The Female Eunuch

by Germaine Greer

  That women should seek a revolution in their circumstances by training themselves as a fighting force is the most obvious case of confusing reaction or rebellion with revolution. Now that warfare, like industry, is no longer a matter of superior physical strength, it is no longer significant in the battle of women for admission to humanity. In our time violence has become inhuman and asexual. It is associated with wealth, in the manufacture of sophisticated armaments, in the maintenance of armies of police of all varieties, in the mounting of huge defences which by their very existence precipitate the chaos of war. War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests: by war the issue is left to chance, and the tacit assumption that the best man will win is not at all justified. It might equally be argued that the worst, the most unscrupulous man will win, although history will continue the absurd game by finding him after all the best man. We have only to think of Hochhuth’s attempt to pass judgement on England’s role in the overkill of Germany and the judicious blindnesses of Winston Churchill to recognize this inevitable process. Wars cannot be won, as any Englishman ruefully contrasting his post-war fortunes with those of guilty Nazi Europe is confusedly aware. Women who adopt the attitudes of war in their search for liberation condemn themselves to acting out the last perversion of dehumanized manhood, which has only one foreseeable outcome, the specifically masculine end of suicide.

  The Boston Women’s Liberation Movement justify their interest in karate on the grounds that women are terrified of physical aggression in the individual circumstance, and need to be liberated from that fear before they can act with confidence. It is true that men use the threat of physical force, usually histrionically, to silence nagging wives: but it is almost always a sham. It is actually a game of nerves, and can be turned aside fairly easily. At various stages in my life I have lived with men of known violence, two of whom had convictions for Grievous Bodily Harm, and in no case was I ever offered any physical aggression, because it was abundantly clear from my attitude that I was not impressed by it. Violence has a fascination for most women; they act as spectators at fights, and dig the scenes of bloody violence in films. Women are always precipitating scenes of violence in pubs and dance-halls. Much goading of men is actually the female need for the thrill of violence. Most fights are degrading, confused affairs: most men do not hit the thing they aim at, and most end up letting themselves get hurt in their own confused masochism. The genuinely violent man does not play about with karate or the Marquess of Queensberry’s rules—he uses a broken bottle, a wheelbrace, a tyre lever or an axe. He does not see the fight through, but seeks to end it quickly by doing as much harm as he can as soon as he can.

  It would be genuine revolution if women would suddenly stop loving the victors in violent encounters. Why do they admire the image of the brutal man? If they could only see through the brawn and the bravado to the desolation and the misery of the man who is goaded into using his fists (for battered-looking strong men are always called out by less obviously masculine men who need to prove themselves). Why can they not understand the deification of the strongman, either as soldier, wrestler, footballer or male model, seeing that his fate so closely approximates their own? If women would only offer a genuine alternative to the treadmill of violence, the world might breathe a little longer with less pain. If women were to withdraw from the spectatorship of wrestling matches, the industry would collapse; if soldiers were certainly faced with the withdrawal of all female favours, as Lysistrata observed so long ago, there would suddenly be less glamour in fighting. We are not houris; we will not be the warrior’s reward. And yet we read in men’s magazines how the whores of American cities give their favours for free to the boys about to embark for Vietnam.

  The male perversion of violence is an essential condition of the degradation of women. The penis is conceived as a weapon, and its action upon women is understood to be somehow destructive and hurtful. It has become a gun, and in English slang women cry when they want their mate to ejaculate, ‘Shoot me! Shoot me!’ Women cannot be liberated from their impotence by the gift of a gun, although they are as capable of firing them as men are. Every time women have been given a gun for the duration of a specific struggle, it has been withdrawn and they have found themselves more impotent than before. The process to be followed is the opposite: women must humanize the penis, take the steel out of it and make it flesh again. What most ‘liberated’ women do is taunt the penis for its misrepresentation of itself, mock men for their overestimation of their virility, instead of seeing how the mistake originated and what effects it has had upon themselves. Men are tired of having all the responsibility for sex, it is time they were relieved of it. And I do not mean that large-scale lesbianism should be adopted, but simply that the emphasis should be taken off male genitality and replaced upon human sexuality. The cunt must come into its own. The question of the female attitude to violence is inseparable from this problem. Perhaps to begin with women should labour to be genuinely disgusted by violence, and at least to refuse to reward any victor in a violent confrontation, even to the point of casting their lot on principle with the loser. If they were to withdraw their spectatorship absolutely from male competition, much of its motivation would be gone.

  The Woman’s Fight

  (Tune: ‘Juanita’)

  Soft may she slumber on the breast of mother earth,

  One who worked nobly for the world’s rebirth.

  In the heart of woman, dwells a wish to heal all pain,

  Let her learn to help man to cast off each chain.

