists, religious leaders, women’s magazines and men. Perhaps the reforms which did happen eventually led them to the position from which they could at last see the whole perspective and begin to understand the rationale of their situation. Perhaps because they are not enmeshed in unwilling childbirth and heavy menial labour in the home, they have had time to think. Perhaps the plight of our society has become so desperate and so apparent that women can no longer be content to leave it to other people. The enemies of women have blamed such circumstances for female discontent. Women must prize this discontent as the first stirring of the demand for life; they have begun to speak out and to speak to each other. The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion. ‘Right on!’