tessaays 's review for:

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

4.0

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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.