Germaine Greer (Melbourne, 29 January 1939) Australian Anarchist writer

Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer (/ɡrɪər/; born 29 January 1939) is an  and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminist movement in the latter half of the 20th century. She lives in the United Kingdom, where she has held academic positions, specializing in English literature, at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge.
Greer's ideas have created controversy ever since her first book, The Female Eunuch (1970), made her a household name. An international bestseller and a watershed text in the feminist movement, the book offered a systematic deconstruction of ideas such as womanhood and femininity, arguing that women are forced to assume submissive roles in society to fulfill male fantasies of what being a woman entails.
Her work since then has focused on literature, feminism and the environment. Later books include Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984), The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991), The Whole Woman (1999), Shakespeare's Wife (2007), and White Beech: The Rainforest Years (2013). She owns and finances Stump Cross Books, which publishes the work of 17th- and 18th-century women poets. She has also been a columnist for several publications, including The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Independent, and The Oldie.
Greer is a liberation rather than equality feminist. Her goal is not equality with men, which she sees as assimilation and "agreeing to live the lives of unfree men". "Women's liberation," she wrote in The Whole Woman (1999), "did not see the female's potential in terms of the male's actual." She argues instead that liberation is about asserting difference and "insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self-determination". It is a struggle for the freedom of women to "define their own values, order their own priorities and decide their own fate".

Early life and education

Greer was born in Melbourne, the eldest of three children (two girls and a boy), to South African-born Eric Reginald (Reg) Greer and Margaret (Peggy) Mary Lafrank. Peggy, a milliner, had married Reg in March 1937; he was a newspaper advertising representative who had served as a wartime RAAF officer. Greer was raised in the suburb of Sandringham, near the beach, attending St Columba's Catholic Primary School in Elwood from February 1943, then Sacred Heart Parish School, Sandringham, and Holy Redeemer School, Ripponlea. In 1952 she won a scholarship to Star of the Sea College in Gardenvale, a convent school run by the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary; a school report called her "a bit of a mad-cap and somewhat erratic in her studies and in her personal responses". She gave up the Catholic faith a year after leaving school, as a result of finding the nuns' arguments for the existence of God unconvincing. According to Greer, her mother had what was probably Asperger syndrome, and as a result they had a difficult relationship. Greer left home because of it when she was 18. In 2012 she said that her brother might have forgiven her for "abandoning" them, but she was not so sure about her sister, "whom I love more than anyone else on earth".
From 1956 Greer attended the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1959 with a BA in English and French language and literature. After graduation she moved to Sydney, where she became involved with the Sydney Push and the anarchist Sydney Libertarians. "[T]hese people talked about truth and only truth," she said, "insisting that most of what we were exposed to during the day was ideology, which was a synonym for lies—or bullshit, as they called it." In 1963 she was awarded a first-class MA in romantic poetry from the University of Sydney for a thesis entitled The Development of Byron's Satiric Mode. The thesis won her a Commonwealth Scholarship, which she used to fund her doctorate, arriving in 1964 at Newnham College, Cambridge, a women-only college. Lisa Jardine recalled the first time she met Greer, at a formal dinner in college:

The principal called us to order for the speeches. As a hush descended, one person continued to speak, too engrossed in her conversation to notice, her strong Australian accent reverberating around the room. At the graduates' table, Germaine was explaining that there could be no liberation for women, no matter how highly educated, as long as we were required to cram our breasts into bras constructed like mini-Vesuviuses ... The willingly suffered discomfort of the Sixties bra, she opined vigorously, was a hideous symbol of male oppression. ... [We were] astonished at the very idea that a woman could speak so loudly and out of turn and that words such as "bra" and "breasts"—or maybe she said "tits"—could be uttered amid the pseudo-masculine solemnity of a college dinner.

Greer joined the student acting company, the Cambridge Footlights in October 1964, on the same day as Clive James and Russell Davies. She was billed in 1965 as the first woman to be granted full membership. She received her PhD in 1969 for a thesis entitled The Ethic of Love and Marriage in Shakespeare's Early Comedies.

