The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

  Such unremarkable and unconscious forms of rebellion against the feminine role are old and ineffectual. If we were to compare the high incidence of positive homosexuality as well as effeteness and epicenity among male inhabitants of the establishments of higher learning we might discern a valid reaction against the male stereotype of brawn and insensitivity, but as long as the situation remains unrationalized it has little significance except as a personal motivation or a partial factor in neurosis. Rationalization has begun however, and it was first practised by women from this class, the most privileged of their sex. The history of suffragettism and its survival until our own day is beyond the scope of this book, although it is remarkable how many of today’s militant women can remember some extraordinary old lady who sought (in vain) to plant the seeds of rebellion in their minds. From time to time wonderfully vivid old women appear on TV, or are written up in obituaries in The Times, to remind us not only of the continuity of the movement but of the tactical address and joyful courage of petticoated, corseted and hatted gentlewomen of a lifetime ago. The progress since their times has not been uniform: women’s clothes have fluctuated between the loose and unrestricting and the voluminous and pinching, the novelette heroine has been plucky and good-humoured, and then once more sexy and languishing. The beginning of the second feminist wave, of which this book must be considered a part, was Betty Friedan’s research into the post-war sexual sell which got American women out of the factories and back into their homes. Mrs Friedan is a summa cum laude graduate of Smith College and held a research fellowship in psychology at Berkeley, a professional woman of considerable reputation and attainments. What she discovered during the five years that she worked on her book has led to her forming the most influential of the women’s groups in America, the National Organization of Women, which now has a membership of more than three thousand and branches in many cities. Somewhere on the way she shed the husband to whom she dedicated her book. Her movement is the only one to achieve any degree of recognition from the political establishment. When NOW was formed it was read into the Congressional record; it provides most of the motivation and the personnel for the numerous women’s groups and committees which now figure in various Congressional bodies. Clearly, what Mrs Friedan suggests cannot be at all radical. Her whole case rests upon the frustration suffered by the educated woman who falls for the Freudian notion that physiology is destiny. For Mrs Friedan sexuality seems to mean motherhood, an argument which other feminist groups also seem to be misled by, so that in rejecting the normative sex role of women they are forced to stress non-sexual aspects of a woman’s destiny at the expense of her libido, a mistake which will have serious consequences. She represents the cream of American middle-class womanhood, and what she wants for them is equality of opportunity within the status quo, free admission to the world of the ulcer and the coronary. She has continued the campaign for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, which was begun in 1923, and for the repeal of the abortion laws on the most subtle grounds, arguing that they are unconstitutional as breaches of privacy, limitations on free speech and so forth. She feels that the problems of housewives’ neuroses will be solved when they are socialized, encouraged to look beyond the kitchen to the community.3 So far she has succeeded in ‘forcing’ the New York Times to increase its reputation for fairmindedness and freedom from male chauvinism by desegregating the Want Ads. Of course she could not desegregate the jobs: the immediate result of that tactic was that more qualified women wasted more time and energy reading about, applying for, and being rejected from jobs they had no chance of getting in the first place. As long as even female employers continue to prefer male employees, such token reforms will have only negative results. NOW also boycotted Colgate-Palmolive in a protest against job discrimination, although they have never levelled an attack of any significance against the whole ludicrous cosmetic industry, when the same worthless ingredients make up all the preparations from the cheapest to the most fabulously expensive, and female insecurity is cultivated by degrading advertising so that these mucky preparations can be sold more quickly than ever. NOW also raided a bar in the Plaza Hotel where women were not admitted except at certain times of the day, and then only if accompanied by a male.

  It was not long before intelligent members of NOW realized that their aims were too limited and their tactics too genteel. One of the more interesting women to emerge in the movement is Ti-Grace Atkinson, a leader of the most radical and most elite women’s group, The Feminists—A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles. This is a closed group of propaganda-makers who are trying to develop the notion of a leaderless society in which the convention of Love (‘the response of the victim to the rapist’), the proprietary relationship of marriage, and even uterine pregnancy will no longer prevail. Their pronouncements are characteristically gnomic and rigorous; to the average confused female they must seem terrifying. They have characterized men as the enemy, and, as long as men continue to enact their roles as misconceived and perpetuated by themselves and women, they are undoubtedly right. Nevertheless it is not true that to have a revolution you need a revolutionary theory: they might well find that a theory devised by minds diseased by the system will not be able to avail itself of the facts of a changing situation. It is dangerous to eschew sex as a revolutionary tactic because it is inauthentic and enslaving in the terms in which it is now possible, when sex is the principal confrontation in which new values can be worked out. Men are the enemy in much the same way that some crazed boy in uniform was the enemy of another like him in most respects except the uniform. One possible tactic is to try to get the uniforms off.

