One great thing about the feminist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was its ability to make a scene. Take the unforgettable “Dialogue on Women’s Liberation,” a panel that took place in New York City in 1971 in which four female delegates were tapped to speak in a discussion moderated by Norman Mailer, who had just published the decidedly un-feminist The Prisoner of Sex. Billed as a dialogue, the result—documented in filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker’s Town Bloody Hall—more closely resembled a riot. The teeming crowd became unruly even before the event had started, with one heckler yelling out above the din, “Women’s lib betrays the poor! Norman Mailer betrays the poor!” The audience, which included Betty Friedan and a soft-spoken Susan Sontag, came to hear about the burgeoning revolution. They came to see Mailer publicly attack, and be attacked by, the women’s libbers about the politics of sex. But most of all, they came to see Germaine Greer.
She was something to be seen: clad in a black fur jacket and a glamorous floor-length sleeveless dress, the thirty-two-year-old Greer was six feet tall, angular verging on bony, and in possession of a thick crown of frizzed-out black hair. Her style on stage was less performance than poised seduction. Despite her languid manner, which noticeably awed the other panelists, Greer’s responses to both Mailer and the audience were so razor sharp it’s hard to believe they were delivered extempore. At one point, Greer chastens a man who inquires what he might expect of sex in the feminist age, what women are “asking for,” by responding without hesitation (and more than a little unkindly), “You might as well relax. Whatever it is they’re asking for, honey, it’s not for you.” Unabashed and wildly charismatic, Greer was the most important feminist in the world. Today, few remember her name.
(...)
The Female Eunuch, Greer’s first book and the central node of her career, came out in 1970. It was a sensation, selling out its print run in a matter of months and establishing Greer as a leading mind in women’s liberation and an international intellectual celebrity. More than other books that came out around its time, including Kate Millet’s 1969 text Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, also published in 1970, Eunuch was written to be read by women who were not intellectuals, and existed outside of the movement. According to Greer, feminism was, and had to be, for everyone. This was a book written to women and not just for women. Divided into cogent sections called “Gender,” “Curves,” “Hair,” “Sex,” and “The Wicked Womb,” it described the ways in which sexism was institutionalized in every woman’s life, from hair products to housewifery. Even when Greer’s ideas themselves were risky or rarefied, her colloquial, often-vulgar style of writing helped her to connect with common women. The book’s most often quoted line gives a good sense: “If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood—if it makes you sick, you’ve got a long way to go.”
The strategy worked. Eunuch had tremendous reach, selling out its first two runs and eventually being translated into eleven languages. The book was discussed on late-night talk shows and in middle-class living rooms. It has never gone out of print. Gloria Steinem and Letty Pogrebin founded Ms. magazine the year after its release; following Greer’s lead, feminist activists were finding a way to popularize and disseminate their message into the mainstream.
While it touched on issues from consumerism to menstruation, Eunuch had a single argument at its core: gendered oppression is all-pervasive. It argued that women were systematically subjugated to the power and will of men and too fearful, polite, or unaware to retaliate and claim authority over their own lives. “What many women mistake for happiness is in fact resignation,” Greer told an Australian reporter the year Eunuch was published. More importantly, she made the case that this deeply inculcated sexism was the product not of fear but hostility. It was a loaded idea that would inform feminist, and eventually queer, theoretical discourse to come. In a now famous, blunt line from the book, she wrote, “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.” This societal structure, according to Greer‘s text, repressed women sexually and severed them from their libidos—hence the title of the book, a premise initially derived from a chapter of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice entitled “Allegory of the Black Eunuch.” Divorced from their sexuality, women were not self- empowered, but rather submissive, demeaned, and, in some cases, enslaved. Lacking agency of their own, they had come not only to be hated by men but by themselves. “Out of her own and her man’s imagination,” Greer wrote, “she will continue to apologize and disguise her ... crippled and fearful self.” This idea, that power was tethered not only to making money and asserting physical dominance but ownership over one’s sexual desires, was novel. Just seven years prior in her book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan had written of the malaise of the American housewife as “the problem that has no name.” The Female Eunuch, as a title and an idea, claimed just the opposite. Greer’s words cut like a precise blade; reading them one recalls just why the sexual revolution was called a war.
It was a daring thesis for a daring time, and Greer met praise and backlash in equal measure. Both responses prompted her to become the public face of women’s liberation, a position she took on with gusto. Greer travelled around the world being photographed, giving lectures, granting interviews, and engaging in debates. Unlike other feminist radicals such as Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan, Susan Brownmiller, Sheila Jeffreys, or Mary Daly, she was fast becoming a household name, intent on delivering her message through literary and pop channels alike. Greer’s contemporary Gloria Steinem was perhaps the only other figure in the movement to become a public personality, appearing on the covers of Newsweek in 1971, McCall’s in 1972, and People in 1974. Greer undoubtedly courted media attention; to what extent she did so because she felt it necessary to act as the ambassador of her cause, as opposed to simply desiring personal fame in its own right, remains unclear.
