The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer Page B

and tiresome—So is business—Women’s work is not less than a man’s—What Ruskin says about the wife—Man’s success dependent upon woman—His health depends on his wife’s cooking
    —The fate of a nation may depend upon a wholesome meal—If both man and woman were in business life would lose much brightness—Woman makes social life— Moral life—Keeps man thinking—Values of home education—Daniel Webster’s table manners—Woman embroiders man’s life—Embroidery is to beautify—The embroidery of cleanliness—Of a smile—Of gentle words.
    Summary of Mary Wood-Allen, ‘What a Young Girl Ought to Know’, 1928
    (cited verbatim)

    the inclusion of these fatuous subjects in her regimen. Sitting in her absurd version of masculine uniform making sponge fingers with inky hands, she must really feel like the punching-bag of civilization. The pre-pubescent girl, however sluggish and confused she may seem to the disenchanted observer, is a passionate creature. The conflicts that she is daily and hourly suffering absorb much of her energy, but she still has enough left to thrill to stories of adventure and achievement and to identify with heroes, male and female alike. Her sexuality is fundamental to these responses, just as it is to her actual genital practices. In the primary school, one may find this excited interest in an innocent and open form, sometimes quite sensual. I remember being warmly kissed once on a visit to a school in Manchester by a horde of little girls and boys, who flung their arms around my neck and snuggled into my fur, pressing questions and gifts indiscriminately. The classes of eleven-and twelve-year- olds that I taught in Australia could generate extraordinary intensity which had its expression in lots of odd ways, sometimes in crushes and rapt idealism, and sometimes in peculiar and deflected experi- ments within the playground community. Sometimes they could perform wonders of orchestrated cooperation in presenting their little plays and projects, or devising ways to recognize a birthday or thwart the school administration. More often they flagged or fell to quarrelling. Most often the authorities intervened because the classes had got too noisy, or because school routine was in danger of disruption. Gradually the scope for embracing, experiencing and expression was being limited as the pattern of submission, rejection
    and all the rest that is meant by adaptation was imposed.
    It was remarkable that in view of the conflict and the relentless enculturation to which they were subjected, these girls retained so much of their childhood energy and love. Some of its expression was specifically sexual, as the psychologists are prepared to admit, although

    they insist that the pre-adolescent girl’s sexuality is masculine, clit- oral and so forth. 1 So they grossly misinterpret the typical adolescent
    passion for horses as a reflection of the immature girl’s penis envy. The horse between a girl’s legs is supposed to be a gigantic penis. What hooey! What the young rider feels is not that the horse is a projection of her own physical ego, but that it is an other which is responding to her control. What she feels is a potent love calling forth a response. The control required by riding is so strong and subtle that it hardly melts into the kind of diffuse eroticism that theorists like Dr Pearson would have us believe in. For many girls who are beginning to get the picture about the female role, horse- riding is the only opportunity they will ever have to use their strong thighs to embrace, to excite and to control. George Eliot knew what she was doing when she described Dorothea Brooke’s passion for wild gallops over the moors in Middlemarch . It is part and parcel of her desire to perform some great heroism, to be free and noble.
    Those little girls who wrote passionate love-letters to each other and to me in the schools where I taught had no conscious under- standing of their own