The Female Eunuch (P.S.) [Paperback]

Germaine Greer (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 14, 2008 | Series: P.S.

The publication of Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch in 1970 was a landmark event, raising eyebrows and ire while creating a shock wave of recognition in women around the world with its steadfast assertion that sexual liberation is the key to women's liberation. Today, Greer's searing examination of the oppression of women in contemporary society is both an important historical record of where we've been and a shockingly relevant treatise on what still remains to be achieved.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A dazzling combination of erudition, eccentricity, and eroticism.” (Newsweek )

“Brilliantly written, quirky and sensible, full of bile and insight.” (New York Times Book Review )

“This book changed my life. Germaine Greer is brave and crazy, serious and fun, sharp and sexy.” (Elizabeth Wurtzel )

From the Inside Flap

Praise for THE FEMALE EUNUCH by Germaine Greer

"Like a woman, this book gets better with age. Greer's punchy prose and all-too-true observations motivate you to go out and do something to liberate yourself-and other women." -Leora Tanenbaum, author of "Slut! Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation"

"In this classic text, Germaine Greer establishes herself as the bastard brainchild of Simone deBeauvoir and Valerie Solanis; a free-loving feminist freak and angry intellectual blazing the trail for modern day thinkers like Camille Paglia and Elizabeth Wurtzel; a pro-sex feminist before the term was invented. At times funny, at times ferocious, and at times frustrating, "The Female Eunuch" remains an important historical document, one which makes palpable both the passion and the venom that brought Feminism's second wave to life." -Debbie Stoller, co-founder of "Bust" magazine and co-editor of "The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order"

"This book changed my life. Germaine Greer is brave and crazy, serious and fun, sharp and sexy. The suffragettes may have invented modern-day feminism half a century before, but Germaine Greer made it hot." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of "Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women" and "Prozac Nation" --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics (October 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006157953X
• ISBN-13: 978-0061579530
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #245,374 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 47 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Greer has style May 12, 2002

By Jennifer

Format:Paperback

I read Greer's The Whole Woman, her most recent endeavor, before reading The Female Eunuch--suddenly I understood why the reviews of the Whole Woman were so tepid-to-awful. I liked it, but reading Eunuch I realized that this woman had incredible style and swagger, but that she had written a much more delicious and fearless book back in 1970.

In the intervening years, so much has changed for women (because of feminism) that Greer's antics and ability to go head to head with macho rakes/serious artists (like she did with Norman Mailer in an infamous Town Hall meeting) is less notable. Still, Eunuch bristles with energy and youth and it makes me think, even though I was certainly not raised in the repressive forties and fifties.

I think that this book is definitely worth reading, especially to see how far we've come.

95 of 129 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars shocking May 12, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

I began reading "The Female Eunuch" after I had read Natalies Angiers "Woman : An Intimate Geography". It caused a sensation in its time and is still capable of shocking. Ms Angiers may have borrowed from The "Female Eunuch" because she also divides her books in to chapters with simple headings like the "body" and "work" and this gives both books clarity and focus. Where they differ is that Ms Greer,s is on shakier ground with her scientific references which can be excused since the book was first published in 1970.

Her statements about clitoral orgasms being a "new scientific myth" makes very odious and irritating reading. Ms Greer tries to excuse herself by saying that focusing on clitoral arousal is just another limiting perspective on female sexuality. She is wrong. Clitoral arousal is still a mystery to many women. Who still expect to achieve vaginal orgasms and wonder why they do not. Which only proves that for all the scientific hoopla in the 1970s. Most women are still ignorant about how their genitalia function.

Ms Greer mentions hiding her soiled sanitary rag from her brother as a girl and is obviously indignant about it But still does not question why female reproductive organs are considered so objectionable that they and their issue should be hidden. I would have considered this oversight a direct result of her childhood in Australia which is basically a secular country. However Ms Greer attended a Roman Catholic girls school. Implying that she should know full well why women genitals and menstrual fluid are considered 'unclean' It is laid out quite clearly in Leviticus.

Ms Greer,s strength lies in her confrontational style and ability to elucidate how women are taught to be women by the cultural process of engendering them and rather than an evolutionary predisposition to domestic servitude.

At the time she made these statements there was little scientific data to support her assertions that far from women wanting to be frivolous domestic chattles and childbreeders. They actually were capable of pursuing any form of employment and having a womb in no way hampered this.

Ms Greer is ignorant of non western cultures and even pre christian cultures and so she assumes that woman have always been socially subordinate because she has a womb. This is unfortunate because the western image of womanhood is not a universal standard and is itself quite recent. She would have done well to read up on the European witchtrials in which millions of women especially midwives died. Because their professions were in direct competition with doctors and priests.

Ms Greer is at her best when she denounces. Female financial and emotional dependence on men as infantile and thus uninspiring for both men and woman. Contrary to many accusations of Ms Greer being a "man-hater" this book indicates that she is more likely to place women,s inferior social status squarely on the shoulders of women themselves.

Ms Greer exhibits a sneaky admiration for men and their "liberated" sexuality and obvious disdain for womens inability to relinquish dependency relationships built on emotional blackmail. Ms Greer beleives that women hold on to their men by forcing them into "addictions" which "only they the wife , lover will tolerate". Some people will find this analogy troubling and well they might. How many women hold onto thier men by getting into bondage ?

