The female's fate is to become deformed and debilitated by the destructive action of energy upon the self, because she is deprived of scope and contacts with external reality upon which to exercise herself.... It is exactly the element of quest in her sexuality which the female is taught to deny. She is not only taught to deny it in her sexual contacts, but... in all her contacts, from infancy onward, so that when she becomes aware of her sex the pattern has sufficient force of inertia to prevail over new forms of desire and curiosity. This is the condition which is meant by the term "female eunuch."

She goes on, for the umpteenth time in feminist literature, to trace the step-by-step development of girls into unhappy or "feminized" women ("Baby," "Girl," "Puberty," etc.). Feminist literature, perhaps in an attempt to get away from what has always been female dependence, often ends up repeating itself. Women get too wrapped up in their own way of saying things, trying to prove that they've psyched it out better than the others, and forget that their sisters have said the same thing just as well. Simone DeBeauvoir started this generation's plotting of the course of Where We Were Conditioned, and far too many have repeated it with only minor variations. It's time to get away from the comprehensive, this-says-it-all-book, and on to the specific issues.

Greer paints a bleaker picture of women's consciousness than we have become accustomed to. Several times she asserts that women prefer male doctors, which-at least in this community-is blatantly false. And her view of female friendships is dimmer than reality. "Those women who boast of their love for their own sex," she asserts, "usually have curious relations with it, intimate to the most extraordinary degree but disloyal, unreliable and tension-ridden, however close and longstanding they may be." Perhaps in her situation it's true, but for most of us here, the pattern has changed.

Her discussion of the American feminist movement is contained under the rubric of "bitter women [calling] you to rebellion." And her detailing of it shows little comprehension of the wide popularity of consciousness-raising groups which have done more than anything else to propagate the women's movement.

The most disturbing part of her, book is Greer's vision of the future. She acknowledges that it will be a struggle, but has a rosy vision of the ease with which all will be accomplished. While on one side she can describe the unhappy realities of the individual woman, when Greer looks at them in large numbers she launches into a Consciousness Three rap. "All literature, however vituperative, is an act of love, and all forms of electronic communication attest to the possibility of understanding," she sighs. Her call to revolution at the end of the book ranges from housewives leaving their husbands and children to "(using) even cooking, clothes, cosmetics and housekeeping for fun. ." You too can have fun washing the dishes and cooking the meals-not a word about maybe your husband helping. She hits on women as targets for advertising, and recommends that they form buying cooperatives. That's it on capitalism. She ends on a call to struggle-although heaven knows it's not to arms: "The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed."

What Greer has given us is a good guide to a revolution of our bodies. But beyond the excitement of the first 50 pages, and the repetition of the next 150, she becomes, regrettably, the Charles Reich of the feminist movement.