  Woman, oh woman, leave your fetters in the past:

  Rise and claim your birthright and be free at last.

  Mother, wife and maiden, in your hands great power lies:

  Give it all the freedom, strength and sacrifice.

  Far across the hilltop breaks the light of coming day,

  Still the fight is waiting, then be up and away.

  I. W. W. Songs

  Although many women do not necessarily find themselves attracted to the winners in violent conflicts but prefer to hover over the gallant defeated, in the wider social sense they all prefer winners. An eminent lady professor, addressing an adult education group at a northern university, lamented the fact that male chauvinism prevented educated men from dating the equally qualified and very accessible girls at the same institution. The girls could not be expected to hobnob with the less educated, inferior men, and so they went out with no one. But if men are content to spend their leisure time with their intellectual inferiors, why cannot women be so? Women may remark with contempt that men are nine-to-five intellectuals, and can only relax when the heat is off and they can chat with a moron. They play Daddy the all-knowing, and their chosen dates play breathless daughter. By and large the gibe is true. But it is also true that in too many cases female intellectuals are arrogant, aggressive, compulsive and intense. They place too high a value on their dubious educational achievements, losing contact with more innocent recreations. They seek a male whose achievements will give value to their own, an ego to replace their own insufficiency, and most men are quick to sense the urgency of the quest. Many men tire of morons easily, but are more deeply repelled by blue-stockings. Rather than seek to be squired and dated by their rivals why should it not be possible for women to find relaxation and pleasure in the company of their ‘inferiors’? They would need to shed their desperate need to admire a man, and accept the gentler role of loving him. A learned woman cannot castrate a truck-driver like she can her intellectual rival, because he has no exaggerated respect for her bookish capabilities. The alternative to conventional education is not stupidity, and many a clever girl needs the corrective of a humbler soul’s genuine wisdom. In working-class families, the paternal role of the father is not as pronounced as it is in middle-class homes, for often working-class women are quicker with their letters and more adept at manipulating the authorities than their husbands are.1 A worker husband could well be proud of a ‘thinker’ ma
te. Marriage would mean that after taxation her earnings made little difference to the family’s financial situation. Professional earnings in this country are so low and hours so long that no man need feel his earning capacity undermined by his wife’s, however highly qualified she was. Socialist women, now fulminating in segregated groups after waiting hand, foot and buttock on the middle-class revolutionary males in the movement, might be better off placing their despised expertise and their knowledge of the basic texts at the service of the class they were meant for. Women’s achievement is usually assessed in terms of how far up out of their class they succeed in mating. A revolution in consciousness might reverse that notion. Of course, it must be done genuinely—there is no scope for condescension.

  If women are to effect a significant amelioration in their condition it seems obvious that they must refuse to marry. No worker can be required to sign on for life: if he did, his employer could disregard all his attempts to gain better pay and conditions. In those places where an employer has the monopoly of employment this phenomenon can be observed. It should not be up to the employer to grant improvements out of the goodness of his heart: his workers must retain their pride by retaining their bargaining power. It might be argued that women are not signed up for life in the marriage contract because divorce is always possible, but as it stands divorce works in the male interest, not only because it was designed and instituted by men, but because divorce still depends on money and independent income. Married women seldom have either. Men argue that alimony laws can cripple them, and this is obviously true, but they have only themselves to blame for the fact that alimony is necessary, largely because of the pattern of granting custody of the children to the mother. The alimonized wife bringing up the children without father is no more free than she ever was. It makes even less sense to sign a lifelong service contract which can be broken by the employer only. More bitter still is the reflection that the working wife has her income assessed as a part of her husband’s, and he on the other hand is not even obliged to tell her how much he earns. If independence is a necessary concomitant of freedom, women must not marry.

  What does the average girl marry for? The answer will probably be made—love. Love can exist outside marriage—indeed for a long time it was supposed that it always did. Love can take many forms; why must it be exclusive? Security? Security is a chimera, especially if it is supposed to mean the preservation of a state of happy togetherness which exists at the time of marriage. Should no obvious disasters like adultery or separation occur, people still change: neither partner will be, ultimately, the person who got married in the beginning. If a woman gets married because she is sick of working, she asks for everything she gets. Opportunities for work must be improved, not abandoned. If a woman married because she wants to have children, she might reflect that the average family has not proved to be a very good breeding ground for children, and seeing as the world is in no urgent need of her increase she might do better, for contraception is very possible, to wait until some suitable kind of household presents itself. The scorns and disabilities suffered by the single girl who cannot have a mortgage and is often considered an undesirable tenant can be experienced and challenged only by a single girl; cowardly marriage is no way to change them. Even though there are more problems attendant upon bringing up an illegitimate child, and even friendly cohabitation can meet with outrage and prosecution from more orthodox citizens, marrying to avoid these inconveniences is a meaningless evasion.

