The Female Eunuch in the Suburbs: Reflections on Adolescence, Autobiography, and History-Writing

In 1972, age sixteen, I read Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970). I was living in my family home in Bardon, a relatively homogeneous suburb of Brisbane, Australia, rendered gracious by well-mown lawns, hilly views, and homemade swings in mango trees. The Female Eunuch’s cover featured a raunchy, barebreasted female torso with handles on hips, hanging on a coathanger. With a cover as affronting as its title, the Eunuch entered a turbulent household where several books had already been confiscated, and where explosive conflicts regularly ensued between parents and eldest child, myself. I was foolhardy, adventurous, and confrontational, but often emotionally wrenched and exhausted from wild arguments. In many ways, I was the typical adolescent-a narcissistic child-adult, moods seesawing from smug confidence and self-righteousness to uncertainty and powerlessness. Heightened by a wider phenomenom dubbed “the generation gap,” their limited secondary education, and an unquestioning Catholicism, my parents understood the changes going on in the world as evil and dangerous. In the parental home during my Senior year, I fought a hopeless battle for physical and intellectual freedoms, foolishly attempting to fast-track my parents into new ways of thinking. Miss Coburn, my lovably dowdy history teacher, recommended Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Departing from the approved syllabus, her reading list also included Richard Neville’s Play Power and Alexander’s Summer Hill, about alternative education. She told us that Greer would help us understand the women’s liberation movement and ‘the permissive society,” a phenomenom we were studying in
Modem History. All Hallows, a Catholic girls’ school perched high on a hill in a part of the city known as “the Valley,” shared its altitude with a huge bridge straddling the Brisbane River. A brewery across the road intermittently filled the air with the pungent odors of hops and malt. The school’s fortress-like entrance, its imposing, reputedly convict-built walls, and its ludicrously lengthy rulebook, engendered the nickname “All Gallows.”