Ms Greer is troubled by the concept of love as it is filtered through the media and "trashy" romantic fiction. She believes that women are addicted to an illusion. She says this whilst ignoring the fact that people have been writing love letters to each other from the moment they invented writing. She should look at some of the ancient Egyptian love letters written 1,849 BC. Which prove that human beings have always been romantic and perhaps they always will be.

Ms Greer also expresses open disdain for that paragon of virtue Motherhood. The lofty pedestle of female worth that all women are supposed to want to climb. She notes how "over nurturing" also known as the "smothering mother" Can suppress her children,s identities especially female children by preventing them from exploring their external environment. Unlike their brothers who are encouraged to explore and investigate the world without fear. This Ms Greer concludes results in arrested development both academically and emotionally for girls. Because the child will cling to the mother. To parents who have been indoctrinated into beleiving that the mother,s perpetual presence is essential for an emotionally balanced and secure child this will sound outrageous and extreme.

Ms Greer is a head of her time by saying that women begin to falter educationally during adolescence and places this at the door of conflicts between parents that believe the socialization of a daughter involves suppressing her personality into compliant help-mate and schools which encourage girls to be ambitious and use their academic and athletic talents.

Most woman Ms Greer attests can not reconcile the need to be a "good daughter and wifely prospect" with their need for personal achievement. Ms Greer therefore concludes that they betray themselves and become fodder for the capitalist system. In which personal fulfillment is prosponed and subverted in to rabid consumer good consumption. What is also known as the "shopaholic" Ms Greer suggest in wiley humor that if women ceased to shop they could bargin for greater say in economic influence. Yes a shopping strike !

Ms Greer is instantly controversial when she states that the mother and daughter relationship is a problematic one. That the mother may see her role as one of suppression of her daughter s identity. This attitude may appear shocking to some who believe that a "girls best friend is her mom" Ms Greer was born in the 1930s and there is an obvious clash between her need to be freed from the conventional female expectations in life and her mother,s desire to straight-jacket her personality into feminine cliches. Ms Greer mentions how her grandmother and mother debated about whether she should wear a corset or not whilst women were still wearing girdles and other stomach shapers.

What makes this book a ground breaker is Ms Greer,s focus on sex and how women being de-sexed by society (she does not mention the role of religion in this madonna-whore dichotomy) Has created a society of women that are easily exploited both as teenagers when they simply give into sex with partners they don't know and later as spouses. Where sex is bartered for a roof over their heads

Ms Greer has been described a a faux feminists and a libertine. Her faux feminism attributed to her damning indictment of motherhood and the role that women play in their own suppression. Ms Greer expects opposition and in her book she courts it at every turn. Knowing that militant feminists will charge after her.

The other accusation against her of being a libertine is perhaps a more serious one. Because it is about gender betrayal. Ms Greer is often scathing about female sexuality which she considers subdugated into coyness. She is right about female sexuality being subdugated but rather than claiming that women want to be female eunuchs. She might be better served by looking at the religious restrictions on women being sexually liberated. In this instance Ms Angiers book is a step on by elucidating women's need for sex but the social curtailment of womens sexual exploration being the direct product of religious restraints enshrined in laws. If your being threatened with physical mutilations, rape, burning, stoning or social ostracism as a slut. It is likely that your libido might not be up to much !

Ms Greer book is still ground breaking and I recommend it on the basis of its criticism of how women are reared. Both men and woman should read it. Especially if they are parents with a daughter. Ms Greer though brash and angry still poses some very important questions about how training a girl into submission perpetuates womens lower status especially financially. She cites the nurses strikes in England where the nurses were compromised because their status as compassionate care givers prevented them from striking and securing a wage that they could live of. Other examples which are obviously more anecdotal references to Ms Greer's own youth include her accounts of how women are trained into a servile politeness. Which means that young women are forced to listen to "boring men" chatter on and on and never interject with their own comments.

This occurs because Ms Greer believes women are educated and nurtured into believing themselves intellectually and sexually inferior and incomplete.

I think for this reason alone her book is worth a second glance. Because it would be a lie to claim that these statements have become irrelevant with the passage of time. The process of womens liberation has still along way to go.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth It November 8, 2011

By Jackie

Format:Paperback

This is an incredible and thought-provoking book. Written in, it seems, a blaze of fury,"The Female Eunuch," doesn't shy away from controversy.

To the reviewer who mentioned the style as inferior to more academic texts, I would agree - PROVIDED that you judge it on it's "sociological" merit as opposed to cultural. She doesn't support her claims with statistics or figures, and sometimes draws anecdotes that hardly seem to fit her premises from god-knows-where. No one but an egotistical, grandiose, self-important thinker would write in the style she writes in: namely the style most influential thinkers in history have used. If you see the truth in what she says, her ideas are great, poetic, motivational, etc. If you don't see the phenomena she describes in the book around you in your day-to-day life, then you are probably personally more liberated than the audience of "castrated women" she intended the book for. Either way, you'll definitely spot some glaring holes in her writing.

Reading this book as a kid (you heard me) shaped my philosophy of gender pretty powerfully. It's written in such a grabbing style, and it makes recommendations to the women of the world that are downright anarchistic, insubordinate, and earth-shaking. If you ever feel like your feminism is a little bit unambitious or tepid, this is the book to get you back on your feet, and really reanalyzing your place in the world as a feminist woman or man. Just read it. It will make you think important thoughts.