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3.38 AVERAGE
3.38 AVERAGE
challenging
slow-paced
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
Christ, Greer certainly doesn’t have a writing style like Dworkin. I was really struggling with the concepts she was trying to convey in her convoluted sentence structure.
It’s of it’s time, sure. That’s a given - 1970 and she was never the “popular” one, but she made quite the impact with her branding - she’s 84 now and this 50 years ago. I’m hardly clutching my pearls in shock or offence - but there’s ideas worth unpacking all through this. I’d probably prefer a summary than to leaf through this writing myself.
The foreword is decent too.
“It is a profoundly narcissistic endeavour to read books from the past, and expect them to reflect the morals of the present day” - says Hadley Freeman in her introduction, before going on to rightful highlight some of the absolute “clangers” of homophobic and racist sentiments in the Female Eunuch, published in 1970, a half century ago. But she also points out - “There is an oddly Freudian tendency among young women to trash the feminists from the generation before, a kind of motherkilling, a means for the new generation to make room for themselves. (Although, ladies, please : there’s always room.)
It’s of it’s time, sure. That’s a given - 1970 and she was never the “popular” one, but she made quite the impact with her branding - she’s 84 now and this 50 years ago. I’m hardly clutching my pearls in shock or offence - but there’s ideas worth unpacking all through this. I’d probably prefer a summary than to leaf through this writing myself.
The foreword is decent too.
“It is a profoundly narcissistic endeavour to read books from the past, and expect them to reflect the morals of the present day” - says Hadley Freeman in her introduction, before going on to rightful highlight some of the absolute “clangers” of homophobic and racist sentiments in the Female Eunuch, published in 1970, a half century ago. But she also points out - “There is an oddly Freudian tendency among young women to trash the feminists from the generation before, a kind of motherkilling, a means for the new generation to make room for themselves. (Although, ladies, please : there’s always room.)
Figurehead feminists, are especially vulnerable to expectations of perfection and any infractions result in being flung overboard.”
“ I have never understood this hard-line approach of rejecting everything about a person because you object to something about them. And what a waste it would be to disregard her, because Greer was right - so thrillingly right - about misogyny and self-loathing, and the lies women were and are sold about what constitutes a good life.
Greer was and is far from perfect, but learning to accept female imperfection is the moral of this book. Just like her book she is astonishing, brilliant, absurd, infuriating, incendiary and part of the canon forever.”
A fair analysis tbh.
A tough one to review because me reading it now in 2022 is SO different to someone reading it in the 70s when it came out. Greer has quite an arresting writing style which is mostly used to powerful effect throughout this essay collection, though it does sometimes veer into diatribe. I didn’t agree with all of her viewpoints (the trans and queer stuff in particular was pretty icky and troubling) but I found the overall collection very much worth reading. If nothing else, it really gave a powerful background to housewife/working woman characters in recent novels and TV shows that are set in the 50s/60s (Mad Men is a great example). For people around my generation it’s hard to imagine how different, and mostly worse, things were for women just 10-20 years before we were born. This book really throws that into sharp relief.
It's a classic, which is why it should still be required reading for any feminist trying to educate themselves. But it's very, very much of its time, very much the work of a second waver with all the problematic attitudes towards sexuality, homosexuality and race that that implies. Worth reading as an historical record, but not something that I base my own thought on, really.
informative
slow-paced
Germaine Greer's written words are as powerful as her lectures. While the statistics in the book have not been revised for the new edition, this book is a useful tool; as a record of where the world was and as a yardstick to measure how far we as a society has progressed or evolved over the last 50 years.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Moderate: Homophobia, Racial slurs, Lesbophobia
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
A reread that was terrifyingly still relevant to this time, the fashion of politics and with similar struggles for rights and freedoms we see play out across our global stories. I look forward to the day when we can see this book as way of understanding how things were not how things are.