Career

Greer worked as an assistant lecturer at the University of Warwick from 1968 to 1972, living at first in a rented bedsit in Leamington Spa. In 1968 she was married for the first and only time, a marriage that ended in divorce in 1973. She met Paul du Feu, an English graduate who was working as a builder, outside a pub in Portobello Road, London, and married him after a brief courtship at Paddington Register Office, using a ring from a pawn shop. The marriage lasted only a few weeks; Greer wrote that she spent their wedding night in an armchair, because her husband, drunk, would not allow her in bed. She said she had been unfaithful to him several times. Du Feu later married and divorced Maya Angelou.
She began writing columns for Oz magazine, owned by Australian writer Richard Neville, whom she had met at a party in Sydney. The magazine's July 1970 edition, OZ 29, featured "Germaine Greer knits private parts," an article on the hand-knitted Keep it Warm Cock Sock, "a snug corner for a chilly prick". As Rose Blight she wrote a gardening column for Private Eye. She was also co-founder and editor of the Amsterdam underground magazine Suck, which published a full-page photograph of her "stripped to the buff, looking at the lens through [her] thighs". Her articles for Suck included one entitled "I Am a Whore".

External media

Images
Germaine Greer, c. 1971, photographed by Terence Hill.
Greer's Vietnamese press pass, 24 November 1971.
Video
"This House Supports the Women's Liberation Movement", Greer and William F. Buckley Jr., The Cambridge Union, 1973.[e]

The Female Eunuch was published in October 1970, launched at a party attended by editors from Oz. Arguing that the suburban, consumerist, nuclear family represses and devitalizes women, the book became an international bestseller and a watershed text in the feminist movement. The following year Greer appeared on the cover of Life magazine, under the title "Saucy Feminist That Even Men Like". In April 1971 she famously debated Norman Mailer (whose book The Prisoner of Sex had just been published) in "Dialogue on Women's Liberation" at the Town Hall in New York. Greer shared the stage with Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Ceballos, while Susan Sontag and Betty Friedan sat in the audience. Filmmakers Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker captured the event in the documentary Town Bloody Hall (1971).
On 1 June 1971 she began writing a column in The Sunday Times, and later that year her journalism took her to Vietnam, where she wrote about "bargirls" made pregnant by American soldiers, and Bangladesh, where she interviewed women raped by Pakistani soldiers during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. After leaving Warwick in 1972, she co-presented Nice Time, a Granada Television comedy show, with Kenny Everett and Jonathan Routh. In 1973 she debated William F. Buckley Jr. at the Cambridge Union on the motion "This House Supports the Women's Liberation Movement". Buckley recalled that Greer had "trounced him". "Nothing I said," he wrote in 1989, "and memory reproaches me for having performed miserably, made any impression or any dent in the argument. She carried the house overwhelmingly."
In 1979 Greer was appointed director of the Center of the Study of Women's Literature at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in 1981 she founded the Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, an academic journal that highlights previously unknown women writers. In 1989 she became a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, where she had completed her PhD. That year she founded Stump Cross Books, which publishes the work of 17th- and 18th-century women poets. The imprint is financed by Greer. In 1998 Greer returned to Warwick as Professor of English and Comparative Studies.

