The Female Eunuch

by Germaine Greer

  Anne Allen is more like the average British housewife than the young woman she spoke to, and much more ‘normal’ than faculty wives or corporation wives or swapped wives. She is not ashamed about the anti-social nature of her family although she might as well have said that there was not one couple that she could tolerate at such close quarters, and not many couples with whom she was in any sense intimate at all. The term couples itself implies the locked-off unit of male-female: she did not speak of families. This is virtually what the nuclear family has become. Women’s magazines sadly remark that children can have a disruptive effect on the conjugal relationship, that the young wife’s involvement with her children and her exhaustion can interfere with her husband’s claims on her. What a notion—a family that is threatened by its children! Contraception has increased the egotism of the couple: planned children have a pattern to fit into; at least unplanned children had some of the advantages of contingency. First and foremost they were whether their parents liked it or not. In the limited nuclear family the parents are the principals and children are theirs to manipulate in a newly purposive way. The generation gap is being intensified in these families where children must not inconvenience their parents, where they are disposed of in special living quarters at special times of day, their own rooms and so forth. Anything less than this is squalor. Mother must not have more children than she can control: control means full attention for much of the day, and then isolation. So the baby-sitter must be introduced into the house sneakily, for if junior finds out that his parents are going out, he’ll scream. I think of the filthy two-roomed house in Calabria where people came and went freely, where I never heard a child scream except in pain, where the twelve-year-old aunt sang at her washing by the well, and the old father walked in the olive grove with his grandson on his arm. English children have lost their innocence, for their first lessons have been in the exploitation of their adult slave. A sterilized parent is a eunuch in his children’s harem. To be sure, I recognize that efficient contraception is necessary for sexual pleasure and that sexual pleasure is necessary, but contraception for economic reasons is another matter. ‘We can only afford two children’ is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than ‘we don’t like children’. A sterilized parent is forever bound to those children whom he has, more than ever immobile and predictable, and those children are more securely bound to him. ‘We can only afford two children’ really means, ‘We only like clean, well-disciplined middle-class children who go to good schools and grow up to be professionals’, for children manage to use up all the capital that is made available for the purpose, whatever proportion it may be of the family’s whole income, just as housework expands to fill the time available. The sterilized parent is the ultimate domestic animal. Masculine culture contains a strong vein of anti-domesticity, although men can hardly have the experience of it that women have had trained into them. The fantasy of the perfect partner exists alongside the consciousness of what family meant to a growing boy.

  Marriage is the only thing that really scares me. With the right girl I suppose it’s okay but I couldn’t imagine myself having a house and a wife. I like to feel free, to go anywhere and not have to worry. That’s one nice thing about not having a girlfriend, you’re free to go out and enjoy yourself with the lads. Having a girl ties you down.

  The more you go out with a girl, the more involved you get. I’m frightened of becoming engaged. That would finish me—because I’d never break off the engagement, it isn’t fair on the girl. Too many teenagers rush into marriage…

  The next time I have a steady girl I’m going to make it clear from the start that I want a free night off with the lads every week. Once you lose all your friends, you’re stuck to the girl, and you’ve had it.7

  You’ve had it, you’re hooked, done for! Involved means tangled up, tied down.

  Most people get the best job they can, work for promotion and when they’re earning enough money meet a girl and marry her. Then you have to buy a house and a car, and there you are—chained down for the rest of your life. When you get to thirty-five you’re frightened to try anything new in case you lose your security. Then it means living with all the regrets about things you wanted to do.8

  The disenchanted vision of these children has revealed the function of the patriarchal family unit in capitalist society. It immobilizes the worker, keeps him vulnerable, so that he can be tantalized with the vision of security. It gives him a controllable pattern of consumption to which he is thoroughly committed. His commitment is to his small family and his employer not to his community. The effect of wifely pressure on strikers has not to my knowledge been analysed. Often it is responsibility to a family which causes a striker to take drastic action: if the employers can hold out long enough it is this same pressure which will bring him back to work. Wives distrust their husbands’ leisure; too often a wife would rather her husband earned less than hung about in the streets with his cronies getting into trouble. One of the saddest comments upon the family in industrial society was offered by the spectacle of the wives of miners thrown out of work by pit closures angrily refusing the solution of pay without work because their husbands would either be around the house all day doing nothing, or getting into mischief with the boys. Many girls undertake their anti-social functions very early, restricting their boyfriends’ association with their ‘mates’ severely in return for sexual favours. This is not altogether the fault of women’s selfishness for the male groups that threaten her do not admit her except under special circumstances and in a special capacity. She cannot play darts, drink beer, or kick a football about. Her distrust of these activities is not that her man will consort with other women in the company of his mates, but the knowledge that he enjoys these other activities and is dependent upon them in a way that he does not enjoy or depend upon her. She is jealous not of his sexual favours, but upon the partiality of his sexual passion, and the greater togetherness he might enjoy with men. Every wife must live with the knowledge that she has nothing else but home and family, while her house is ideally a base which her tired warrior—hunter can withdraw to and express his worst manners, his least amusing conversation, while he licks his wounds and is prepared by laundry and toilet and lunch-box for another sortie.