  The forcing house of most of the younger women’s liberation groups was the university left wing. In the November-December number of New Left Review in 1966, Juliet Mitchell published the most coherent statement of the socialist feminist position, and reprinted in various forms it remains the basis for most socialist theorizing on the subject, even though it is clearly deficient on the tactical side. Women—The Longest Revolution is squarely based on the tenets of Marx, Bebel and Engels. Unlike other theorists she does not fall for Engels’s dubious anthropology, but keeps herself to stringent examination of demonstrable fact. ‘…Far from women’s physical weakness removing her from productive work, her social weakness has in these cases evidently made her the major slave of it.’4

  She sees that increasing industrialization does not therefore guarantee women a place in productive work because it was not incapability of muscular effort that kept her out of it, but rather the development of private property and private ownership of the means of production, and the relegation of women to the status of supermenials enacting vicarious leisure. This role in its turn is determined by the assumed structure of the family as necessarily patriarchal, the distortion of reproduction into a parody of production, of sexuality into sadistic exploitation, and the socialization of the child as woman’s unique and prolonged responsibility. These four structures, production, reproduction, sexuality and socialization, will have to be reconceived if any major change is to result. Foreseeing perhaps the developments that were soon to ensue from female activity in socialist movements, her conclusion labours to integrate the feminist movement with the proletarian revolution, despite her knowledge that there was no indication in the structure of existent groups or existent socialist regimes that such a brief would be respected:

  …Socialism should properly mean not the abolition of the family, but the diversification of the socially acknowledged relationships which are today forcibly and rigidly compressed into it. This would mean a plural range of institutions—where the family is only one, and its abolition implies none. Couples living together or not living together, long-term unions with children, single parents bringing up children, children socialized by conventional rather than biological parents, extended kin-groups, etc.—all these could be encompassed in a range of institutions which matched the free invention and variety of men and women.


  It would be illusory to try and specify these institutions. Circumstantial accounts of the future are idealistic and, worse, static. Socialism will be a process of change, of becoming. A fixed image of the future is in the worst sense ahistorical; the form that socialism takes will depend on the prior type of capitalism and the nature of its collapse…The liberation of women under Socialism will not be a ‘rational’ but a human achievement, in the long passage from Nature to culture is the definition of history and society.5

  A much more naïve attempt to prove that the struggle of women against oppression was a part of the class struggle had been made as early as 1954, by Evelyn Reed, in the October Discussion Bulletin of the Socialist Workers’ Party, in which she attempts to prove that sex rivalry and the emergence of women as sexual objects were the results exclusively of bourgeois capitalism. She invoked the notion of a primitive society free from any form of sex exploitation or property or rivalry, where cosmetics were used simply as a means of identification, describing the propaganda machine of femininity as the deliberate sinister ploy of money-hungry capitalists in the nineteenth century expanded to gargantuan limits in the twentieth. The basic trend of the argument is probably correct, but she is so patently arguing from her convictions to her evidence, none of which has any source that she quotes, that the most sympathetic reader is alienated, unless, presumably, he has no way of knowing better. In 1969 her contributions to the woman question were all issued in a pamphlet called Problems of Women’s Liberation: A Marxist Approach. Her arguments are couched in typical Marxist doctrinaire terminology, buttressed by phony anthropology and poor scholarship. The cover features a reproduction of a figure on an Attic vase, misidentified as a ‘goddess symbol of the matriarchy’ when it is actually a graceful Bacchante with thyrsus and dead wildcat. Evelyn Reed would have been horrified if she had realized that her work was decorated with the symbol of hippiedom and drug culture, flowing hair, snake diadem and all. There is a symbolism in the error: there is certainly more hope for women in Marcuse than in Marx. The booklet6 is unusually well-distributed and may be influential, which is in some ways a pity, for much time will be wasted debating invalid conclusions. Juliet Mitchell’s article is much better argued and much more scrupulous.

  Women active within socialist groups were not reassured that the liberation of the working classes would be their own liberation. Stalin’s repeal of the early Soviet legislation which permitted automatic divorce and free abortion, and his institution of rewards for motherhood was a patent betrayal.7 The increase in the number of female doctors in the soviet was a mere refinement of the female role of service.8 Female construction workers in Russia are taught no skills and given no tools.9 In China militarization of women, prohibition of cosmetics and frivolous attire did not entail any amelioration of the woman’s role as servant of her family although the more obvious evils of concubinage were eradicated. In the summer of 1967 the women’s caucus of the National Convention of the SDS went ahead to draw up a manifesto after expressing their feelings more or less forcefully at an SDS session. Susan Surtheim, who described the session in the National Guardian, supported the idea of male liberation groups to correlate with female groups and thought that men should be invited to women’s meetings, assuming that the problem was limited to flaws in the sexual roles. The manifesto as it was drawn up mirrored the viewpoint of women like her. It concluded:

  …that our brothers in the S.D.S. [must] recognize that they must deal with their own problems of male chauvinism in their personal, social and political relationships.

