The Female Eunuch

by Germaine Greer

  3f. See Gray’s Anatomy (op. cit.), pp. 402—7.

  4. Evidence for the slighter differentiation in pelvic formation among primitive or hard-working women can be derived from Ploss and Bartels, who cite for example Hennig’s ‘Das Rassenbecken’, from Archaeologie für Anthropologisten (1885—6), Vol. 16, pp. 161—228.

  CURVES

  1. Broby-Johansen’s Body and Clothes (London, 1969) is the fullest account to date of the interaction between body, self-image and clothing, including the shifting of the erogenous zones and the siting of fat.

  2. Sophie Lazarsfeld, The Rhythm of Life (London, 1934), p. 158.

  3. Pauline Reage, The Story of O (Traveller’s Companion, Paris, 1965), p. 18 and passim. Thorstein Veblen offers a sociological explanation of curves as signifying luxury and debility in The Theory of the Leisure Class (London, 1899), pp. 141-6.

  4. Kenneth Tynan, ‘The Girl who turned her Back’, Mayfair, Vol. 4, No. 3, March 1969.

  5. This eulogy of fat from Ploss and Bartels (op. cit., p. 86) reveals just how important it must have been to our grandfathers:

  There is something alien and repellent in very angular and flat surfaces in women, such as appear among certain primitive races owing to overwork and poor living at an age when European women are still in the prime of life.

  The adipose layer may be considered a most important secondary sexual character in women. It produces the tapering roundness of the limbs, the curves of the throat, nape and shoulders, the swelling of bosom and curving roundness of buttocks; all the characteristic signs of womanhood. This adipose layer also produces the smooth cushioned shape of the knee which differs so from the masculine form. And the massive roundness (which sometimes appears disproportionate) of the upper thigh in women, tapering rapidly towards the smooth dimpled knee, is caused by the same fatty layer.

  HAIR

  1. The assumption that women grew much more hair on their heads than men was almost universal. Bichat (op. cit., Vol. II, p. 446) even goes so far as to say ‘one might think that nature had thus compensated the fair sex for their deficiency in many other parts’. Cf. The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher (London, 1779), p. 374. While baldness is a sex-linked characteristic, it is not proper to maintain that women do not go bald. The intensity of the sexual prejudice has resulted in the utter concealment of female baldness, which is much commoner than is generally supposed.

  SEX

  1. E.g. Samuel Collins, Systema Anatomicum (London, 1685), p. 566, and Palfijn’s Surgical Anatomy (London, 1726), plates facing pages 226 and 227, also his Description Anatomique des Parties de la Femme (Paris, 1708, the plates are not numbered) and Spigelius, De humani corporis Fabrica (1627), Tab. XVII, Lib. VIII, and Les Portraits Anatomiques of Vesalius (1569), and the Tabulae Anatomicae of Eustachius (1714).

  2. A Pleasant new Ballade Being a merry Discourse between a Country Lass and a young Taylor, c. 1670.

  3. The High-prized Pin-Box. Tune of, Let every Man with Cap in’s Hand etc., c. 1665.

  4. Samuel Collins (op. cit.), pp. 564—5.

  5. Theodore Faithfull answering correspondence in International Times No. 48, 17—30 January 1969.

  6. A. H. Kegel, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 153, 1953, pp. 1303—4. His work is discussed by Daniel G. Brown in ‘Female Orgasm and Sexual Inadequacy’, An Analysis of Human Sexual Response, ed. Ruth and Edward Brecher (London, 1968), pp. 163—4.

  7. Mette Eiljersen, I Accuse! (London, 1969), p. 45.

  8. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (London, 1969), pp. 52—3.

  9. Jackie Collins, The World is Full of Married Men (London, 1969), pp. 152—3.

  THE WICKED WOMB

  1. One such book, written by a lady doctor to introduce girls to menstruation, is Erna Wright’s Periods without Pain (London, 1966); the grim diagrams she employs do not even show the clitoris, nor is it mentioned in the text.

  2. The ancient fear of the womb has been discussed at length by H. R. Hays in The Dangerous Sex: The Myth of Feminine Evil (London, 1966).

  3. Cf. the comments by Daniel G. Brown (loc. cit., pp. 148-9) on the necessity of women’s taking over the study of their own sexuality.

