The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer
The Female Eunuch is a landmark in the history of the women’s movement. Drawing liberally from history, literature and popular culture, past and present, Germaine Greer’s searing examination of women’s oppression is at once an important social commentary and a passionately argued masterpiece of polemic.
Polly Russell, Lead Curator Contemporary Politics and Public Life, British Library:
“First published in 1970, The Female Eunuch, was a bold and brash call for a feminist revolution. It was the catalyst for many women’s political awakening, (my own included, aged 16, when I came upon it in the mid-1980s. I can still recall the wide-eyed thrill of reading Greer’s outraged and outrageous prose.) Taking aim at consumer culture, marriage and the nuclear family, Greer exhorted women to reject what was expected of them and to take control of their lives and the world. ‘Hopefully,’ Greer wrote in her introduction, ‘this book is subversive.’ Indeed it was and, some forty years on, it still is.”