Product Description

A new cover re-issue of the ground-breaking, worldwide bestselling feminist tract. A worldwide bestseller, translated into over twelve languages, 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. Probably the most famous, most widely read book on feminism ever.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12276 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
'A dazzling tract, erudite, outrageous, funny.' Cosmopolitan 'Brilliantly written, quirky and sensible, full of bile and insight...The best feminist book so far' New York Times 'A dazzling combination of erudition, eccentricity and eroticism.' Newsweek 'Intelligent, funny and beautifully written' Vogue 'Germaine Greer in THE FEMALE EUNUCH converted me to Women's Lib, as much by her bawdy sense of humour as by the bite of her polemic' Kenneth Tynan, Observer 'A fine, continuous flow of angry power...terrific polemical force' Listener

About the Author
Germaine Greer is a major cultural figure - a writer, an English critic, a literary and media star, and a feminist.

Customer Reviews

Passion, Brains and Brilliance...
It's important to remember that this book was written in the 1970s when the workplace didn't look the way that it looks now. Women now may complain that they still don't have equal pay for doing equal jobs - but in the 1970s they didn't even expect equal pay. We didn't have girls doing better in schools than boys - it was a world where women genuinely saw themselves as second class citizens and many had a feeling of inferiority to men that was deeply ingrained. Young women leaving university in 2007 have very little trace of this and are aware that a woman's brain is in many ways and in many subjects better for many jobs than a man's is. It isn't that either is better - they are just different.

Germaine Greer wrote a book that influenced her generation and a stunningly written book it is too. She is erudite and full of passion and, much to my surprise - not really anti men at all. It was the status quo that Greer hated - the two up two down slavery that she saw enslaving women. (Wouldn't it be good to have someone whose job is to keep your house clean, bring up your children, have a meal ready when you get home and 'provide' sex whenever you want it. This book needs to be read in that context.. the alarming thing is that so much of what Greer attacks so brilliantly is still around us today. Despite her warnings - in some areas we have made very little progress.

This is a classic - read it. And you may need a dictionary. I did. :-)

Over-rated sensationlist and hate-filled
This book only deserves attention because it is so sensationalist. When I first read it at the age of 18 I felt that, as a young woman, I was being mentally assaulted by the author for being female; she really does not seem to like the average woman who longs to feel secure in her femininity very much. It is a rant that makes interesting anecdotal points but has too little backup evidence. No historical point is traced thoroughly through documents. The basic assumption of the book is a pseudo-Marxist one; men and women are two political classes and the former has been oppressing the latter throughout history until along came the swinging sixties. Greer blames women for having been supposedly brainwashed by men and the patriarchal order into accepting femininity, which insofar as behaviour is concerned, she clearly sees as a social construct foisted upon women. No doubt there is real room for investigating this claim, because certain social norms of femininity (and masculinity) vary between societies, but Matt Ridley has shown in The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, that these differences are less significance than universal similarities. Greer is too keen to take up the sort of view espoused from Rousseau to Margaret Mead et al.that it is western civilisation that has been most oppressive upon women, whereas there exist 'liberated' societies of 'noble savages' elsewhere. Again, evolutionary science and anthropology will show evidence to the contrary. It must be said clearly to Greer and all other western feminists that it is precisely western civilisation, and the fact that the notion of human rights and civil liberties originated in the Judeo-Christian tradition, that has provided the fertile soil for feminism in the first place. Everybody who reads this book should read the rejoinder to it, 'The Female Woman' by the Greek femal economist Arianna Stassinopoulos. That book contains much more accurate cross-cultural evidence and is much more realistic about the strengths and weaknesses of both women and men.

still relevant after nearly 30 years!
this book was written long before i was born, but i was shocked to see how little society has moved on. women in 1999 still face many of the same obstacles as in the 1960s and 1970s. greer writes with such passion and humour that you can't help agreeing!