Writing

The Female Eunuch

The Female Eunuch was published by HarperCollins in London in October 1970. A Paladin paperback soon followed, with cover art by John Holmes. Greer told Rolling Stone in January 1971 that McGraw-Hill had paid $29,000 for the American rights and Bantam $135,000 for the paperback rights. By March 1971 the book had nearly sold out its second printing and had been translated into eight languages. It has never been out of print. Greer argued in the book that women do not realise how much men hate them, and how much they are taught to hate themselves. When it was first published, Wallace writes, one woman wrapped it in brown paper and kept it hidden under her shoes because her husband would not let her read it.
"The title is an indication of the problem," Greer told The New York Times in 1971. "Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master's ulterior motives—to be fattened or made docile—women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It's a process that sacrifices vigor for delicacy and succulence, and one that's got to be changed."
Two of the book's themes already pointed the way to Sex and Destiny 14 years later, namely that the nuclear family is a bad environment for women and for the raising of children, and that the manufacture of women's sexuality by Western society was demeaning and confining. Girls are feminised from childhood by being taught rules that subjugate them, she argued. Later, when women embrace the stereotypical version of adult femininity, they develop a sense of shame about their own bodies, and lose their natural and political autonomy. The result is powerlessness, isolation, a diminished sexuality, and a lack of joy. She argued that women should get to know and accept their own bodies, and give up celibacy and monogamy. But they should not burn their bras. "Bras are a ludicrous invention", she said, "but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression."

Lysistrata translation, The Obstacle Race

In 1972 Kenneth Tynan, artistic director of the Royal National Theatre, commissioned Greer to work on a translation of Aristophanes's Lysistrata. The project was not completed. The work found belated appreciation in 1999, with the remains of the script re-worked by Phil Willmott and produced by him as Germaine Greer's Lysistrata: The Sex Strike. Greer's second book, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (1979), covers its subject until the end of the nineteenth century, and speculates on the existence of women artists whose careers were not recorded.

Sex and Destiny

Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984) continued Greer's critique of Western attitudes toward sexuality, fertility, and family, and the imposition of those attitudes on the rest of the world. Her targets again include the nuclear family, government intervention in sexual behaviour, and the commercialisation of sexuality and women's bodies. She argued that the Western promotion of birth control in the Third World was in large part driven not by concern for human welfare but by the traditional fear and envy of the rich towards the fertility of the poor. The birth control movement had been tainted by such attitudes from its beginning, she wrote, citing Marie Stopes and others. She cautioned against condemning life styles and family values in the developing world.

Daddy, We Hardly Knew You

Greer's Shakespeare and The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings, a collection of articles written between 1968 and 1985, appeared in 1986. In 1989 came Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, a diary and travelogue about her father, whom she described as distant, weak and unaffectionate, which led to claims—which she described as inevitable—that in her writing she was projecting her relationship with him onto all other men.

The Change

Natalie Angier, writing in The New York Times, called The Change: Women, Ageing, and the Menopause (1991) a "brilliant, gutsy, exhilarating, exasperating fury of a book". In it, Greer wrote of the myths about menopause, advising against the use of hormone replacement therapy. "Frightening females is fun," she wrote in The Age. "Women were frightened into using hormone replacement therapy by dire predictions of crumbling bones, heart disease, loss of libido, depression, despair, disease and death if they let nature take its course." She argues that scaring women is "big business and hugely profitable". It is fear, she wrote, that "makes women comply with schemes and policies that work against their interest".

Slip-Shod Sibyls

Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (1995) is an account of women who wrote poetry in English before 1900, and an examination of why so few female poets have been admitted to the literary canon. Her conclusion is that women were held to different and lower standards than men (hence the "slip-shod" sibyls of the title, quoting Alexander Pope), and the poetic tradition discouraged good poetry from women. The book includes a critique of the concept of the woman as Muse, associated with Robert Graves and others, a chapter on the reputation of Sappho and her use as a symbol of female poetry, a chapter on the 17th-century poet Katherine Philips, two chapters on Aphra Behn and one on Anne Wharton, both also of the 17th century; the 17th- and 18th-century poet Anne Finch; and the 19th-century poets Letitia Landon and Christina Rossetti. It also includes an epilogue on 20th-century female poets, and their propensity for suicide. Greer writes: "Too many of the most conspicuous figures in women's poetry of the 20th century not only destroyed themselves in a variety of ways but are valued for poetry that documents that process."