  4. Bisshof’s Observations and Practices Relating to Women in Travel etc. (London, 1676), p. 76.

  5. Chlorosis has been described as ‘an anaemic condition seen in young women and girls and thought to have been due to tight corsets, constipation, frequent pregnancies, poor hygiene and diet’. (The British Medical Dictionary, ed. Sir Arthur Salusbury McNalty, London, 1961.) It was as often thought by popular medicine to have been caused by the frustration of the virgin’s desire to couple and bear children, vide The Works of Aristotle in Four Parts (London, 1822), pp. 21-2. In fact it had been associated with iron deficiency by Baverius in the fourteenth century, but the connection with virginity obscured the issue for theorists like Johan Lange who wrote a treatise on the virgins’ illness in 1554. In 1730, Hoffmann further complicated the issue by connecting it with hysteria. Learned studies demonstrated its prevalence in boarding schools and among female students generally, and it was even connected with a heart condition at one stage. (See An Introduction to the History of Medicine by Fielding H. Garrison, Philadelphia, 1929, pp. 167, 207, 271, 314, 360, 571, 647.) Nowadays it is generally agreed that no definable disease called chlorosis exists.

  6. The bibliography of hysteria is enormous, from Hippocrates Liber Prior de morbis mulierum of which a version by Cordeus appeared in 1583, and In Libellum Hippocrates de Virginum Morbis of Tardeus (1648). The affliction was a popular and lucrative specialization. Many young doctors chose to write about it in Latin dissertations. British Museum T.559 contains thirty-odd tracts dating between 1668 and 1796 which may serve as examples of the way in which heterogeneous symptoms were lumped together under the blanket of hysteria.

  7. Ploss and Bartels (op. cit.), Vol. I, pp. 611—31, ‘The Seclusion of Girls at Menstruation’.

  8. Sylvia Plath’s poetry is a monument to woman strangled in phylogenetic toils. Her imagery builds fantastic structures of female carnality obsessed with the dream of violation and death. Some of the dominant motifs and the basic tensions are illustrated by her short poem, ‘Metaphors’:

  I am a riddle in nine syllables,

  An elephant, a ponderous house,

  A melon strolling on two tendrils,

  A red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!

  This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.

  Money’s new minted in this fat purse.

  I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.

  I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,

  Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

  (The Colossus, London, 1960, p. 41)

  THE STEREOTYPE

  1. Thorstein Veblen (op. cit.,) passim.

  2. E.g.

  I thought my mistress’ hairs were gold,

  And in her locks my heart I fold:

  Her amber tresses were the sight

  That wrapped me in vain delight;

  Her ivory front, her pretty chin,

  Were stales that drew me on to sin;

  Her starry looks, her crystal eyes

  Brighter than the sun’s arise.

  (Robert Greene, Francesco’s Fortunes)

  3. E.g.

  When I admire the rose,

  That Nature makes repose

  In you the best of many,

  And see how curious art

  Hath decked every part,

  I think with doubtful view

  Whether you be the rose or the rose be you.

  (Thomas Lodge, William Longbeard)

  4. E.g.

  Her cheeks like apples which the sun hath rudded,

  Her lips like cherries charming men to bite,

  Her breast like to a bowl of cream uncrudded…

  (Edmund Spenser, Epithalamion)

  5. E.g.

  The outside of her garments were of lawn,
<
br />   The lining purple silk, with gilt stars drawn,

  Her wide sleeves green and bordered with many a grove…

  Buskins of shells all silvered used she

  Branched with blushing coral to the knee,

  Where sparrows perched, of hollow pearl and gold,

  Such as the world would wonder to behold;

  Those with sweet water oft her handmaid fills,

  Which as she went would chirrup through the bills.

  It is only proper to point out that in this passage Marlowe is setting Hero up as a foil to the natural beauty of Leander, beloved of the gods, who is presented quite naked. Hero as a stereotype might be considered one of the themes of the poem.

  6. Corbett v Corbett (otherwise Ashley) before Mr Justice Ormerod (Law Report, 2 February 1970, Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division). News of the World, 8 February 1970, Sunday Mirror, 3, 8, 15 February 1970.

  ENERGY

  1. Carl Vogt, ‘La Question de la Femme’, Revue d’An-thropologie, 1888, Tome III, fasc. lv, pp. 510—12, quoted in Ploss and Bartels (op. cit.), Vol. I, p. 126

  2. Vide ‘Sublimation: its Nature and Conditions’ in J. C. Flügel, Studies in Feeling and Desire (London, 1955).

  3. The traditional view is expounded by McCary in The Psychology of Personality (London, 1959), pp. 7—9.

  4. S. Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality, The Standard Edition of The Complete Works (London, 1953), Vol. vii, p. 219.

