Germaine Greer Critical Essay | Critical Review by Claudia Dreifus

Critical Review by Claudia Dreifus

SOURCE: “The Selling of a Feminist,” in The Nation, June 7, 1971, pp. 728-9.

In the following review, Dreifus offers negative evaluation of The Female Eunuch, which she describes as “shallow, anti-woman, regressive.”

Early last year, when the high priests of publishing began to discover that their female readers were insatiably curious about the women's liberation idea, there was much discussion as to which of the bountiful crop of feminist authors would become the big femme lib superstar. Betty Friedan had no appeal for the literary lions—she was too old, too bourgeoise, too organization-conscious. Shulamith Firestone, the author of The Dialectic of Sex and organizer of New York Radical Feminists, was strikingly attractive; but alas, anti-love, perhaps even anti-men. Ti-Grace Atkinson, an advocate of extra-uterine birth, was considered too far out for a whirl through the major networks. For a while it seemed as if the brilliant and beautiful Kate...
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