The Female Eunuch

Written in 1991, this Foreword to the 21st-anniversary edition is a short re-visitation of the work by Greer. She acknowledges that there are more opportunities for women to learn and determine their own identities in 1991 than there were in 1970, but she maintains the crux of her original argument: Women are not truly free because the systems of oppression that regulate them are largely still intact. Expansion of rights does not guarantee freedom if the system that grants the rights is based on inequality. Greer laments the falling of the Soviet Union and failure of communism because it indicates a triumph for capitalism—one of the primary systems of oppression that limits women through the exclusionary practices of privatization.

Greer begins the book by summarizing her main points and outlining its organization. She situates this book as a work of second-wave feminism, both to distance her beliefs from those of first-wave feminists and to highlight her radical feminist stance.

There are five main parts in this book: “Body,” “Soul,” “Love,” “Hate,” and “Revolution.” The work begins with “Body” to illuminate the depth of oppression that women face. The second part, “Soul,” defines “the dominant image of femininity which rules our culture and to which all women aspire” (18), a concept Greer calls the “Eternal Feminine.