British artist Gavin Turk once said that if you took a book and replaced each occurrence of the word ‘revolution’ with the famous poster image of Che Guevara, everyone would still understand the text. In the popular imagination, that image of Guevara and the idea of ‘revolution’ have become synonymous, even though most of us know little about him or his revolutionary exploits.
Any number of substitutions might work. For the word ‘hubris’, a picture of Gough Whitlam on the steps of Parliament giving his ‘God Save the Queen’ speech. For ‘Viagra’, the decrepit Hugh Hefner in his mouldy smoking jacket. And so on.
I suspect that if you replaced the word ‘feminism’ with the limbless female torso image from the cover of the 1971 paperback edition of The Female Eunuch, you’d get much the same result. And, just as it is with Guevara, the vast majority of people know very little about the precise contents of Germaine Greer’s most famous book.
That The Female Eunuch is still remembered forty years after its first appearance is unsurprising. When it was published, the media activity surrounding the book was unprecedented. Its author became one of the first true feminist stars of the television age, famously crowned ‘The saucy feminist that even men like’ by Life Magazine. While some feminists covered up in boiler suits, Greer confused the stereotype by revealing all to the world, posing naked in Suck magazine. Naturally enough, outrage, titillation and more headlines followed.
The generation who experienced this Greer-frenzy has grown old, and subsequent generations have had their own vastly popular, ‘life changing’ feminist texts – Backlash, The Beauty Myth, Female Chauvinist Pigs. Yet feminists of all generations are still inclined to pay lip service to The Female Eunuch. Many of the thirty-something feminist women I’ve spoken to about the book were plainly embarrassed if they hadn’t read it, eager to reassure me that it was on the top of their ‘to do’ list. It’s hard to imagine that failing to have read any of the other feminist best sellers of our age will cause people to blush in forty years time.
As every newspaper editor knows, anniversaries are the time for gratuitous retrospectives. And, as The Female Eunuch’s birthday has come around again, several publications have posed essentially the same retrospective question: forty years after The Female Eunuch’s appearance, how much has changed for women?
That we are willing to consider this question without guffawing confirms how large Greer’s book still looms. After all, the question implies that modern feminism began with The Female Eunuch; that if we are to look back and measure the progress of women in our age, the publication of this book is an appropriate starting point.
But to treat The Female Eunuch as marking feminism’s Year Zero is wildly ahistorical and ironic, given that both Greer and her book stood so obstinately outside the mainstream of second-wave, activist feminism. Yet treating Greer’s book as a starting point does reveal a deeper truth. The Female Eunuch brought feminism to a huge number of ordinary women. It spoke to a popular audience in a way that other books of the time did not. And it launched Greer – the woman who, whether she likes it or not, is still the face of feminism.
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Of course, being an icon has its disadvantages. In 2005, the former NSW judge Roderick Meagher wrote about Germaine Greer in the ‘Disagreeable Portrait’ series in Quadrant. Meagher fired off a predictable salvo of anti-feminist sledging, but despite the scatter gun of insults it was easy to see what really bothered him: ‘Looking at the shriveled old parsnip she has now become, I can hardly believe that she was the comparatively beautiful young woman I once knew in the fifties.’ Greer may also have been shocked at the way the intervening years have treated Meagher, and a Google Image search quickly confirms that Father Time has indeed given Roderick a fierce thrashing with the ugly stick. But a potential charge of hypocrisy didn’t stop him. ‘In those days her skin was pinkish,’ Meagher continued wistfully, ‘it had not attained the half-eaten chewing gum colour, nor was it criss-crossed with lines.’ Even to a man like Meagher, who despises feminists and feminism, Greer’s greatest sin is not that she penned one of the classics of modern feminism but that she has dared to age.
Meagher’s nonsense was not the first or the last time that Greer has been criticised for getting old. There’s even a Facebook site – ‘Germaine Greer is a bitter old hag’ – dedicated to this ingenious line of critique. Famously, Louis Nowra recently joined the Parsnip School of Greer Criticism with his article, ‘The Better Self ? Germaine Greer and The Female Eunuch’, in The Monthly in March, comparing her appearance to that of his demented grandmother.
