Sexual Liberation

Feminist Literature, 1970

Unlimited freedom to imitate bonobos and chimpanzees without the crushing oppression of morality.

The father of the Sexual Revolution is undoubtedly Freud and his theories of female sexual repression. Two other factors are highly prominent: Kinsey’s research in the 1940s, and the invention of the contraceptive pill in 1960. However, the undoubted epicentre of the issue’s politicisation was Germaine Greer’s 1970 polemic “The Female Eunuch” in which she argued the nuclear family represses women sexually and turns them into “eunuchs”. Greer later went on to reverse a lot of her stance and was banned by her own proteges.