The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

from external reality is reinforced by the punishments she gets for wandering off on her own. While little boys are forming groups and
    gangs to explore or terrorize the district, 9 she is isolated at home,

    listening to tales of evil-minded strangers. Her comparative incarcer- ation is justified in the name of protection, although the home is the most dangerous place there is. She is taught to fear and distrust the world at large, for reasons which are never clearly stated. As a form of forearming this forewarning is notoriously unsuccessful. Sexual desires are not so lacking in resource that they cannot attack little girls as they go upon those errands and journeys that are sanctioned by Mother. When a little girl who missed her bus rang her mother from the bus-stop one evening, so spending the sixpence that would have been her fare for the next one, her mother told her to walk home because she didn’t have the car. The child went on her way weeping and terrified, and was accosted by a smiling stranger who abducted, raped and strangled her. The commonest result of the dark warning system is that when little girls do meet an exhibitionist or do happen to talk to a stranger who does something odd to them, they are too frightened and guilty, as well as too worried about the effect on their parents, even to tell them. It is a contributing factor in the pattern of child violation that little girls think of themselves as victims, and cannot even summon the energy to scream or run away. Because they are prevented from understanding the threat, they can have no adequate defence. The bitterest irony is that the child violators are themselves products of the same clumsy condi- tioning.
    While little boys are learning about groups and organizations, as well as the nature of the world outside their homes, little girls are at home, keeping quiet, playing with dolls and dreaming, or helping Mother. At school they use their energy to suppress themselves, to be good and keep quiet, and remember what they are hearing and doing. At home they perform meaningless physical rituals, with no mental activity attached to them. So the sensual and intellectual are even more widely separated in them than they are in their brothers. If the sensual retains its hold. they prefer to work with their hands,

    cooking, sewing, knitting, following a pattern designed by someone else. The designers, the master-cooks and the tailors are men. If women become ‘intellectuals’ they are disenfranchised of their bodies, repressed, intense, inefficient, still as servile as ever. Some geniuses have broken right through the chain reaction and have seen it for what it was, but most creative women bear the stamp of futility and confusion even in their best work. Virginia Woolf saw some of the way, but it cost her too much; George Eliot was one of the few who burst right through her straitjacket. The difference may have been one of the energy of the psyche, or of intelligence, or simply that Eliot was plain and Virginia was graceful and lovely. Whatever the case, the foundations of the conflict were laid in their infancy.

    Girl

    I would not be doing justice to girls if I were to imply that they ac- cepted all their enculturation without a struggle. The heaviness of maternal pressure in little girls to be neat and sneaking is very often met with the same degree of resistance. The growing girl may refuse to keep her room neat, may insist on mucking about with boyish affairs, even to the extent of joining a male group and fighting to maintain her place in it by being twice as tough as any of the boys. She may lose all her hankies and hair-ribbons, rip her knickers climbing trees, and swear and swagger with the best of them. This

    A girl whose spirits have not been dampened by inactivity, or innocence tainted by false shame, will always
    be a romp…
    Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792, p.87

    is patronizingly referred to as going