Such attacks, of course, are not reserved for Greer. Focusing on a woman’s haircut, her frock or the surface area of her bottom is a time-honoured means of avoiding engagement with what is coming out of her mouth. Yet when it comes to Greer, there is something more to the vitriol.
Part of the uncomfortable legacy of The Female Eunuch is that its author has not only grown old but has refused to go away, keep quiet or even to mellow. She and her book have become icons, and yet Greer the woman has declined suspension in the aspic of collective memory.
One of the difficulties in ruminating on the legacy of The Female Eunuch is that the personality of its author tends to get in the way. Another is that the cud has already been comprehensively chewed. It’s not easy to talk about so celebrated a publication without lapsing into clichés and banalities, and repeating the things that have already been said, not once but dozens of times.
The book’s exasperating, exhilarating and infuriating qualities must be duly noted. To illustrate how potent and risqué it was, we are told of women who hid it away in brown-paper bags. Some threw it at their husbands after reading it; others forgot about the book throwing and simply walked out. In case you’re still in any doubt about the The Female Eunuch’s outrageousness, it’s usual to flag Greer’s exhortation that women test their feminist credential by tasting their menstrual blood. Almost inevitably, her later appearance on Celebrity Big Brother is cited as a problematic postscript to her greatness.
So the Eunuch changed lives, was useful as a missile and some of its culinary recommendations were dubious. But is it any good?
The Female Eunuch is more a dazzling polemic than a coherent, consistent philosophical work. Before the reader has time to feel unease at one of her incendiary, rapidly fired statements, she distracts you with the next startling barrage. These pyrotechnics may divert you from the fact that many of the The Female Eunuch’s arguments are derivative, but it is Greer’s uncompromising voice and her brilliant rhetorical style that keep you reading. While her prose is sophisticated, sometimes even academic, it is also exciting and accessible; a far more inviting read than some of the other ‘classics’ of the period, such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, or Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex.
Above all, The Female Eunuch is more personal. Which is unsurprising; it is about self-examination. One of Greer’s boldest assertions is that before true liberation can be achieved, women need to free themselves from the stereotypes that shackle them personally and sexually, and turn them into metaphorical eunuchs. For a woman to find true liberation, Greer insists, ‘She could begin not by changing the world, but by re-assessing herself.’
At the time of publication, The Female Eunuch’s emphasis on personal liberation over structural reform irritated many within the women’s movement. One of the criticisms levelled at the The Female Eunuch was its lack of practical solutions. But this misses the ultimate value of the book – as a source of hope and inspiration for women. And Greer’s focal argument did have strong intuitive appeal. How could women really join in liberating themselves as a group if they weren’t liberated as individuals?
For all its depressing revelations about the perversion of what it is to be a woman, The Female Eunuch is ultimately an optimistic work. Its rhetorical bite can be painful (‘the man regards her as a receptacle into which he has emptied his sperm, a kind of human spittoon, and turns from her in disgust’), but it is also invigorating (‘a man is more than a dildo’, ‘the cunt must come into its own’). The book ends with a simple, seductive call to arms: ‘What will you do?’ Female empowerment, 1970s style.
Yet, despite its revolutionary zeal, Greer stood very much on the outer of the various organised women’s groups in Australia, the UK and the US. Her (highly unauthorised) biographer, Christine Wallace, observed that ‘Germaine’s seemingly splendid isolation within feminism, on a media stage all to herself, is one of her most striking attributes.’ In Untamed Shrew, Wallace includes a curious picture of Greer at the annual women’s day march in Sydney in 1972. Wallace’s caption reads: ‘Greer walking tall.’ It could just be me, but Greer seems decidedly uncomfortable, arms crossed, looking above the crowd, wishing she was at home, perhaps, reading Shakespeare and making a meal of her menses. One thing is for sure: collective action and Germaine Greer have always been uncomfortable bedfellows, whether that action related to feminism or any of the other causes she has become involved in.
A similar ambivalence exists in respect of Greer and academic feminism. Ironically, for a book that purportedly changed so many lives and had such an impact on the general public’s understanding of feminism, The Female Eunuch has never been treated seriously by the academy. As Sybil Nolan once wryly noted, there is no ‘Greerology’.
