Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch had an enormous impact. It's still felt 50 years on

In The Female Eunuch, Greer (pictured here in 1979) fought back against the rigid roles assigned to
women by society. (Getty: Janet Fries)

By Nicola Heath for The Books That Changed Us

When Kathy Lette was growing up in Sydney's southern suburbs in the 1970s, she says boys had two nicknames for women: bush pigs or maggots.

"If you were good-looking, they called you a glamour maggot," she tells ABC Radio National’s The Books That Changed Us.

This atmosphere of sexism permeated Puberty Blues, Lette's 1979 novel, co-written with Gabrielle Carey, that exposed the habitual misogyny of Australian surf culture.

"The boys treated us as a mattress with breasts," Lette says.

"I knew men hated us, but I didn't understand why."

When Lette read Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch at age 19 — two years after she published Puberty Blues — things became clearer.

"[Greer] explained it all to me," she says.

"I understood how entrenched the sexism was and why."

What does The Female Eunuch argue?

When Greer published The Female Eunuch in 1970, she was working as a literary academic in the UK.

In 1964, she'd left Sydney — where she completed an MA on Romantic poet Lord Byron and was a member of the left-wing libertarian group, the Sydney Push — to study at Cambridge University. By 1968, she'd finished a PhD on Shakespeare.

But it was her writing for counterculture publications Oz and Suck — an Amsterdam-based pornography magazine she'd co-founded in 1969 — that led her to the subject of women's liberation.

Germaine Greer on the cover of Oz Magazine in 1969 with
Vivian Stanshall from the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

While The Female Eunuch is considered a classic second-wave feminist text, Greer's brashness often put her at odds with other second-wave feminists, such as Betty Friedan (who had published the influential The Feminine Mystique in 1963).

Greer's title refers to Soul on Ice, a book by Black Panther activist Eldridge Cleaver, published in 1968, which included a chapter called The Allegory of the Black Eunuchs about racism in America.

In The Female Eunuch, Greer argued the roles of wife and mother in the traditional nuclear family subordinated and oppressed women.

"[Women were] required to fulfil these standards of femininity, which were ensuring that they didn't reach their potential," says Anthea Taylor, associate professor in gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney. "They were also unable to exercise their sexual agency."

Greer's book flew in the face of these norms.

It explored previously off-limits topics such as menstruation, orgasm and menopause and made the case for women's sexual liberation.

It was a message with a hungry audience. The book was an instant bestseller and sold out its initial print run on the first day, establishing Greer's reputation as a public intellectual and feminist provocateur.

Taylor says Greer's media savvy helped The Female Eunuch become "a feminist blockbuster".

"A lot of second-wave feminists were suspicious of what they called the 'malestream media'. They didn't want to engage," she says.

"They thought the feminist message would be diluted or compromised by engagement with the mainstream media.

"Whereas Greer thought, 'Look, we've got to use whatever weapons that we've got'."

Feminist 'foot soldiers'

Greer's description of what it felt like to be a woman in 1970 connected with women outside the organised feminist movement.

"It wasn't necessarily offering a political blueprint for widespread change, and she wasn't necessarily endorsing some of the tactics of the second-wave feminist movement," explains Michelle Arrow, professor of modern history at Macquarie University.

This scepticism of political movements appealed to women who wouldn't consider joining a march or a consciousness-raising group. 

"But they could read this book in their homes and throw it at their husbands," Arrow says.

The Female Eunuch has remained in print since it was published in 1970. 
(Supplied: HarperCollins)

Reflecting on the book's impact, Bette Duncan, a mother of five, told ABC's Women Out Loud in 1995 that The Female Eunuch changed her life when she read it in the early 70s.

"I suddenly discovered … here was a woman who was putting down on paper my thoughts," she said.

"I have five children, but I always felt there was more for me. Where was I? So, I marched off to university and got myself a degree, and that opened up my life completely. And now I do all the things that I like doing, and I thank Germaine Greer."

The reams of correspondence Greer received in response to The Female Eunuch filled 120 boxes of her 500-box archive, which she sold to Melbourne University in 2013 for $3 million.

Taylor used the letters, which revealed several themes, as the basis of her 2024 work, Germaine Greer, Celebrity Feminism and the Archive.

"We hear women say, '[The Female Eunuch] articulated everything that I was feeling but wasn't able to express'," Taylor says. "For those women, Greer was very much their voice … But for other women, it was like a light bulb being turned on, and they used those explicit terms.

"One woman … wrote to Greer: 'It has been like a shaft of daylight into the confusion of my private thoughts and feelings. How amazing to realise that I'm not a freak and that other women have experienced the same things.'

"That was something we saw repeatedly: women felt that they weren't alone. They weren't aberrant. There wasn't anything wrong with them, but it was the roles that they were being asked to fulfil."

Kathy Lette's mother, Val, one of few women among Lette's friends' mothers who worked in the 70s, described The Female Eunuch as a powerful force.

According to Val, "it turned [women] on intellectually".

"Mum says that, in the sex war, Germaine became their general, and Mum and her friends felt like foot soldiers. She said the book broke some marriages [and] it caused others to be renegotiated."

For the first time, Val's friends challenged the gender inequality and domestic servitude they'd always taken for granted. Many didn't look back.

"The reaction was seismic through Australian society," Lette says.

The Female Eunuch today

More than 50 years on, some of Greer's views have drawn criticism, particularly relating to issues such as domestic violence and the experience of transgender people.

"[Some of her ideas are] not necessarily fully thought out to their absolute, intellectually defined conclusion," Arrow says.

However, she believes that while times have changed, The Female Eunuch still has a place in contemporary discourse.

"The way [Greer] talks about life inside a female body in 1970 is really bracing and refreshing and still amazing.

"It's at once a relic of its time and a marker of a particular moment in history, but it is also still shockingly relevant in so many ways."

In recent years, Greer has attracted controversy for her views on transgender rights. (Getty: Colin McPherson)

For Lette, reading The Female Eunuch, "was the first time I realised I was allowed to enjoy sex … [that] we had a right to pleasure".

Lette also believes the book is relevant today.

"Sexual double-standards are still rife in Australian society. When I was growing up as a surfie girl, a guy who was sexually active was a love god, a stud muffin, a spunk rat, a Lothario, a Romeo, [while] a woman with the same sexual appetites was dismissed as a slut, a tart, a tramp, a mole," she says.

"And has that really changed so much?"

First published at ABC News, February 4, 2025