ABSTRACT
In a synopsis sent to her publisher outlining her plans for a ‘sensational’ book, Germaine Greer wrote:
If Eldridge Cleaver can write a book about the frozen soul of the negro, as part of the progress towards a correct statement of the coloured man’s problem, a woman must eventually take steps towards delineating the female condition as she finds it scored upon her sensibility. I know myself to be an anomaly, a lucky survival, but men, so is Cleaver: if he is a genius, a criminal, a delinquent only such a person who escapes from the glass mountain can describe it and pass the message on ….
The recent opening of the Greer archive at the University of Melbourne offers researchers new understanding of the transAtlantic orientation of The Female Eunuch and the inspirations and models provided by a range of contemporary radical male American writers, notably Eldridge Cleaver, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Norman Mailer. Greer’s papers contain pitches to the publisher, numerous drafts and revisions of her book proposal, summaries of the book’s contents, clues to its anticipated readers and towards the end of the process, a ‘dedication’. Drafts are partly handwritten, partly typed and combinations of these, amended and revised, all evolving, illuminating Greer’s chosen genre, discursive frames of reference and the motif of castration. The papers provide insight into The Female Eunuch’s defining analogy between the condition of woman and that of the ‘American Negro’ and illuminate media strategies that ensured the book became an iconic feminist text.