  BABY

  1. William Blake, ‘Infant Sorrow’, Songs of Experience (Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, London, 1967, henceforward referred to as Nonesuch, p. 76).

  2. Sunday Mirror, 19 October 1969.

  3. William Blake, ‘Infant Joy’, Songs of Innocence (Nonesuch, p. 62).

  4. For an explanation of the principle see Paul Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energies of the Psyche (London, 1935), pp. 120—22 and Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (London, 1968), Part IV, ‘The Self and the Other; Narcissus’ (pp. 46—57).

  5. Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood (London, 1936), p. 191.

  6. Freud notes this phenomenon in New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis (Complete Works, Vol. xxii, p. 117). The expounders of feminine wiles boast of it, e.g. M. Esther Harding, The Way of all Women (London, 1932), p. 7, and Mary Hyde, How to Manage Men (London, 1955), p. 6.

  7. Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (London, 1969), p. 125.

  8. J. Dudley Chapman, The Feminine Mind and Body (New York, 1967), quotes Oscar Hammerstein II, ‘You can have fun with a son, but you gotta be a father to a girl’ (Carousel), p. 19.

  9. Vide Anna Anastasi, Differential Psychology (London), and Walter Wood, Children’s Play and its Place in Education (London, 1913), pp. 83-4.

  GIRL

  1. Vide Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology (London, 1967), pp. 40-42, also Cap. II ‘The Flight from Womanhood’ passim. Cf. Margaret Mead, Male and Female (London, 1949), p. 144.

  2. Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women (London, 1946, 1947), Vol. I, pp. 7, 22. Deutsch even goes so far as to state that the greatest danger to her uncontrollable girl patients was that they should unconsciously provoke the lust of their male companions because ‘they have no sexual urge, they desire no sexual gratification and because of the absence of desire they feel secure’ (p. 42).

  PUBERTY

  1. Deutsch (op. cit.), pp. 136—7, cf. Horney (op. cit.), pp. 100-101 and Lewis M. Terman, Genetic Studies of Genius (London, 1936), Vol. III, pp. 93—4.

  2. J. Dudley Chapman (op. cit.), p. 69.

  3. James Hemming, Problems of Adolescent Girls (London, 1950), pp. 93-4.

  4. Ibid., p. 130.

  5. A. C. Kinsey, W. B. Pomeroy, C. E. Martin and P. H. Gebhard, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (Philadelphia, 1953), p. 173.

  6. Hemming (op. cit.), p. 15.

  7. Horney (op. cit.), p. 234.

  8. Ibid, p. 244.

  9. John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (1686—7), edited and annotated by James Britten (London, 1881), p. 153.

  THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SELL

  1. August Strindberg, The Father, Act II, Sc. vii. Although he is patently ill-served by his wife’s superstition and incomprehension of his work, the Captain still imagines that there was once a good old time when ‘one married a wife’ and enjoyed ‘sensual love’ and not a business partnership.

  2. Naomi Weisstein, ‘Kinder, Kuche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology reconstructs the Female’, Motive, March—April 1969, pp. 78—85.

  3. Ibid., p. 80.

  4. Ian Suttie, The Origins of Love and Hate (London, 1935), p. 221.

  5. Ernest Jones, ‘The Early Development of Female Sexuality’ in Papers on Psychoanalysis (London, 1948), p. 438.

  6. S. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (op. cit.), p. 219 (my ital.).

  7. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (op. cit.), p. 121.

  8. S. Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents: Complete Works (op. cit.), p. 144.

  9. Deutsch (op. cit.), Vol. I, p. 101.

  10. Horney (op. cit.), pp. 232—3.

  11. Deutsch (op. cit.), p. 151.

  12. Bruno Bettelheim, ‘Women and the Scientific Professions’, MIT Symposium on American Women in Science and Engineering, 1965.