  Obviously any woman who thinks in the simplest terms of liberating herself to enjoy life and create expression for her own potential cannot accept such a role. And yet marriage is based upon this filial relationship of a wife who takes her husband’s name, has her tax declared on his return, lives in a house owned by him and goes about in public as his companion wearing his ring on her finger at all times. Alteration in detail is not alteration in anything else. A husband who agrees that he too will wear a ring, that they will have a joint bank account, that the house will be in both their names, is not making any serious concessions to a wife’s personal needs. The essential character of the institution asserts itself eventually. The very fact that such concessions are privileges which a wife cannot claim contains its own special consequences of gratitude and more willing servitude. And yet if a woman is to have children, if humanity is to survive, what alternative can there be?

  …the signing of a marriage contract is the most important business transaction in which you will ever become involved…One or other of the principals should function as the managing director of the household—preferably the husband: although at times his only qualification for the position is brute strength…The children as they come along are the new investments undertaken by the firm; and the directors should see to it that there is a good return for the assets invested.

  Cyrus Fullerton,

  ‘Happiness and Health in Womanhood’, 1937, pp. 40—41

  To begin with, the problem of the survival of humanity is not a matter of ensuring the birth of future generations but of limiting it. The immediate danger to humanity is that of total annihilation within a generation or two, not the failure of mankind to breed. A woman seeking alternati
ve modes of life is no longer morally bound to pay her debt to nature. Those families in which the parents replace themselves in two children are not the most desirable ones for children to grow up in, for the neuroses resultant from the intensified Oedipal situation are worse in cases where the relationship with the parents is more dominant than the problems of adjusting to a peer group of brothers and sisters. There is no reason, except the moral prejudice that women who do not have children are shirking a responsibility, why all women should consider themselves bound to breed. A woman who has a child is not then automatically committed to bringing it up. Most societies countenance the deputizing of nurses to bring up the children of women with state duties. The practice of putting children out to nurse did not result in a race of psychopaths. A child must have care and attention, but that care and attention need not emanate from a single, permanently present individual. Children are more disturbed by changes of place than by changes in personnel around them, and more distressed by friction and ill-feeling between the adults in their environment than by unfamiliarity. A group of children can be more successfully civilized by one or two women who have voluntarily undertaken the work than they can be when divided and tyrannized over by a single woman who finds herself bored and imposed upon. The alternative is not the institutionalization of parental functions in some bureaucratic form, nothing so cold and haphazard as a baby farm, but an organic family where the child society can merge with an adult society in conditions of love and personal interest. The family understood not as a necessary condition of existence in a system but as a chosen way of life can become a goal, an achievement of a creative kind.

  If women could regard childbearing not as a duty or an inescapable destiny but as a privilege to be worked for, the way a man might work for the right to have a family, children might grow up without the burden of gratitude for the gift of life which they never asked for. Brilliant women are not reproducing themselves because childbearing has been regarded as a full-time job; genetically they might be thought to be being bred out. In a situation where a woman might contribute a child to a household which engages her attention for part of the time while leaving her free to frequent other spheres of influence, brilliant women might be more inclined to reproduce. For some time now I have pondered the problem of having a child which would not suffer from my neuroses and the difficulties I would have in adjusting to a husband and the demands of domesticity. A plan, by no means a blueprint, evolved which has become a sort of dream. No child ought, I opine, to grow up in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a city flat, where he has little chance of exercising his limbs or his lungs; I must work in a city where the materials for my work and its market are available. No child ought to grow up alone with a single resentful girl who is struggling to work hard enough to provide for herself and him. I thought again of the children I knew in Calabria and hit upon the plan to buy, with the help of some friends with similar problems, a farmhouse in Italy where we could stay when circumstances permitted, and where our children would be born. Their fathers and other people would also visit the house as often as they could, to rest and enjoy the children and even work a bit. Perhaps some of us might live there for quite long periods, as long as we wanted to. The house and garden would be worked by a local family who lived in the house. The children would have a region to explore and dominate, and different skills to learn from all of us. It would not be paradise, but it would be a little community with a chance of survival, with parents of both sexes and a multitude of roles to choose from. The worst aspect of kibbutz living could be avoided, especially as the children would not have to be strictly persuaded out of sexual experimentation with their peers, an unnatural restriction which has had serious consequences for the children of kibbutzim. Being able to be with my child and his friends would be a privilege and a delight that I could work for. If necessary the child need not even know that I was his womb-mother and I could have relationships with the other children as well. If my child expressed a wish to try London and New York or go to formal school somewhere, that could also be tried without committal.

