‘The most revolting ideas I’ve read in a woman’s magazine’: The Female Eunuch, Affective (dis)investments, and McCall’s reader-writers’

Abstract

In March 1971, American women’s magazine McCall’s published an extract of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Myriad unpublished letters to the editor contained in the Greer archive at the University of Melbourne reveal that the magazine’s readers were largely dismissive of Greer’s feminist vision. These reader-writers, best conceptualised as ‘anti-fans’, took both author and editor to task for criticising them as wives and mothers. Through an analysis of these letters, this article argues that their authors contested Greer’s burgeoning authority as a second-wave celebrity feminist largely by pathologising her; invoking essentialist assumptions about femininity; and mobilising discourses of ‘choice’ more commonly seen to be product of a ‘postfeminist’ representational environment. Through their anti-fan practices, they challenge Greer’s attempts to deprive housewives of agency, deploying rhetorical strategies that are at once reliant upon and highly critical of second-wave feminism. This article also problematises the notion that critically engaged audiences have emerged in any notable sense only recently due to digital media. Complicating dominant ways of framing the feminist past and the postfeminist present, this article demonstrates that celebrity feminists, including ‘blockbuster’ authors, have historically always elicited complex affective responses.