The Whole Woman

The Whole Woman, a sequel to The Female Eunuch, was released in 1999. Greer argued that there had been little progress in the feminist movement:

Even if it had been real, equality would have been a poor substitute for liberation; fake equality is leading women into double jeopardy. The rhetoric of equality is being used in the name of political correctness to mask the hammering that women are taking. When The Female Eunuch was written our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves. On every side speechless women endure endless hardship, grief and pain, in a world system that creates billions of losers for every handful of winners. It's time to get angry again.

Her comments about female genital mutilation (FGM) proved controversial, particularly that opposition to it is an "attack on cultural identity", just as outlawing male circumcision would be viewed as an attack on Jews and Muslims. Greer wrote that feminists fighting to eliminate FGM in their own countries "must be supported", but she explored the complexities of the issue and the double standards of the West regarding other forms of bodily mutilation, including that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended surgery at that time on baby girls with clitorises over three-eighths of an inch long. She questioned the view that FGM is imposed by men on women, rather than by women on women, or even freely chosen.
Other controversial points in the book include Greer's opposition, in a chapter entitled "Pantomime Dames," to accepting transgender women as women: "Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to recognise as women, men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it, because they see women not as another sex but as a non-sex. No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight. The insistence that man-made women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males."

The Beautiful Boy

A book of art history, The Beautiful Boy (2003) was illustrated with 200 photographs of what The Observer called "succulent teenage male beauty". Greer described the book as an attempt to address modern women's apparent indifference to the teenage boy as a sexual object and to "advance women's reclamation of their capacity for, and right to, visual pleasure". The cover photograph, by David Bailey, was of 15-year-old Björn Andrésen in his character of Tadzio in the film Death in Venice (1971). The actor complained about Greer's use of the photograph.

Whitefella Jump Up

Greer has published three essays on Aboriginal issues, including "Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood" (2003). According to her own account, she understood little about Aboriginal issues during her early years in Australia, but in England she saw from the perspective of distance that "what was operating in Australia was apartheid: the separation and alienation South Africa tried desperately and savagely to impose on their black majority, we had achieved, apparently effortlessly, with our black minority." On returning to Australia in late 1971 she made a concerted effort "to see as much as I could of what had been hidden from me" travelling for that purpose through the Northern Territory with activist Bobbi Sykes.
In Whitefella Jump Up (2003), Greer argued that Australians should re-imagine Australia as an Aboriginal nation. "Jump up" in Australian creole can, she wrote, mean "to be resurrected or reborn"; the title refers to occasions when Aborigines apparently accepted whites as reincarnated relatives. Greer suggested that whites were mistaken in understanding this literally, and that the Aborigines were in fact offering whites terms on which they could be accepted into the Aboriginal kinship system. The essay argues that it may not be too late for Australia as a nation to root itself in Aboriginal history and culture. She wrote:

Though I can claim no drop of Aboriginal blood, twenty years ago Kulin women from Fitzroy adopted me. There are whitefellas who insist that blackfellas don't practise adoption; all I can say is that when I asked about the possibility of assuming Aboriginality, the Kulin women said at once 'We'll adopt you.' 'How do you do that?' I asked, hoping I wouldn't be required to camp in some bleak spot for a month or two, and be painted or smoked and cut about. 'That's it,' they said. 'It's done. We've adopted you.' Since then I have sat on the ground with black women and been assigned a skin and been taught how to hunt and how to cook shellfish and witchetty grubs, with no worse punishment for getting it wrong than being laughed at.

Greer's essay "On Rage" (2008) dealt with the widespread rage of indigenous men. Aboriginal academic Marcia Langton argued that Greer was making excuses for bad behaviour.

White Beech

In 2013 Greer published White Beech: The Rainforest Years about her work rehabilitating Australian rainforest at a former dairy farm near the Springbrook National Park in southern Queensland. There she discovered an uncommon White Beech (Gmelina leichhardtii) tree, and that Agent Orange (2,4,5-T), contaminated with the dioxin 2,3,7,8-TCDD, had been sprayed for years.

