Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, published in London in 1970 and an immediate international bestseller, made a sustained and provocative argument that women had been systematically deprived of their full energy, sexuality, and creative capacity by patriarchal culture — including the bodily disciplines of corseting, dieting, and the elaborate systems of feminine appearance. Greer's argument was more directly bodily than Friedan's, insisting that women's physical self-alienation — their distance from their own bodies — was the root of their oppression. The book sold over a million copies and was translated into thirteen languages.

The Female Eunuch arrived in the same year as the women's liberation marches in London and New York and provided feminist poetry with a new vocabulary of bodily reclamation. Greer's argument that women must reclaim their own bodies — their fat, their hair, their smells, their physical energy — fed directly into the confessional and bodily poetry of the 1970s. Her work was a direct influence on the feminist poetry community that gathered around publications including Spare Rib and Ms. magazine.