Summary
The book is a feminist analysis, written with a mixture of polemic and scholarly research. It was a key text of the feminist movement in the 1970s, broadly discussed and criticised by other feminists and the wider community, particularly through the author's high profile in the broadcast media. In sections titled "Body", "Soul", "Energy", "Love" and "Hate" Greer examines historical definitions of women's perception of self and uses a premise of imposed limitations to critique modern consumer societies, female "normality", and masculine shaping of stereotypes quoting, "The World has lost its soul, and I my sex." [3] In contrast to earlier feminist works, Greer uses humour, boldness, and coarse language to present a direct and candid description of female sexuality, much of this subject having remained undiscussed in English-speaking societies. Greer's irreverence towards Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis was inspired by Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex . [4] The work bridged academia and the contemporary arts in presenting the targets of the final section of the book, Revolution; it is in accord, and often associated with, a creative and revolutionary movement of the period.
Greer argues that men hate women, though the latter do not realise this and are taught to hate themselves. [5]
In her final title labelled Revolution, Greer argues that change had to come about via revolution, not evolution. Women should get to know and come to accept their own bodies, taste their own menstrual blood, and give up celibacy and monogamy. Yet they should not burn their bras. "Bras are a ludicrous invention", she wrote, "but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression." [6] Greer complains of the "genteel, middle-class ladies" who sit on women's rights committees and spend their time signing petitions to achieve equality. Greer expresses that to gain equality a woman must not be genteel but she should instead seek revolution. In a foreword added to the 21st anniversary edition, Greer references the loss of women's freedom with the "sudden death of communism" (1989) as catapult for women the world over for a sudden transition into consumer Western society wherein there is little to no protection for mothers and the disabled; here, there is no freedom to speak:
The freedom I pleaded for twenty years ago was freedom to be a person, with dignity, integrity, nobility, passion, pride that constitute personhood. Freedom to run, shout, talk loudly and sit with your knees apart. Freedom to know and love the earth and all that swims, lies, and crawls upon it ... 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. [7]
Reception
In a 1971 interview, Greer said of her book that "The title is an indication of the problem. Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master's ulterior motives—to be fattened or made docile—women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It's a process that sacrifices vigor for delicacy and succulence, and one that's got to be changed." [8] In January 1972 The Age 's reviewer Thelma Forshaw described The Female Eunuch as "the orchestrated over-the-back-fence grizzle ... based on the curious fancy ... we were all men, and then some fiend castrated half of us and gave us a ghastly internal bookie's bag called a womb". [9] The newspaper declared that the review "has stirred up a considerable controversy". [10] According to the journalist Keith Dunstan, "[t]he reviews of [the book] were extremely mixed. The most famous was by [Forshaw] of The Age". [9] Dunstan contrasted this with a positive review by Sylvia Lawson of The Australian , "[it has] been greeted in Australia with some fantastically myopic, complacent and resentful printed comment ... [the book] is neither dogmatic nor complacent, neither strident nor paranoic ... [it is] ranging, exploratory and questioning". [9]
Laura Miller of Salon described the book as a "fitful, passionate, scattered text, not cohesive enough to qualify as a manifesto. It's all over the place, impulsive, and fatally naive—which is to say it is the quintessential product of its time." [11] The neuroscientist Simon LeVay wrote in Queer Science (1996) that subsequent scientific research contradicted Greer's claim that there are no differences between the brains of men and women. [12] The critic Camille Paglia called The Female Eunuch a "marvelous book", and described Greer's international tour to promote it as "the zenith of twentieth-century feminism". [13]
Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical re-ordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts, while recognizing that women's experiences are also affected by other social divisions such as in race, class, and sexual orientation. The ideology and movement emerged in the 1960s.
The sexual revolution, also known as the sexual liberation, was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the developed Western world from the 1960s to the 1970s. Sexual liberation included increased acceptance of sex outside of traditional heterosexual, monogamous relationships. The normalization of contraception and the pill, public nudity, pornography, premarital sex, homosexuality, masturbation, alternative forms of sexuality, and the legalization of abortion all followed.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson is a 1990 work about sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts by scholar Camille Paglia, in which she addresses major artists and writers such as Donatello, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Emily Brontë, and Oscar Wilde. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, Paglia argues that the primary conflict in Western culture is between the binary forces of the Apollonian and Dionysian, Apollo being associated with order, symmetry, culture, rationality, and sky, and Dionysus with disorder, chaos, nature, emotion, and earth. The book became a bestseller, and was praised by numerous literary critics, although it also received critical reviews from numerous feminist scholars.
SCUM Manifesto is a radical feminist manifesto by Valerie Solanas, published in 1967. It argues that men have ruined the world, and that it is up to women to fix it. To achieve this goal, it suggests the formation of SCUM, an organization dedicated to overthrowing society and eliminating the male sex. The SCUM Manifesto has been described as a satire or parody, especially due to its parallels with Freud's theory of femininity, though this has been disputed, even by Solanas herself.
