The Female Eunuch, 40 years on - Funny, angry, clever and hopeful – The Female Eunuch set out to transform women's lives. Does Germaine Greer's seminal tract still speak to feminists?

Yes, writes Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk The Guardian, Saturday 20 November 2010

Germaine Greer in 1970. Photograph: Topham Picturepoint


Perhaps politics is always to one extent or another autobiography, but in feminism the personal is a place of special potency. The Female Eunuch, like its antecedent and template The Second Sex, defined the female politics of its day by the use of what creative writing teachers call point of view: the author evolved a politicised narration out of her own experience of being a woman, and because feminism itself might be called an exercise in – or perhaps a tragedy of – point of view, she reflected exactly the individualism that both forms and obstructs the feminist agenda.

A feminist is born out of her own sense of frustration and enclosure; she comes into existence in the same moment as – or for the very reason that – she realises she is trapped. It might be said that this is how people are very frequently politicised – they experience the colour of their skin, or their social class, or their religion as limitation – but the logic of the woman-trap and its interface with the world are uniquely complex.

The Female Eunuch is an example of the ambiguous role testimony plays at this interface. Today's reader may be struck by the half-familiarity of its political content – four decades on, our feminist fashions have become both more referential and less radical – but the resilience of its autobiographical material, its voice, raises a different set of issues entirely, for it prompts the question of whether a feminist can ever be more than that – more than an autobiographer, an artist of her own experience – and indeed whether she should even try.

The feminist's willingness to speak out is both an unburdening and an expression of hope, hope that others will be recruited by her truth-telling to a place of greater female unity and honesty. Yet the feminist is almost by definition less compromised than the generic "woman" she believes herself to be defending. Indeed, her earliest feelings of imprisonment may have come from the observation that women can seem one way and feel another, can testify to those feelings themselves under certain circumstances, and hence look very much like people who need and are willing to be liberated. Increasingly, in our post-Freudian age, we are learning to see through that trick. We know that women find self-expression problematic, and can under-value themselves, in their playing of traditional female roles, roles they have no intention of transgressing. Even when a woman is doing what apparently she wants – from pole dancing to motherhood – the culture provides a kind of parking-space for her ambivalence about it.


The difficulty for feminists has always lain in getting women to surrender the privacy of their discontent. It may be that in that privacy a woman finds at least one guaranteed source of freedom. When the feminist sets forth her view of women, of what a woman is, she is revealing herself, isolating herself, making herself vulnerable. For that reason she is called brave. The personal becomes the political only to become the personal again. There is a paucity of public battlefields for women, so even a true (masculine) heroism is denied her. Besides, where women are concerned the public battle does not resolve or even particularly relate to the private war, whose battlefields, we all agree, are located in the body and the home. To fight a battle you need an enemy, and who, or what, is the enemy of woman? Womanhood is a complete identity; even the woman of compartments is a woman in each one. Womanhood is everything; her enemy is everyone, everyone and no one, and it is generally agreed that her very worst enemy, from the garden of Eden to the here and now, can be herself.
Read the full story at The Guardian online.