The Female Eunuch
Greer's passionate polemic argued that women had been castrated of their true nature (their sexuality, their anger, their full personhood) by patriarchal society. More electric and provocative than The Feminine Mystique, it set the tone for the radicalism of second-wave feminism.
The sweeping generalizations about women and men as monolithic categories erase class and race under one universal experience, and the verdict from unsympathetic readers is blunt: “dated, elitist, racist, homophobic.” The passages on homosexuality and gender read as flatly offensive now. The Freudian and pseudo-anthropological scaffolding has not held up, and a critic calls the result a “fitful, passionate, scattered text,” elsewhere “myopic, complacent and resentful.” The opening Body chapters and the closing revolutionary politics are where readers stall. Defenders answer the datedness by saying “you aren't a part of that time,” while the harshest simply want it “trash that it is, suitably disposed of.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
