Some of the outstanding books in this series will be polemical and rhetorical as much as revolutionary. In the literature of gender identity, _The Female Eunuch _is already a classic, a

bestselling masterpiece of passionate free expression by a writer steeped in the English literary tradition. Australia's Germaine Greer, the woman who has described herself as "an

anarchist, basically", was captured in an _Observer _profile of 2003: "She has been in the business of shaking up a complacent establishment for nearly 40 years now, and was

employing the most elemental shock tactic of getting naked in public both long before and long after it ever crossed Madonna's mind. Indeed, she has never shied away from exposing

menopause, thereby leaving herself open to claims that she shamelessly extrapolates from her own condition to the rest of womankind and calls it a theory. She is the original mother of

reinvention." Greer is always her own best material. It's her voice that sets her work apart, and her inimitable tone – earthy erudition spliced with abrasive advocacy – that gives

_The Female Eunuch_ its unique narrative power. When he reviewed _The Female Eunuch_ in the _Observer_, Kenneth Tynan recognised this. He wrote that Greer "has converted me to

women's lib, as much by her bawdy sense of humour as by the bite of her polemic". From first publication, this liberating, sometimes intimidating, book soon became mythologised. As

a revolutionary manifesto, there are many things it's not: principally, it's not about sexual equality for women of the world, though that may have been a message her readers took

away. Greer's explicit liberation struggle focuses on the self, not the collective. She wants a new society in which women write their own script, set their own agenda, and make their

own deep personal choices. The "women" Greer addresses are not the majority of womenkind – she concedes that she does not "know" poor people – but people like herself,

university graduates, the comparatively privileged members of the western democracies. The books her work complements are Betty Friedan's _The Feminine Mystique _and Kate Millett's

_Sexual Politics_, both of which are less accessible, and more earnestly part of the women's movement in its early days. From that springboard Greer, the self-confessed

"anarchist" (elsewhere, a "privileged escapee"), was able to vault over a lot of tedious barricade-building before establishing her own risky and raucous front line in

the sex wars of the late 20th century. Greer herself was under no illusions about her place in the maelstrom of socio-cultural change that exploded around her in the late 1960s. Her work,

she declared on the first page of _The Female Eunuch_, was just "part of the second feminist wave". This, for some, was about the forging of a classless society and the withering

away of the state. Not Greer. Where once, in suffragette days, genteel middle-class ladies had clamoured for reform, the Greer of circa 1970 wanted one thing: freedom. "Freedom to be a

person, with the dignity, integrity, nobility, passion, and pride that constitute personhood. Freedom to run, shout, to talk loudly and sit with your knees apart." In retrospect,

perhaps disingenuously, she hoped her book would "quickly date and disappear" as the feminist revolution swept all before it. The movement, of course, did no such thing, and

Greer's bright hopes for "a new breed of women" for whom her analysis of "sex oppression in the developed world in the second half of the 20th century would be utterly

irrelevant" still remain unfulfilled. But the temptation now to read _The Female Eunuch_ as outmoded, suffering the fate of all polemical literature, would be to overlook its staying

power as an inspiring beacon amid a hurricane of social change. The incandescent energy that promoted _The Female Eunuch's _ecstatic iconoclasm, especially to the new generation of the

1970s, came from a young woman who was just 31 on publication, craving freedom from the suffocations and cruelties of patriarchy, freedom from condescension, casual humiliation and abuse.

Greer's was a manifesto for a showdown with the opposite sex. "Most of the women in the world," she writes, "are still afraid, still hungry, still mute and loaded by

religion with all kinds of fetters, masked, muzzled, mutilated and beaten". However, the argument she makes about female submission in a patriarchal society is framed in terms of

"liberation", not "equality". Despite occasional references to the new left, there is a striking absence of class war in _The Female Eunuch_. She opens with a section on

the body, because it is impossible, she declares, "to argue a case for female liberation if there is no certainty about the degree of inferiority or natural dependence which is

unalterably female... We know what we are, but know not what we may be, or what we might have been." Juxtaposed with the body is not the mind, as one might expect, but the soul, which

is enslaved to the subtle tyranny of all-pervasive male fantasies, anatomised in a passionate sequence entitled "the stereotype". It's here that the narrative and many of its

more fervent declarations ("I am sick of the Powder Room") now read like a first draft for its author's autobiography, and sometimes even like a fragment of literary

criticism. The second half of _The Female Eunuch_ delves first into love (and its paradoxes), and then segues, with the decibels rising, into hate ("women have very little idea of how

much men hate them"). Greer's chapter on abuse is prescient and literary, devolving into a brilliant passage of linguistic analysis leavened with quotations from _King Lear_, Frank

Zappa and Schopenhauer. This, unequivocally, is a book of its time and its place, a book whose subject young Dr Greer would have debated in many Cambridge postgraduate seminars during the

1960s. _The Female Eunuch _closes with a call to arms, a passionate but vague appeal for revolution, a rhetorical flourish which must, to any committed 21st century feminist, seem almost

comically thin. "The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women must take," instructs Greer in her closing pages, "is joy in the struggle". What might that be

? "Revolution," she declares, "is the festival of the oppressed. For a long time there may be no perceptible reward for women other than their new sense of purpose and

integrity. Joy does not mean riotous glee, but it does mean the purposive employment of energy in a self-chosen enterprise." These words might almost be a definition of Germaine

Greer's subsequent career path. Social earthquakes of any consequence have their absurdities and confusions. Going over the top is part of every revolutionary's job description.

The radical feminism of the 1970s has worn about as well as the radical socialism that preceded the Thatcher counter-revolution, which is to say: quite badly. Nevertheless women's lib,

combined with the new left, did achieve lasting social and cultural change. _The Female Eunuch _was one of many catalysts in that ferment, with Germaine Greer its merry, and dazzling

provocateur, a mischievous hybrid of lab assistant and sorcerer's apprentice. Nearly 50 years on, who could not find it in their hearts to salute the queen of such revels? A SIGNATURE

SENTENCE "The first significant discovery we shall make as we racket along our female road to freedom is that men are not free, and they will seek to make this an argument why nobody

should be free." THREE TO COMPARE Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique (1963) Kate Millett: Sexual Politics (1970) Germaine Greer: The Whole Woman (1999)