SOURCE: “The Female Eunuch,” in Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew, Faber and Faber, 1998, pp. 155-74.

In the following essay, Wallace provides analysis of the feminist perspective, mass appeal, and critical reception of The Female Eunuch.

The ‘advocacy of delinquency’ among women was Greer's chief purpose in The Female Eunuch.¹ We have to question the most basic assumptions about ‘feminine normality,’ she argued, when for so long female sexuality has been denied and misrepresented as passivity. ‘The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of femininity in the same way that the signs of independence and vigour in the rest of her body are suppressed,’ Greer wrote. ‘The characteristics that are praised and rewarded are those of the castrate—timidity, plumpness, languor, delicacy and preciosity.’ Physically and psychologically the suppression and deflection of women's energy had rendered them eunuchs in modern society. It was time to revolt.

Some women were already...