Several months after her book was published, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation created a short documentary about Greer on her return trip to Melbourne, which was nationally televised. In a particularly powerful scene, a group of local teenage schoolgirls describe how the book helped refashion their sense of self-worth. One pig-tailed girl states, “They are conditioning us to take the place of an average housewife.” It is Greer’s text, she reports, that has opened her eyes to society’s attempts to “brainwash” her into submission. Greer herself is interviewed for the film while leaning against a brick wall and smoking a cigarette. Coolly self-assured, she appears custom-built to lead a modern women’s revolution.
by Carmen Winant, Cabinet | Read more:
Image: Carmen Winant
She was something to be seen: clad in a black fur jacket and a glamorous floor-length sleeveless dress, the thirty-two-year-old Greer was six feet tall, angular verging on bony, and in possession of a thick crown of frizzed-out black hair. Her style on stage was less performance than poised seduction. Despite her languid manner, which noticeably awed the other panelists, Greer’s responses to both Mailer and the audience were so razor sharp it’s hard to believe they were delivered extempore. At one point, Greer chastens a man who inquires what he might expect of sex in the feminist age, what women are “asking for,” by responding without hesitation (and more than a little unkindly), “You might as well relax. Whatever it is they’re asking for, honey, it’s not for you.” Unabashed and wildly charismatic, Greer was the most important feminist in the world. Today, few remember her name.
(...)The Female Eunuch, Greer’s first book and the central node of her career, came out in 1970. It was a sensation, selling out its print run in a matter of months and establishing Greer as a leading mind in women’s liberation and an international intellectual celebrity. More than other books that came out around its time, including Kate Millet’s 1969 text Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, also published in 1970, Eunuch was written to be read by women who were not intellectuals, and existed outside of the movement. According to Greer, feminism was, and had to be, for everyone. This was a book written to women and not just for women. Divided into cogent sections called “Gender,” “Curves,” “Hair,” “Sex,” and “The Wicked Womb,” it described the ways in which sexism was institutionalized in every woman’s life, from hair products to housewifery. Even when Greer’s ideas themselves were risky or rarefied, her colloquial, often-vulgar style of writing helped her to connect with common women. The book’s most often quoted line gives a good sense: “If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood—if it makes you sick, you’ve got a long way to go.”
The strategy worked. Eunuch had tremendous reach, selling out its first two runs and eventually being translated into eleven languages. The book was discussed on late-night talk shows and in middle-class living rooms. It has never gone out of print. Gloria Steinem and Letty Pogrebin founded Ms. magazine the year after its release; following Greer’s lead, feminist activists were finding a way to popularize and disseminate their message into the mainstream.
While it touched on issues from consumerism to menstruation, Eunuch had a single argument at its core: gendered oppression is all-pervasive. It argued that women were systematically subjugated to the power and will of men and too fearful, polite, or unaware to retaliate and claim authority over their own lives. “What many women mistake for happiness is in fact resignation,” Greer told an Australian reporter the year Eunuch was published. More importantly, she made the case that this deeply inculcated sexism was the product not of fear but hostility. It was a loaded idea that would inform feminist, and eventually queer, theoretical discourse to come. In a now famous, blunt line from the book, she wrote, “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.” This societal structure, according to Greer‘s text, repressed women sexually and severed them from their libidos—hence the title of the book, a premise initially derived from a chapter of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice entitled “Allegory of the Black Eunuch.” Divorced from their sexuality, women were not self- empowered, but rather submissive, demeaned, and, in some cases, enslaved. Lacking agency of their own, they had come not only to be hated by men but by themselves. “Out of her own and her man’s imagination,” Greer wrote, “she will continue to apologize and disguise her ... crippled and fearful self.” This idea, that power was tethered not only to making money and asserting physical dominance but ownership over one’s sexual desires, was novel. Just seven years prior in her book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan had written of the malaise of the American housewife as “the problem that has no name.” The Female Eunuch, as a title and an idea, claimed just the opposite. Greer’s words cut like a precise blade; reading them one recalls just why the sexual revolution was called a war.
It was a daring thesis for a daring time, and Greer met praise and backlash in equal measure. Both responses prompted her to become the public face of women’s liberation, a position she took on with gusto. Greer travelled around the world being photographed, giving lectures, granting interviews, and engaging in debates. Unlike other feminist radicals such as Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan, Susan Brownmiller, Sheila Jeffreys, or Mary Daly, she was fast becoming a household name, intent on delivering her message through literary and pop channels alike. Greer’s contemporary Gloria Steinem was perhaps the only other figure in the movement to become a public personality, appearing on the covers of Newsweek in 1971, McCall’s in 1972, and People in 1974. Greer undoubtedly courted media attention; to what extent she did so because she felt it necessary to act as the ambassador of her cause, as opposed to simply desiring personal fame in its own right, remains unclear.
Several months after her book was published, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation created a short documentary about Greer on her return trip to Melbourne, which was nationally televised. In a particularly powerful scene, a group of local teenage schoolgirls describe how the book helped refashion their sense of self-worth. One pig-tailed girl states, “They are conditioning us to take the place of an average housewife.” It is Greer’s text, she reports, that has opened her eyes to society’s attempts to “brainwash” her into submission. Greer herself is interviewed for the film while leaning against a brick wall and smoking a cigarette. Coolly self-assured, she appears custom-built to lead a modern women’s revolution.
by Carmen Winant, Cabinet | Read more:
Image: Carmen Winant