  13. E. Erikson, ‘Inner and Outer Space: Reflections on Womanhood’, Daedalus, 1964, No. 93, pp. 582—606.

  14. Joseph Rheingold, The Fear of Being a Woman (New York, 1964).

  15. J. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (London, 1893), p. 13, cf. Margaret Mead (op. cit.), pp. 209—10:

  The human female who has learned through a long childhood education to value a great variety of rewards, and fear a great variety of punishments, finds that her receptivity—although perhaps retaining a slight degree of periodicity—is actually subject to a great deal of modulation. Where receptivity requires so much less of her—merely a softening and relaxing of her whole body, and none of the specific readiness and sustained desire that is required of the male—she can learn to fit a simple compliancy together with a thousand other considerations of winning and keeping a lover or a husband, balancing the mood of the moment against the mood of tomorrow, and fitting her receptivity into the whole pattern of a relationship. There seems little doubt that the man who has learned various mechanical ways to stimulate his sexual specificity in order to copulate with a woman whom he does not this moment desire is doing far more violence to his nature than the female who needs only to receive a male to whom she gives many other assents, but possibly not active desire.

  16. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (London, 1969), p. 20.

  THE RAW MATERIAL

  1. Eleanor Maccoby, The Development of Sex Differences (London, 1967), passim, especially the ‘Classified Summary of Research in Sex Differences’, (pp. 323—51).

  2. Lewis M. Terman, Genetic Studies of Genius (op. cit.), p. 294.

  3. Maccoby (op. cit.), p. 35.

  4. Ibid., pp. 36, 37.

  5. Ibid., p. 44.

  WOMANPOWER

  1. See Mary Ellman, Thinking About Women (London, 1969), passim. Mailer explains his concept of the novel as the Great Bitch and how women cannot be said to get a piece of her in ‘Some Children of the Goddess’, Cannibals and Christians (London, 1969), p. 132.

  2. The term is culled from Cynthia Ozick ‘The Demise of the Dancing Dog’, Motive, March—April 1969.

  3. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (London, 1906), p. 236.

  4. Ibid., p. 241.

  5. Ibid., p. 250.

  6. Valerie Solanas, S.C.U.M. Manifesto (New York, 1968), p. 73.

  7. Weininger (op. cit.), p. 274. The claim that deceitful-ness is a secondary sexual characteristic of the female mind has been made by many observers, including feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft who saw it as an essential consequence of female degradation and B. L. Hutchins, Conflicting Ideals: Two Sides of the Woman Question (London, 1913), ‘Girl
s have been brought up on intensely insincere ideals’ (p. 30).

  8. Weininger (op. cit.), p. 100. The assumptions that women perceive differently from men, are subjective rather than men and so on, despite the failure of testing to indicate any justification for them, are taken on trust by psychologists who deal with femininity. Deutsch luxuriates in extolling the value of women’s subjective, intuitive perception as the desirable complement to male objectivity and mental aggression.

  9. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, Selected Essays (London, 1958), pp. 287—8.

  10. Antonin Artaud, ‘Letters to Anaïs Nin’ translated by Mary Beach, International Times, No. 16. Letter of 14 or 15 June, 1933.

  11. This quotation appears in Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage (London, 1967) ascribed to A. N. Whitehead, and a book called Adventures of Ideas. I cannot recall seeing it in Adventures of Ideas but it does catch the drift of much that Whitehead did say, e.g. ‘The Anatomy of Some Scientific Ideas’ in The Organization of Thought (London, 1917), pp. 134—90 passim, or Science and the Modern World (Cambridge, 1927) Cap. v, ‘The Romantic Reaction’ (pp. 93—118) passim, or indeed Adventures of Ideas (Cambridge, 1933), pp. 150—51, 173, 184—5.

  12. Weininger (op. cit.), p. 149.

  13. J. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge, 1954), Vol. II, p. 58.

  14. S. Freud, Some Psychic Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes, Complete Works, Vol. xix, pp. 257—8.

  15. Weininger (op. cit.), p. 146.

  16. Ibid. p. 186.

  17. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (op. cit.), p. 145.

  18. Ibid., p. 276.

  19. Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York, 1966), p. 80.

  20. Weininger (op. cit.), p. 198.

  21. Edward de Bono, The Uses of Lateral Thinking (London, 1967), p. 31, cf. A. N. Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (London, 1911), p. 138 and William James, Some Problems in Philosophy, Cap. X.

  22. 22. Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs (London, 1969), p. 160.

  23. 23. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (Edinburgh, 1945), p. 23.

  WORK

  1. Unless otherwise stated statistics in this section are drawn from the Annual Abstract of Statistics, No. 105, 1968.