Having spent far too many years studying feminism in its various guises, I can testify that I never once saw The Female Eunuch on a university reading list. When Greer was mentioned in intellectual feminist discussions, it was frequently with disdain. At one particularly austere academic feminist reading group I attended in early 2001, the wrath directed towards her by some of the participants astounded me. There was a very real resentment that she continued to take up so much feminist oxygen. The implicit assumption among some of them seemed to be that if only their own pygmy candles had been afforded the air that Germaine so greedily consumed, then they too might have cut through the darkness of Patriarchal Paradigms.
The Female Eunuch’s success was contextual; Greer’s work didn’t exist in a vacuum. As it permeated the popular consciousness, the second wave of feminism provided many women with a new sort of church. And whether the second-wave activists and academics liked it or not, many of these new converts designated Greer as their charismatic guru, and The Female Eunuch as their holy text. Even today, the aura persists. In 2008, the artist Emily Floyd exhibited her homage to the book at Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne, with the non-ironic title ‘Temple of The Female Eunuch’ – a comment on the almost spiritual reverence that the book still evokes.
Yet many times I have heard older women who experienced the Eunuch epiphany say that Greer has ‘lost it’ in recent years, as if her first incarnation, as the youthful author, was her ‘not lost’ phase.
This idea – that Greer has recently gone feral – is an exact inversion of the real problem with Germaine. In fact, she has remained remarkably unchanged in the years since the book’s publication; just as uncompromising, just as prone to outrageous statements, just as fearless about wading into debates. All very much as she did in the early 1970s.
But the discomfort so many of us feel isn’t just a symptom of Greer’s own persona – that of ‘an occasionally charming old ratbag’ (as Helen Razer recently dubbed her) who continues to say things that many of us find confronting. Neither is it simply a sign of our latent sexism, making us squirm at the sight of assertive, passionate older women. At a subconscious level, we resent the fact that Greer is still hanging around, forty years after her book was published. Our visionary young heroes always look better when they are gone. Even Jesus lived just long enough to deliver his message without having its more controversial aspects come back to embarrass him in middle age.
This story, of the brilliant youngster who conquers the world, is most satisfying when the fêted one burns bright and dies young. If they are so inconsiderate as to hang around into old age they become discomfiting at best; at worst downright ridiculous, like the ageing rock star who never bettered that inspired first album yet still desperately trades on it. In fact, Greer found a way out of the ‘second album’ dilemma; she herself became far more noteworthy than any follow-up book could possibly have been. Long after most people had stopped talking about The Female Eunuch, they still talked about Germaine, and this wasn’t dependent upon the quality of her subsequent publications, fine as many of them were. It was a function of sheer personality.
In this respect, Greer is that most modern of celebrities; she herself is the product. She is not, though, simply famous for being famous; to suggest that is an absurdity. But she has transcended her work – all except for the Eunuch, which will forever mark her as the most famous feminist on the planet. If you doubt this, try asking women to name a person whom they associate with feminism. It’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t name her first. Interestingly, this is no less true of younger women. Depressingly, you may find that Greer is the only feminist that many of them can name.
Whatever you may think about The Female Eunuch, this is its undeniable legacy: to have made its author the undisputed figurehead of feminism, a virtual feminist messiah – even if most committed feminists want no such thing, and Germaine herself finds the idea ridiculous.
Many different things propelled Greer to this exalted status. The age she was born into, her personality, her media genius, the idiosyncratic brilliance of The Female Eunuch, even the book’s cover, a work of art that has in itself become iconic. Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir may not have had the benefit of television to propel and accelerate their celebrity, but then Greer’s success was a product of far more than screen presence. There was something visceral at work there, perpetuating the luminous aura that still surrounds her.
This truth seemed to coalesce in the recent overwhelming response to Louis Nowra’s comments about Greer and The Female Eunuch’s legacy. Even Philippa Martyr, in Quadrant, joined the boo-hissing. It felt like a moment of real cultural significance, where women discovered unity in a common desire to defend Germaine, as though a sacrilege had been committed. Few of us still worship at the Temple of The Female Eunuch but, like lapsed Catholics, we hate it when non-Catholics criticise the Church.
Here in the West, we’re accustomed to our messiahs being human. We like them to bleed and suffer and shout profanities from the cross. Greer’s done all that; much of it literally, the rest figuratively. In The Female Eunuch, she exposed herself to the world, rude bits and all. And thankfully she’s never stopped doing it.