  Any new arrangement which a woman might devise will have the disadvantage of being peculiar: the children would not have been brought up like other children in an age of uniformity. There are problems of legitimacy and nationality to be faced. Our society has created the myth of the broken home which is the source of so many ills, and yet the unbroken home which ought to have broken is an even greater source of tension as I can attest from bitter experience. The rambling organic structure of my ersatz household would have the advantage of being an unbreakable home in that it did not rest on the frail shoulders of two bewildered individuals trying to apply a contradictory blueprint. This little society would confer its own normality, and other contacts with civilization would be encouraged, but it may well be that such children would find it impossible to integrate with society and become drop-outs or schizo-phrenics. As such they would not be very different from other children I have known. The notion of integrating with society as if society were in some way homogenous is itself a false one. There are enough eccentrics carving out various lifestyles for my children to feel that they are no more isolated than any other minority group within the fictitious majority. In the computer age disintegration may well appear to be a higher value than integration. Cynics might argue that the children of my household would be anxious to set up ‘normal’ families as part of the natural counter-reaction. Perhaps. When faced with such dubious possibilities, there is only empiricism to fall back on. I could not, physically, have a child any other way, except by accident and under protest in a hand-to-mouth sort of way in which case I could not accept any responsibility for the consequences. I should like to be able to think that I had done my best.

  For a male and female to live continuously together is…biologically speaking, an extremely unnatural condition.

  Robert Briffault, ‘Sin and Sex’, 1931, p. 140

  The point of an organic family is to release the children from the disadvantages of being the extensions of their parents so that they can belong primarily to themselves. They may accept the services that adults perform for them naturally without establishing dependencies. There could be scope for them to initiate their own activities and define the mode and extent of their own learning. They might come to resent their own strangeness but in other circumstances they might resent normality; faced with difficulties of adjustment children seize upon their parents and their upbringing to serve as scapegoats. Parents have no option but to enjoy their children if they want to avoid the cycle of exploitation and recrimination. If they want to enjoy them they must construct a situation in which such enjoyment is possible.

  The institution of self-regulating organic families may appear to be a return to chaos. Genuine chaos is more fruitful than the chaos of conflicting systems which are mutually destructive. When heredity has decayed and bureaucracy is the rule, so that the only riches are earning power and mobility, it is absurd that the family should persist in the pattern of patriliny. It is absurd that people should live more densely than ever before while pretending that they are still in a cottage with a garden. It is absurd that people should pledge themselves for life when divorce is always possible. It is absurd that families should claim normality when confusion about the meaning and function of parenthood means that children born within a decade of each other and a mile of each other can be brought up entirely differently. To breast feed or not breast feed? To toilet train when and how? To punish, if ever? To reward? It is absurd that so many children should grow up in environments where their existence is frowned upon. It is absurd that children should fear adults outside the immediate family. Generation X, the generation gap, the Mods, the Rockers, the Hippies, the Yippies, the Skinheads, the Maoists, the young Fascists of Europe, rebels without a cause, whatever patronizing names their parent generation can find for them, the young are accusing their elders of spurious assumption of authority to conceal their own confusion. Vandalism
, steel-capped boots, drugs, football rioting, these are chaos and the attempts of instituted authority to deal with them are more chaotic still. The juvenile offender dares the system or one of the systems to cope with him and it invariably fails. The status quo is chaos masquerading as order: our children congregate to express an organic community in ritual and uniform, which can make nonsense of state authority. The Californian police do not dare to interfere with the Hell’s Angels who make a mockery of their punitive law by refusing to do the things that their parents might have done if they had had that power. The same sort of mockery is uttered by the Black Panthers. The family is already broken down: technology has outstripped conservatism. The only way the state-father can deal with its uncontrollable children is to bash and shoot them in the streets or send them to a war, the ultimate chaos.

  Reich described the authoritarian compulsive family as ‘part and parcel, and, at the same time, prerequisite, of the authoritarian state and of authoritarian society’.9 Like the family, the state belies itself by its own confusion and permissiveness although ultimately it intervenes to exercise its authority chaotically. In England the ‘excesses’ of youth are contained and allowed to spend themselves until they can be controlled or punished discreetly, so that they do not inflame the dormant young population unduly. The result is political and social chaos, the ‘sexual wilderness’. The formlessness, the legal non-existence of my dream household is a safeguard against the chaos of conflicting loyalties, of conflicting education apparata, of conflicting judgements. My child will not be guided at all because the guidance offered him by this society seeks to lead him backwards and forwards and sideways all at once. If we are to recover serenity and joy in living, we will have to listen to what our children tell us in their own way, and not impose our own distorted image upon them in our crazy families.