The Female Eunuch
•enU1antly
writ1en, quirky,
and
sens
i
ble, full
of bile an
d
insight,
·
-NEW
YORK
TIM BOOK REVIEW
The Female Eunuch
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.
Foreword to the 21st Anniversary Edition 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:
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13
27
29
35
38
42
44
53
61
63
73
80
89
96
103
113
118
132
155
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 Notes
Acknowledgements About the Author
Other Books by Germaine Greer Credits
Cover Copyright
About the Publisher
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172
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269
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353
372
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 profession- al 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 pharma- ceutical 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. Free- dom from shoes that make us shorten our steps and push our but- tocks out. Freedom from the ever-present juvenile pulchritude. Freedom from the humiliating insults heaped on us by the top shelf of the newsagents; freedom from rape, whether it is by being un- dressed 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
11
rejection of the concept of female libido as merely responsive is es- sential to female liberation. This is the proposition that was inter- preted 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 con- stitute 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 op- pression 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 enter- prise, prostitution, prostitution of body, mind and soul to consumer- ism, 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.
‘The World has lost its soul, and I my sex’ (T
OLLER
,
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 exer- cise, 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 retrench- ments and the revival of frills, corsets and femininity after the per- missive twenties, through the sexual sell of the fifties, ever dwind- ling, 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 with- ering 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 emancipa- tion. 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 ca- nary 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 enjoy- ing new limelight. The media insist upon exposing women’s libera- tion 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