The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Although I haven't just re-read it, I have to come to the defence of this book – and its author - which have both been trashed on the 40th anniversary of its publication by an Australian playwright called Louis Nowra.

Because if I were to write a list of the most important books I’ve ever read, The Female Eunuch would be at the top. It made me.

Aussie readers will be familiar with the hoo hah, but to put everyone else in the picture: Nowra was commissioned to write a contemporary critique of the book by the male editor of a magazine called – hilariously in the context – The Monthly.

I haven’t been able to read the article in full – it’s oddly unaccessible online - but the extracts I’ve seen from it are very disappointing in a publication which styles itself as ‘Australia’s leading cultural, political, and social magazine.’

A large part of his argument that the book is worthless seems to be that Germaine Greer looks like a mad old lady, similar to his late granma. But as I haven’t read it, I will leave it to people who have to comment directly on it. See links below.

My reaction is entirely personal – and points up exactly why the editor of the magazine should have commissioned this article from a woman. Whatever Louis Nowra thinks of this book now, I read it in 1973, when I was 13 and it shaped my whole life.

I can remember very clearly the lightbulb moment, while reading it, when I realised that if I didn’t make my own money, I would always have to ask my husband for the cash if I wanted to buy a new dress.

And that I might have to be nice to him and agree with things he said, that I didn’t believe in, and have sex with him even if I didn’t feel like it, and make what he wanted for dinner even if I didn’t want it, to get that money. Ping!

I know that’s a pathetically trivial reduction of Greer’s theses, but it was what brought the bigger issue home to my 13 year-old head: that economic independence is the foundation for freedom.

I worked hard at school, uni and beyond, driven by that understanding. I haven’t been supported by anyone else since I left education. There was a lot of other stuff in the book that made a deep impression too, but that was the revelation that made me the person I am today.

I’m not going to re-read it now to see whether it’s stood the test of time, because it’s doesn't matter. It wasn’t written for 2010, it was written for 1970. And nobody puts that better than Greer herself:

‘It was the best book I could write at the time; I have written better since. If I feel any disappointment at all it is that The Female Eunuch is still in print. A tide of better books should have knocked it off its perch within a few months of its first appearance.'

And even if parts of it are no longer relevant because there have been some – not nearly enough, but some – advances in male/female equality, or other social structures have changed, it doesn’t make the book any less of an achievement. Because the key thing is it was so very important in its time.

Germaine Greer, you are one of my all-time heroines and always will be.

You can read a great piece from my alma mater, the Sydney Morning Herald  here.

A hilarious potty-mouthed polemic by Helen Razer here.
And Ms Greer’s typically elegant comment here, although I’m not clear if this was written in response to Nowra’s piece, or is just where she stands generally on feminism now, here.