The 100 best nonfiction books: No 13 – The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)

The Australian feminist’s famous polemic remains a masterpiece of passionate free expression

Some of the outstanding books in this series will be polemical and rhetorical as much as revolutionary. In the literature of gender identity, The Female Eunuch is already a classic, a bestselling masterpiece of passionate free expression by a writer steeped in the English literary tradition. Australia’s Germaine Greer, the woman who has described herself as “an anarchist, basically”, was captured in an Observer profile of 2003: “She has been in the business of shaking up a complacent establishment for nearly 40 years now, and was employing the most elemental shock tactic of getting naked in public both long before and long after it ever crossed Madonna’s mind. Indeed, she has never shied away from exposing herself; whether photographically, in counterculture periodicals such as Oz and the unambiguously titled Suck, or in memoirs such as her 1990 book Daddy, We Hardly Knew You. She has repeatedly written about her own experiences of lesbian sex, rape, abortion, infertility, failed marriage (in the 1960s she was married to a construction worker for three weeks) and the menopause, thereby leaving herself open to claims that she shamelessly extrapolates from her own condition to the rest of womankind and calls it a theory. She is the original mother of reinvention.”

Greer is always her own best material. It’s her voice that sets her work apart, and her inimitable tone – earthy erudition spliced with abrasive advocacy – that gives The Female Eunuch its unique narrative power. When he reviewed The Female Eunuch in the Observer, Kenneth Tynan recognised this. He wrote that Greer “has converted me to women’s lib, as much by her bawdy sense of humour as by the bite of her polemic”.

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