The Female Eunuch QUOTES

1 " ...the consequences of militancy do not disappear when the need for militancy is over. Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

2 " Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

3 " The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

4 " Marriage cannot be a job as it has become. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

5 " Women's work, married or unmarried, is menial and low paid. Women's right to possess property is curtailed, more if they are married. How can marriage provide security? In any case a husband is a possession which can be lost or stolen and the abandoned wife of thirty odd with a couple of children is far more desolate and insecure in her responsibility than an unmarried woman with or without children ever could be. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

6 " The second class status of marriage became one of the principal issues in the Reformation. Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar, had barely posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg when he took himself a wife. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

7 " Women's magazines sadly remark that children can have a disruptive effect on the conjugal relationship, that the young wife's involvement with her children and her exhaustion can interfere with her husband's claims on her. What a notion- a family that is threatened by its children! Contraception has increased the egotism of the couple: planned children have a pattern to fit into; at least unplanned children had some of the advantages of contingency. First and foremost they were whether their parents liked it or not. In the limited nuclear family the parents are the principals and children are theirs to manipulate in a newly purposive way. The generation gap is being intensified in these families where children must not inconvenience their parents, where they are disposed of in special living quarters at special times of day, their own rooms and so forth. Anything less than this is squalor. Mother must not have more children than she can control: control means full attention for much of the day, then isolation. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

8 " English children have lost their innocence, for their first lessons have been in the exploitation of their adult slave. A sterilized parent is a eunuch in his children's harem
m. to be sure, I recognize that efficient contraception is necessary for sexual pleasure, and that sexual pleasure is necessary, but contraception for economic reasons is another matter. 'We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'. A sterilized parent is forever bound to those children he has, more than ever immobile and predictable, and those children are more securely bound to him. 'We can only afford two children' really means, 'We only like clean, well-discipline middle-class children who grow up to be professionals', for children manage to use up all the capital that is made available for that purpose, whatever proportion it may be of the family's whole income, just as housework expands to fill the time available. The sterilized parent is the ultimate domestic animal. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

9 " If women could regard childbearing not as a duty or an inescapable destiny but as a privilege to be worked for, the ay a man might work for the right to have a family, children might grow up without the burden of gratitude for the gift of life which they never asked for. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

10 " We could see that our mothers blackmailed us with self-sacrifice, even if we did not know whether or not they might have been great opera stars or toasts of the town if they had not borne us. In our intractable moments we pointed out that we had not asked to be born, or even to go to an expensive school. We knew that they must have had motives of their own for what they did with us and to us. The notion of our parents' self-sacrifice filled us not with gratitude but with confusion and guilt. We wanted them to be happy yet they were sad and deprived and it was our fault. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

11 " Now as before, women must refuse to be meek and guileful, for truth cannot be served by dissimulation. Women who fancy that they manipulate the world by pussy power and gentle cajolery are fools. It is slavery to have to adopt such tactics. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

12 " In the struggle to remain a complete person and to love from her fullness instead of her inadequacy a woman may appear hard. She may feel her early conditioning tugging her in the direction of surrender, but she ought to remember that she was originally loved for herself; she ought to hang on to herself and not find herself nagging, helpless, irritable and trapped. Perhaps I am not old enough yet to promise that the self-reliant woman is always loved, but she cannot be lonely as long as there are people in the world who need her joy and her strength, but certainly in my experience it has always been so. Lovers who are free to go when they are restless always come back; lovers who are free to change remain interesting. The bitter animosity and obscenity of divorce is unknown where individuals have not become Siamese twins. A lover who comes to your bed of his own accord is more likely to sleep with his arms around you all night than a lover who has nowhere else to sleep. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

13 " If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

14 " Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

15 " The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of femininity in the same way that the signs of independence and vigor in the rest of her body are suppressed. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

16 " In some ways the operation of the feminine stereotype is so obvious and for many women entirely unattainable, that it can be easily reacted against. It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along. Of course, a woman who goes her own way will find her conditioning is ineradicable, but she at least can recognize its operation and choose to counteract it, whereas a man might find that he was being more subtly deluded. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

17 " Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women’s bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them and their owners. Whether the curves imposed are the ebullient arabesques of the tit-queen or the attenuated coils of art nouveau, they are deformations of the dynamic, individual body, and limitations of the possibilities of being female. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

18 " Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

19 " As far as cosmetics are used for adornment in a conscious and creative way, they are not emblems of inauthenticity: it is when they are presented as the real thing, covering unsightly blemishes, disguising a repulsive thing so that it is acceptable to the world that their function is deeply suspect. The women who dare not go out without their false eyelashes are in serious psychic trouble. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch

20 " A housewife's work has no results: it simply has to be done again. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought up or not. "

― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch