![]() ![]() ![]() They were not expected to write about the things Greer wrote about. Bluestockings were not expected to look like this. So she challenged all sorts of preconceptions. She was also beautiful and six feet tall. Greer, by contrast, drew spicily and in depth on her own biology and experiences. But Simone de Beauvoir siphoned her more extreme autobiographical references into her novels. Of course, the author of an earlier feminist classic, The Second Sex, had also combined formal academic training with a tumultuous private life. Here was an evidently very clever female academic trained in the arts of rhetoric and polemic, with an armoury of literary and historical references, who was also explicitly sexual. What made the book a bestseller, though, was the multi-facetedness of its author. Even the arrangement of the text (choice quotations outlined in black breaking up pages at random) seemed novel. There were those brief, cumulatively hard-hitting chapters, and the irreverent, punchy writing style honed in underground journalism. But at the time, the book grabbed with its brilliance. Greer’s women seem often to lack a head and its contents, not just other body parts. In retrospect, you could argue this was a more apposite image than the artist intended. In my case, it was the famous paperback version, the one with a metallic trunk of a woman on the cover, hanging mutilated from a wardrobe rail. It is now almost thirty years since the publication of The Female Eunuch, and like most women of my age and background, I remember buying a copy. ![]()
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