Sex-positive feminism, also known as pro-sex feminism, sex-radical feminism, or sexually liberal feminism, is a feminist movement centering on the idea that sexual freedom is an essential component of women's freedom. They oppose legal or social efforts to control sexual activities between consenting adults, whether they are initiated by the government, other feminists, opponents of feminism, or any other institution. They embrace sexual minority groups, endorsing the value of coalition-building with marginalized groups. Sex-positive feminism is connected with the sex-positive movement. Sex-positive feminism brings together anti-censorship activists, LGBT activists, feminist scholars, producers of pornography and erotica, among others. Sex-positive feminists believe that prostitution can be a positive experience if workers are treated with respect, and agree that sex work should not be criminalized.
The Second Sex is a 1949 book by the French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in which the author discusses the treatment of women in the present society as well as throughout all of history. Beauvoir researched and wrote the book in about 14 months between 1946 and 1949. She published the work in two volumes: Facts and Myths, and Lived Experience. Some chapters first appeared in the journal Les Temps modernes.
Victim feminism is a term that has been used by some conservative postfeminist writers such as Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf to critique forms of feminist activism which they see as reinforcing the idea that women are weak or lacking in agency.
Nancy Julia Chodorow is an American sociologist and professor. She began her career as a professor of Women's Studies at Wellesley College in 1973, and from 1974 on taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until 1986. She then was a professor in the departments of Sociology and Clinical Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley until she resigned in 1986, after which she taught psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance. Chodorow is often described as a leader in feminist thought, especially in the realms of psychoanalysis and psychology.
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women is a nonfiction book by Naomi Wolf, originally published in 1990 by Chatto & Windus in the UK and William Morrow & Co (1991) in the United States. It was republished in 2002 by HarperPerennial with a new introduction.
In psychoanalytic literature, a Madonna–whore complex is the inability to maintain sexual arousal within a committed and loving relationship. First identified by Sigmund Freud, who called it psychic impotence, it is a psychological complex that is said to develop in men who see women as either saintly Madonnas or debased whores. Men with this complex desire a sexual partner who has been degraded (whore) while they cannot desire the respected partner (Madonna). Freud wrote, "Where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire they cannot love." Clinical psychologist Uwe Hartmann wrote in 2009 that the complex "is still highly prevalent in today's patients".
The Feminists was a second-wave radical feminist group active in New York City from 1968 to 1973.
The Beautiful Boy is a book by radical feminist academic Germaine Greer, published in 2003 as The Boy in the Commonwealth by Thames & Hudson and in the rest of the world by Rizzoli. Its avowed intention was "to advance women's reclamation of their capacity for and right to visual pleasure". The book is a study of the youthful male face and form, from antiquity to the present day, from paintings and drawings to statuary and photographs.
The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution is a 1970 book by the radical feminist activist Shulamith Firestone. Written over a few months when Firestone was 25, it has been described as a classic of feminist thought.
Sexual Politics is the debut book by American writer and activist Kate Millett, based on her PhD dissertation at Columbia University. It was published in 1970 by Doubleday. It is regarded as a classic of feminism and one of radical feminism's key texts, a formative piece in shaping the intentions of the second-wave feminist movement. In Sexual Politics, an explicit focus is placed on male dominance throughout prominent 20th century art and literature. According to Millett, western literature reflects patriarchal constructions and the heteronormativity of society. She argues that men have established power over women, but that this power is the result of social constructs rather than innate or biological qualities.
Thelma Honora Forshaw or Thelma Korting was an Australian short story writer and journalist. In 1967 she published a largely autobiographical collection of short stories, An Affair of Clowns, in 1967. As a journalist she worked as a freelancer and book reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian, The Bulletin, Meanjin, Nation, and Quadrant.
Barbara Creed is a professor of cinema studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of six books on gender, feminist film theory, and the horror genre. Creed is a graduate of Monash and La Trobe universities where she completed doctoral research using the framework of psychoanalysis and feminist theory to examine horror films. She is known for her cultural criticism.
Feminist literature is fiction, nonfiction, drama, or poetry, which supports the feminist goals of defining, establishing, and defending equal civil, political, economic, and social rights for women. It often identifies women's roles as unequal to those of men – particularly as regarding status, privilege, and power – and generally portrays the consequences to women, men, families, communities, and societies as undesirable.
Germaine Greer is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminism movement in the latter half of the 20th century.
Penis envy is a stage in Sigmund Freud's theory of female psychosexual development, in which young girls experience anxiety upon realization that they do not have a penis. Freud considered this realization a defining moment in a series of transitions toward a mature female sexuality. In Freudian theory, the penis envy stage begins the transition from attachment to the mother to competition with the mother for the attention and affection of the father. The young boy's realization that women do not have a penis is thought to result in castration anxiety.
Australia has a long-standing association with the protection and creation of women's rights. Australia was the second country in the world to give women the right to vote and the first to give women the right to be elected to a national parliament. The Australian state of South Australia, then a British colony, was the first parliament in the world to grant some women full suffrage rights. Australia has since had multiple notable women serving in public office as well as other fields. In Australia, European women were granted the right to vote and to be elected at federal elections in 1902.
