The “women” Greer addresses are not the majority of womenkind – she concedes that she does not “know” poor people – but people like herself, university graduates, the comparatively privileged members of the western democracies. She wants a new society in which women write their own script, set their own agenda, and make their own deep personal choices. Greer’s explicit liberation struggle focuses on the self, not the collective. As a revolutionary manifesto, there are many things it’s not: principally, it’s not about sexual equality for women of the world, though that may have been a message her readers took away. He wrote that Greer “has converted me to women’s lib, as much by her bawdy sense of humour as by the bite of her polemic”.įrom first publication, this liberating, sometimes intimidating, book soon became mythologised. When he reviewed The Female Eunuch in the Observer, Kenneth Tynan recognised this. It’s her voice that sets her work apart, and her inimitable tone – earthy erudition spliced with abrasive advocacy – that gives The Female Eunuch its unique narrative power. She is the original mother of reinvention.” She has repeatedly written about her own experiences of lesbian sex, rape, abortion, infertility, failed marriage (in the 1960s she was married to a construction worker for three weeks) and the menopause, thereby leaving herself open to claims that she shamelessly extrapolates from her own condition to the rest of womankind and calls it a theory. Indeed, she has never shied away from exposing herself whether photographically, in counterculture periodicals such as Oz and the unambiguously titled Suck, or in memoirs such as her 1990 book Daddy, We Hardly Knew You. Australia’s Germaine Greer, the woman who has described herself as “an anarchist, basically”, was captured in an Observer profile of 2003: “She has been in the business of shaking up a complacent establishment for nearly 40 years now, and was employing the most elemental shock tactic of getting naked in public both long before and long after it ever crossed Madonna’s mind. In the literature of gender identity, The Female Eunuch is already a classic, a bestselling masterpiece of passionate free expression by a writer steeped in the English literary tradition. S ome of the outstanding books in this series will be polemical and rhetorical as much as revolutionary.
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