The Female Eunuch

Germaine Greer is a retired writer, academic, and broadcaster with a long history of social and political activism. Her work has largely centered around the pursuit of radical feminist liberation. Born in 1939 in Melbourne, Australia, Greer has spent much of her adult life between Australia and the United Kingdom, with part of her career taking her to the United States. She has held positions at the University of Warwick, Cambridge University, and the University of Tulsa.

As a feminist, Greer stands out because the topics she speaks about and the manner in which she discusses them are bold and radical. Her writing style illustrates this brazen approach to discussing women’s issues and rights and serves to command the attention of the women about whom she is writing. Her overt rejection of qualities traditionally associated with women is at the heart of her writing about radical feminism with conviction.

Proposed originally as a reflection on the 50th anniversary of (some) women’s gaining the right to vote in the United Kingdom, Greer ultimately wrote The Female Eunuch to express her own sense of need to advance women’s rights. Upon its publication, scholars did not receive it particularly well, though it was quite popular with average female readers, who were the intended audience.

Greer’s personal life informs quite a bit of the content of this book, and she often substantiates her arguments with her own experiences. She comes from a strict religious family and discusses the physical and emotional abuse she and her siblings suffered at the hands of their parents:

Once my mother knelt on my small brother’s chest and beat his face with her fists in front of my father and was threatened with violent retaliation, the only instance of my father’s rising to her bait that I can recall. My brother was three years old at the time (325).

This abuse led Greer to leave home at 18 and never return and to abandon her family’s Catholic faith. Certainly, her experiences as a woman in the world inform many of her feminist beliefs, but the abusive relationship she had with her parents also illuminates why she raises so many issues with family dynamics.