The Female Eunuch

The Female Eunuch is a feminist essay by Germaine Greer, published in London in October 1970. It became an international bestseller and a key text of the feminist movement of the 1970s, widely discussed both by other feminists and by the general public, largely thanks to the author's high profile in the broadcast media. The book has been translated into numerous languages. A sequel, The Whole Woman, appeared in 1999.

Greer's central thesis is that the "traditional" suburban, consumerist nuclear family represses women sexually, and that this repression devitalises them, reducing them, figuratively, to eunuchs. The essay blends polemic with scholarly research. Its sections, titled Body, Soul, Energy, Love and Hate, examine historical definitions of how women perceive themselves, list the limitations imposed upon them, and critique modern consumer society as well as conventional stereotypes of female and male "normality". Greer argues that men hate women, though women do not realise this and are taught to hate themselves.

Unlike earlier feminist works, Greer uses humour, boldness and coarse language to describe female sexuality directly and candidly, a subject that had received little open discussion in the English-speaking world. Her irreverence towards Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis was inspired by Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. In the final chapter, Revolution, she insists that change must come through revolution rather than evolution: women should come to know and accept their own bodies and give up celibacy and monogamy, yet they should not burn their bras, since making bralessness a rule would merely be another form of repression. She also scorns the "genteel, middle-class ladies" who sit on women's rights committees and spend their time signing petitions, arguing that equality demands radical change rather than politeness.

In a foreword to the 21st anniversary edition, Greer reflects on how the sudden collapse of communism in 1989 left women in many countries exposed to a consumer-driven Western society with little protection. The freedom she had pleaded for, she says, was the freedom to be a person, with dignity, integrity and pride. In a 1971 interview she explained the title: women had been separated from their libido and their capacity for desire, and deprived of their capacity for action, much as farm animals are castrated to serve their owners.

The reception was sharply divided. The journalist Thelma Forshaw, writing in The Age, dismissed it as a grumbling over-the-fence complaint, while Sylvia Lawson, in The Australian, defended it as an exploratory and questioning text. The critic Camille Paglia called it a "marvelous book" and regarded Greer's international promotional tour as the zenith of twentieth-century feminism. Over time some of its claims have been challenged; the neuroscientist Simon LeVay, for instance, argued in 1996 that later research contradicted Greer's assertion that no differences exist between the brains of men and women.