Some of it still stands up, but other parts are the statements of a youthful movement, confident in the absolute correctness of its untested positions. For many of them, the call for revolution came before the call for the liberation of women. Re-issued to coincide with Doubleday's publication of The Whole Woman, the sequel to The Female Eunuch. This is Greer at her best. Applying the term for castrated males to women's political and social disempowerment, Greer … Picked up by myself in a charity shop in a Welsh market town, with a nod to the book's prominence in the early Adrian Mole books, this was actually a surprisingly pleasant read. The weapon that I suggest is that most honoured of the proletariat, withdrawal of labour. It went on to become an international bestseller, translated into more than twelve languages, and a landmark in the history of the women's movement. No stone or assumption is left unturned, no door or circumstance left unopened and no closet, assumption, opinion or excuse is left un-riffled as Greer not only shows where things were (and are) going wrong but also demands of the reader 'what are you going to do?'. The spiritual crisis we are at present traversing might be just another growing pain. The Female Eunuch launched in London, but it was the extensive publicity campaign preceding the book’s entry into the American market that shaped its … Be the first to ask a question about The Female Eunuch. I simmered down eventually. The change is that suddenly everyone is interested in the subject of women. 150 likes. ...very compelling arguments on feminism, and a strong case the 'rational' of subjugation women. What links them is attitude. Because love has been so perverted, it has in many cases come to involve a measure of hatred. They have been led by the nose and every other way until they have to acknowledge that, like every one else, they are lost. The most generous, tender, spontaneous relationship deliquesces into the approved mould when it avails itself of the approved buttresses, legality, security, permanence. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. This review is about two issues that seem unrelated. share. I decided to pick up her seminal text, Despite the age of this book, I still think that most of the insights ring true even today. Even the structure of the boo. It's validating, this book, from the first sentence. The female eunuch by Germaine Greer, 1993, Flamingo edition, in English The chief bogy of those who fear freedom is insecurity, and so Love ends with an animadversion on the illusoriness of Security, the ruling deity of the welfare state, never more insubstantial than it is in the age of total warfare, global pollution and population explosion. I’m sick of being a transvestite. The characteristics that are praised and rewarded are those of the castrate – timidity, plumpness, languor, delicacy and preciosity. "The Female Eunuch" is a fitful, passionate, scattered text, not cohesive enough to qualify as a manifesto. This year marks the 40th anniversary of The Female Eunuch. Forty five years ago, a softly spoken Australian published a delicate commentary on the position of women in the existing patriarchal society and how a small movement known as feminism has taken on a second attempt at evening things out a little. Download "The Female Eunuch Book Summary, by Germaine Greer" as PDF. I'll admit, I'm terrified of Germaine Greer. She can shine and she can let herself down horribly. This book is a part of the second feminist wave. She also implicates capitalism in shaping and reinforcing patriarchy, with some great passages on the history of women in work. The book is also highly readable, non-technical and funny. a grouping of many short, tight essays on the subjects at hand rather than some of the more long-winded thinkers and theorists on these same subjects, is revolutionary. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial. Because so many assumptions about the sex of mind cloud the issue of female mental ability, there follows a brief account of the failure of fifty years of thorough and diversified testing to discover any pattern of differentiation in male and female intellectual powers, called The Raw Material. The housewife who must wait for the success of world revolution for her liberty might be excused for losing hope, while conservative political methods can invent no way in which the economically necessary unit of the one-man family could be diversified. All done in Greer's now world famous to the point and straight talking wit. The opponents of female suffrage lamented that woman’s emancipation would mean the end of marriage, morality and the state; their extremism was more clear-sighted than the woolly benevolence of liberals and humanists, who thought that giving women a measure of freedom would not upset anything. It is almost a hundred years since Nora asked Helmer ‘What do you consider is my most sacred duty?’ and when he answered ‘Your duty to your husband and children’, she demurred. The Female Eunuch. But if women are the true proletariat, the truly oppressed majority, the revolution can only be drawn nearer by their withdrawal of support for the capitalist system. Tentatively it gestures towards the re-deployment of energy, no longer to be used in repression, but in desire, movement and creation. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Because the tests have been irrelevant to the continuing conviction that women are illogical, subjective and generally silly, Womanpower takes a coherent expression of all such prejudice, Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, and turns all the defects which it defines into advantages, by rejecting Weininger’s concepts of virtue and intelligence and espousing those of Whitehead and others. I picked up this book not only because of it's historical significance but because a friend mad a blog post about it while having not read it basically saying Greer was an self-important idiot and I really hate ignorance. Read the world’s #1 book summary of The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer here. Greer really explains how I have been feeling about life, the world, being married, suppressed, not listened to, dismissed, abused and so fourth. The way is unknown, just as the sex of the uncastrated female is unknown. … The Female Eunuch, like The Second Sex, is a monument to this nuanced and melancholic form of personal heroism. Body ends with a look at the way in which female reproduction is thought to influence the whole organism in the operations of the Wicked Womb, source of hysteria, menstrual depression, weakness, and unfitness for any sustained enterprise. This book played on my mind for a long time after I read it, which I think shows its power even 40 years on. One of them was Germaine Greer. Women breaking through the glass ceiling only to go the female eunuch college to still shop for.. On others have failed of its time abroad and I are quite similar want. True chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, proximity! 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