Have you ever felt like you deserve better than the life you are living? Maybe you dream of scaling career heights, but societal expectations whisper that you should focus on home and family. It was the reality for many women in the 1960s. Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch” (published in 1970) became a rallying cry for change. It was not just a dry academic text; it was a game changer. The Female Eunuch explodes traditional notions of womanhood and ignites a fierce debate.
Greer wrote about female sexuality, a topic often shrouded in secrecy and challenged the idea that a woman’s fulfilment came solely from domestic bliss. Her book resonated deeply with a generation of women who craved more and yearned to break free from the limitations placed on them.
The Female Eunuch had a massive impact on a generation. It inspired women to think about gender inequality and domestic servitude. Released 54 years ago in October 1970, it is still a symbol of the moment when women stood up and said no to systemic oppression. The book encouraged women to question the norms that kept them trapped in inequality and household duties. It led to marriages ending or equations changing in a marriage.
Why was the Female Eunuch such a path-breaking work?
Feminism is a function of many variables: frustration, anger, and the inability to speak and exercise one’s own agency. When one feels imprisoned, one identifies with something relatable. That is how millions of women identified with what Greer communicated through her writing. Greer spoke about freedom: the fact or process of being set free from legal, social, or political restrictions.
Freedom would not be wrested from a process of reform by “genteel, middle-class women” sitting on committees or signing petitions. To grasp their liberty, “ungenteel” women would need to “call for revolution”, “disrupt society” and “unseat God”. Indeed, “marriage, the family, private property, and the state” were under attack.
Greer urged women to think beyond the stereotype patriarchal society had created for them, which limited their capacity to act. She likened the situation of the 1970s woman to that of a canary “made for captivity”. She urged women to “discover that they have a will”.
The Female Eunuch: Body, soul, love, hate & revolution
Through the book’s five chapters—”Body,” “Soul,” “Love,” “Hate,” and “Revolution,” Greer gradually developed her famous motif of women as “eunuchs” or castrates, robbed of their natural energy. She wrote that in accepting this castrated or false identity, women had allowed the destruction of their instinct, inclination, will, and capacity.
Greer’s book hopefully told women that things could be otherwise. It told them to demand better education, pool their childcare arrangements, and share a better washing machine or other labour-saving appliance with women in the street. It told women to challenge men’s ownership of the means of production and consumer capitalism’s ownership of the soul.
Sex, desire, shame
Germaine Greer talks about the objectification of women within patriarchal societies. She expresses the idea that, in traditional gender roles, women are often seen primarily as vessels for men’s sexual desires and reproductive needs rather than as autonomous individuals with agency and worth.
By likening women to a “receptacle” or a “human spittoon,” Greer is using vivid and provocative language to underscore the dehumanising nature of this perspective. It suggests that women are reduced to mere objects, devoid of any intrinsic value beyond their utility to men. This reduction of women to passive receptacles for male needs reinforces gender inequality and perpetuates harmful stereotypes about women’s roles and capabilities. Overall, Greer challenges the prevailing attitudes towards women and advocates for their liberation from the constraints of traditional gender norms, which view them solely in relation to men’s desires and needs.
Greer famously drew attention to deeply entrenched cultural constructs that linked sex to shame and disgust, calling out the hypocrisy of a society that blamed women for men’s misogyny. “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” she wrote. “
The Female Eunuch: Own your body
Be Bra-less and wear no underpants.
Greer’s widely discussed call was to go around bra-less and wear no underpants. Own your body; she urged women, its tastes and smells, including, most memorably, your menstrual blood.
“I must confess to a thrill of shock when one of the ladies to whom this book is dedicated told me that she had tasted her own menstrual blood on the penis of her lover,” Greer wrote. And yet, there are “no horrors presented in that blood, no poisons”.
The final thoughts
Greer said women must question everything they had been taught about sex, love, romance, their bodies and their rights. Freedom was theirs, but they had to take it. The action was not just collective but individual, too. The agency was everything. Grab any missile, break any rule. Do it now.
In this way, The Female Eunuch directly addressed and challenged women. In its famous end line, it asked, “What will you do?”
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are based on the writer’s insights, supported by data and resources available both online and offline, as applicable. Changeincontent.com is committed to promoting inclusivity across all forms of content, which we define broadly to include media, policies, law, and history—encompassing all elements that influence the lives of women and gender-queer individuals. Our goal is to promote understanding and advocate for comprehensive inclusivity.