  It is obvious from this meeting of the S.D.S. that full advantage is not being taken of the abilities and potential contributions of women. We call upon the women to demand full participation in all aspects of the movement from licking stamps to assuming leadership positions.

  People in leadership positions must be aware of the dynamics of creating leadership and are responsible for cultivating all of the female resources available to the movement.

  All University administrations must realize that campus regulations discriminate against women in particular and must take positive action to protect the rights of women…

  We seek the liberation of all human beings. The struggle for the liberation of women must be part of the larger fight for freedom. We recognize the difficulty our brothers will have in dealing with male chauvinism and we assume our full responsibility (as women) in helping to resolve the contradiction.

  Freedom now! We love you!10

  Ironically, the very next month New Left Notes printed a speech by Fidel Castro to the Women’s Federation of Cuba which ought to have illuminated the flaws in this policy. After recognizing the contribution of women in the struggle for revolution and thanking them for having borne arms alongside the men, he besought them to return to their former menial roles:

  Who will do the cooking for the child who still comes home for lunch? Who will nurse the babies or take care of the pre-school child? Who will cook for the man when he comes home from work? Who will wash and clean and take care of things?11

  By the autumn of 1967 it was evident that women were thinking their position through. Four girl members of the Student Union for Peace Action, Canada’s leading New Left organization, produced a paper called Sisters, Brothers, Lovers…Listen…based upon the comment of Marx that ‘social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex’. In the paper there is some uneasiness about the actual difference between the sexes, as they are not sure whether women have a genetic disadvantage or not, but by adopting the Marxist idea that progress is the overcoming of such ingrained distinction and the irrelevance of such distinction to actual social function and significance, they hope to get by it. They restate the four-point argument of Juliet Mitchell and her theorization on the cultural determination of the role of women. Once again we meet the bitter description of the role of women in radical movements, highlighted by a statement from Stokeley Carmichael: ‘The only position for women in SNCC is prone.’

  Some movement women are ready for revolution. We are thinking for ourselves. We are doing the necessary reading, writing, and conversing to find the analysis and theory for the task. We have the background of experience to do this. We have the frustration of being excluded to force us into doing this…12

  The impression that for them radicalization is an academic process is strengthened by the inclusion of a reading list, the first of a series which have become progressively longer and more comprehensive. In so far as we are dealing with a movement of university women this is not surprising but for the vast majority of women who never gained any aptitude for this kind of assimilation of ideas, for whom argumentation has no value because they cannot understand it or practise it, such methods remain irrelevant. The most dubious aspect of academic liberationists is their assumption of leadership of a vast murmuring female proletariat, and their adoption of male kinds of grouping and organizational structure to which women have little success in adapting. There is no indication in their theorizing that they have realized the full extent of the male-female polarity, that they have read their Soviet Weekly and been told that members of the State Institute of Teaching Sciences were very worried that the female domination of the teaching industry is producing boys who lack a ‘due sense of male authority’.13

  The academicism of these women extends into most of the women’s liberation groups in universities. Ti-Grace Atkinson, as well as being a founder member of the elite group The Feminists, works for Human Rights for Women, an organization which will sponsor research projects into the history and condition of womanhood. It is possibly chastening to reflect that dead suffragettes were financing such projects long before Human Rights for Women came into existence, as well as endowing scholarships for female engineers and the like. Most women’s colleges have bequests of this kind, and by and large their contribution to female liberation has been negligible.

  The first direct attack on the 1967 Manifesto came from an anonymous male wh
o wrote to New Left Notes in December. He suggested that there was danger in placing an underdeveloped woman in a position of leadership because she would surely fail and so her sense of inferiority would be intensified;14 moreover, he argued women could not separate themselves from men because they needed them, and their role is to be humbler, more accepting and compassionate than men. He thought that women ought first to educate themselves to make valid challenge for leadership of the movement, and that perhaps they ought to keep their maiden names when they married. Docile SDS women began to murmur and by the next SDS National Convention the murmur had grown to a growl. In New Left Notes for 10 June 1968 Marilyn Webb wrote a sharp description of the lot of women members of SDS, the accuracy of which stung every radical girl into new resentment, although she did not advocate secession from the male-dominated movement, but as usual extra work in attaining liberation in the spare time that was not taken up by typing, distributing leaflets, being beaten by the police and keeping house and bed for a revolutionary male.15 At the 1968 convention women misbehaved and drew the wrath of the men upon themselves. They began to realize that they were not to be liberated fighting other people’s battles. The men used the conventional arguments against dominating women and the women, realizing the insidiousness of the polarity, decided that some hard thinking had to be undertaken and some completely new strategy devised.

  Two older members of the radical university movement were preparing a first statement towards such a strategy at this time. Their newssheet, Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement, was begun and their manifesto, Towards a Women’s Liberation Movement, heralded its arrival. The arrest of Carol Thomas for the second time and her incarceration for a long sentence added poignancy and urgency to the case.