When recalling her experience growing up in the southern suburbs of Sydney in the 1970s, Kathy Lette said that boys had two nicknames for women: “boars” or “maggots.” “If you were pretty, they’d call you a glamour maggot,” she stated on the ABC program, “The Books That Changed Us.” This sexist atmosphere permeated Lette’s 1979 novel, co-authored with Gabrielle Carey, “Puberty Blues,” which exposed the deep-seated misogyny within Australian surf culture.
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02-04, 2025“Boys treated us like mattresses with breasts,” Lette said. “I knew men hated us, but I didn’t understand why.” Everything became clear when Lette read Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch” at the age of 19, just two years after she had published “Puberty Blues.” “Greer explained everything to me,” she said. “I understood the deep roots of sexism and why it was there.”
Greer was working as a literary scholar in the UK when “The Female Eunuch” was published in 1970. She had left Sydney for Cambridge University in 1964, where she completed a master’s degree on the Romantic poet Lord Byron, and was a member of the left-wing libertarian group, “The Sydney Push.” By 1968, she had completed her doctorate on Shakespeare. But it was her writing for the counter-culture publications “Oz” and “Suck,” an Amsterdam-based pornographic magazine she co-founded in 1969, that exposed her to the themes of women’s liberation.
Although “The Female Eunuch” is considered a classic text of second-wave feminism, Greer’s outspokenness often put her at odds with other second-wave feminists, such as Betty Friedan. The title of Greer's book references Black Panther activist Eldridge Cleaver’s 1968 publication, “Soul on Ice,” which included a chapter titled “The Allegory of the Black Eunuchs,” about racism in the US. In “The Female Eunuch,” Greer argued that the roles of wives and mothers within the traditional nuclear family oppressed women. “Women were required to meet these standards of femininity that ensured they were unable to fulfil their potential,” said Anthia Taylor, an Associate Professor in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. “They were also unable to exercise their own sexual autonomy.”
Greer’s book defied these norms. It explored previously taboo topics such as menstruation, orgasm, and menopause, and made the case for female sexual liberation. This message resonated with an eager audience. The book became an instant bestseller, selling out its first print run on the first day, and cemented Greer’s reputation as a public intellectual and feminist provocateur. Taylor says Greer’s media savvy helped make “The Female Eunuch” a “feminist bombshell.” She stated, “Many second-wave feminists were suspicious of what they called the ‘male mainstream media.’ They didn’t want to engage. They felt that the feminist message would be diluted or compromised by engaging with the mainstream media. And Greer thought, ‘We have to use whatever weapons we have.’”
Greer’s account of what it was like to be a woman in 1970 resonated with women outside the organized feminist movement. “It didn’t necessarily provide a political blueprint for broad change, and she didn’t necessarily endorse some of the strategies of the second-wave feminist movement,” explained Michelle Arrow, a Professor of Modern History at Macquarie University. This skepticism towards political movements appealed to women who wouldn’t consider attending marches or consciousness-raising groups. “But they could read the book at home and throw it at their husbands,” Arrow said. Reflecting on the book’s impact, Betty Duncan, a mother of five, told the ABC’s “The Women Speak Out” program in 1995 that “The Female Eunuch” had changed her life in the early 70s. “I suddenly realised … here’s a woman putting my thoughts down on paper,” she said. “I had five children, but I always felt I had more to do. Where was I? So, I went to university, got a degree, and it completely opened up my life. Now I do all the things I love doing, and I thank Germaine Greer.”
The letters Greer received in response to “The Female Eunuch” filled 120 boxes of her 500-box archive, which she sold to the University of Melbourne for $3 million in 2013. Taylor used these letters, revealing several themes, as the basis for her 2024 book, “Germaine Greer, Celebrity Feminism and the Archive.” “We heard women saying, ‘The Female Eunuch articulated everything I’ve been feeling but couldn’t express,’” Taylor said. “For those women, Greer was very much their voice … but for other women, it was like a lightbulb going on, and they used those specific terms. One woman … wrote to Greer: ‘It was like a ray of sunshine coming into the muddle of my private thoughts and feelings. It was so wonderful to realise I wasn’t a freak and other women had experienced the same things.’ We see that again and again: women feeling they weren’t alone. They weren’t abnormal. There wasn’t anything wrong with them, but there was something wrong with the roles they were asked to play.”
Kathy Lette’s mother, Val, one of the few mothers of Lette’s friends who worked in the 70s, described “The Female Eunuch” as a powerful force. “It was intellectually stimulating for [women],” Val said. “Mum said that in the sex wars, Germaine became their general, and Mum and her friends felt like the foot soldiers. She said the book broke up some marriages and caused others to be renegotiated.” For the first time, Val’s friends challenged the gender inequalities and domestic servitude they had taken for granted. Many didn’t look back. “That reaction sent shockwaves through Australian society,” Lette said.
More than 50 years later, some of Greer’s views have come under criticism, particularly those relating to domestic violence and the experiences of transgender people. “[Some of her ideas] weren’t necessarily fully thought through to an absolute, intellectually clear conclusion,” Arrow said. However, she argues that despite the changing times, “The Female Eunuch” still has a place in contemporary discussions. “[Greer’s] way of talking about life inside women’s bodies in 1970 was really galvanising and refreshing and still amazing. It’s both a relic of that time and a marker of a particular moment in history, but it’s still shockingly relevant in so many ways.” For Lette, reading “The Female Eunuch” was “the first time I realised I could enjoy sex … [we] were entitled to pleasure.” Lette also believes the book still has relevance today. “The sexual double standard is still rife in Australian society. When I was a surfie girl, a sexually active man was an Adonis, a stud, a rake, a playboy, a Romeo, [while] a woman with the same sexual appetite was seen as a slut, a whore, a tramp, a rat,” she said. “Has that really changed that much?”