  The Rebel Girl

  Words and Music by Joe Hill, Copyright 1916

  CHORUS

  That’s the Rebel Girl, that’s the Rebel Girl!

  To the working class she’s a precious pearl.

  She brings courage, pride and joy

  To the fighting Rebel Boy;

  We’ve had girls before but we need some more

  In the Industrial Workers of the World,

  For it’s great to fight for freedom

  With a Rebel Girl.

  I. W. W. Songs

  It is all very well to state so categorically that a woman who seeks liberation ought not to marry, but if this implies that married women are a lost cause, any large-scale female emancipation would thereby be indefinitely postponed. The married woman without children can still retain a degree of bargaining power, on condition that she resolves not to be afraid of the threat of abandonment. The bargaining between married people generally works unevenly: the wife eventually finds that her life has changed radically, but not her husband’s. This state of affairs is by and large considered just: for example, a Home Office decision recently refused a woman the right to live in her country of origin because she had married an Indian and ‘it was customary for the woman to adopt her husband’s country of origin’.2 The same goes for her home town, or his workplace, his chosen domicile and his friends. The inequality in the give-and-take of marriage can best be explained by an emotional inequity at the heart of it, although in many cases this inequity is a bluff. Many men are almost as afraid of abandonment, of failing as husbands as their wives are, and a woman who is not terrified of managing on her own can manipulate this situation. It is largely a question of nerve. As the stirring of the female population grows, it ought to follow that various kinds of cooperative enterprise spring up to buttress the individual’s independence, although there are probably fewer women’s clubs and cooperative societies now than there were between the wars, if we consider the picture painted in Girls of Independent Means. The principal value in organizing is not the formation of a political front but the development of solidarity and mutual self-help, which can be useful on quite a small scale. Going home to mother is a pretty vapid ploy, because mother is usually difficult to live with, reproachful, conservative and tired of her children’s problems. Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own homes.

  The plight of mothers is more desperate than that of other women, and the more numerous the children the more hopeless the situation seems to be. And yet women with children do break free, with or without their offspring. Tessa Fothergill left her husband, taking her two children, and began the struggle to find a flat and a job on her own. She had so much difficulty that she decided to found an organization for women with her problems and called it Gingerbread. Another similar group already existed, called Mothers-in-Action.3 However slow the progress past official obstruction may be, it is easier accomplished together. Eventually a woman’s newspaper will be founded in which such groups could announce their formation and canvass for collaborators. Most women, because of the assumptions that they have formed about the importance of their role as bearers and socializers of children, would shrink at the notion of leaving husband and children, but this is precisely the case in which brutally clear rethinking must be undertaken. First of all, the children are not hers, they are not her property, although most courts strongly favour the mother’s claim against the father’s in custody cases. It is much worse for children to grow up in the atmosphere of suffering, however repressed, than it is for them to adapt to a change of regime. Their difficulty in adapting is itself evidence of the anti-social strengthening of the umbilical link, and it is probably better for the children in the long run to find out they do not have undisputed hold on mother. In any case, the situation ought to be explained because they always feel unease, and worry more about obscure possibilities than they do about facts. A wife who knows that if she leaves her husband she can only bring up the children in pauperdom, although she could support herself, must make a sensible decision, and reject out of hand the deep prejudice against the runaway wife. In many cases, the husband is consoled by being allowed to retain the children and can afford to treat them better with less anxiety than a woman could. He is more likely to be able to pay a housekeeper or a nanny than a woman is. And so forth. Behind the divorced woman struggling to keep her children there always looms the threat of ‘taking the children into care’ which is the worst of alternati
ves. A woman who leaves her husband and children could offer them alimony, if society would grant her the means.

  The essential factor in the liberation of the married woman is understanding of her condition. She must fight the guilt of failure in an impossible set-up, and examine the set-up. She must ignore interested descriptions of her health, her morality and her sexuality, and assess them all for herself. She must know her enemies, the doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, marriage counsellors, priests, health visitors and popular moralists. She must analyse her buying habits, her day-to-day evasions and dishonesties, her sufferings, and her real feelings towards her children, her past and her future. Her best aides in such an assessment are her sisters. She must not allow herself to be ridiculed and baffled by arguments with her husband, or to be blackmailed by his innocence of his part in her plight and his magnanimity in offering to meet her half-way in any ‘reasonable’ suggestion. Essentially she must recapture her own will and her own goals, and the energy to use them, and in order to effect this some quite ‘unreasonable’ suggestions, or demands, may be necessary.