Miscellaneous

Broadcasting, other writing

Greer makes regular celebrity appearances on television, particularly in the UK. She appeared on the BBC's Have I Got News for You several times from 1990. In 1998 she wrote an episode, "Make Love not War," for the television documentary series Cold War, and sat for a nude photograph by the Australian photographer Polly Borland. In 2005 she entered the Celebrity Big Brother house in the UK to compete in the third series but left the show voluntarily on day six.^{[citation needed]} The following year her Guardian column on the death of Australian Steve Irwin was criticized as insensitive for concluding that the animal world had "finally taken its revenge on Irwin", and that she hoped "exploitative nature documentaries" would now end. A month later she presented a BBC Radio 4 documentary on American composer and rock guitarist Frank Zappa, a friend of hers since the early 1970s. She said that his orchestral work "G-Spot Tornado" would be played at her funeral.

Reality and ideology

From the 1970s Greer described herself as an anarchist or anarchist communist; in 2012 she said she had become a member of the British Liberal Democrats. She argued in 2008 that "reality comes first and ideology comes second", and elaborated on whether feminism was the only successful revolution of the 20th century. She said that she believed in "permanent revolution": “I believe that once you change the power structure and you get an oligarchy that is trying to keep itself in power, you have all the illiberal features of the previous regime. What has to keep on happening is a constant process of criticism, renewal, protest and so forth.”

Accusations of transphobia

Greer's position on transgender women first attracted controversy in 1997, when she unsuccessfully opposed the offer of a Newnham College fellowship to physicist Rachael Padman, arguing that Padman had been born male and should not be admitted to a women-only college. In 2015, when students at Cardiff University petitioned to stop Greer from speaking there on "Women & Power: The Lessons of the 20th Century", she responded by reaffirming, during an interview with Kirsty Wark for BBC Newsnight, that she did not regard transgender women as women. In the same interview, she said that the nomination of Caitlyn Jenner for Glamour Woman of the Year was misogynist, and that a large part of Jenner's story was motivated by a desire to take the limelight away from the born-female members of the Kardashian-Jenner family. The lecture went ahead as planned. Greer reiterated her views in 2016 on an episode of Australia's Q&A.

Archives

The University of Melbourne announced in 2013 that it would house the archive of Greer's work, which includes letters from family, friends, colleagues and critics, filling over 150 filing cabinet drawers. The transfer of the archive from Greer's home in England began in July 2014; the university said it would raise A$3 million to fund the process. Greer said that her fee would be donated to her charity, The Friends of Gondwana Rainforest.

Selected works

• (1970). The Female Eunuch. London: MacGibbon & Kee.
• (1979). The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work. London: Martin Secker and Warburg.
• (1984). Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility. London: Harpercollins.
• (1986). Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Past Masters series).
• (1986). The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings. London: Picador.
• (1989). Daddy, We Hardly Knew You. New York: Fawcett Columbine.
• (1989) with Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, Melinda Sansone (eds.). Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth Century Women's Verse. London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• (1989) (ed.). The Uncollected Verse of Aphra Behn. London: Stump Cross Books.
• (1990) with Ruth Little (eds.). The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda, Volume III, The Translations. London: Stump Cross Books.
• (1991). The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause.
• (1995). Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet.
• (1997). with Susan Hastings (eds.). The Surviving Works of Anne Wharton. London: Stump Cross Books.
• (1999). The Whole Woman. London: Doubleday.
• (2000). John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. London: Northcote House Publishers.
• (2001) (ed.). 101 Poems by 101 Women. London: Faber & Faber.
• (2003). Poems for Gardeners. London: Virago.
• (2003). The Beautiful Boy. New York: Rizzoli.
• (2004). Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood. London: Profile Books (first published 2003 in Quarterly Essay).
• (2007). Shakespeare's Wife. London: Bloomsbury.
• (2013). White Beech: The Rainforest Years. London: Bloomsbury.

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External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Germaine Greer

• Media related to Germaine Greer at Wikimedia Commons
• Works by Germaine Greer at Open Library
• The University of Melbourne Archives.
• "How to be a feminist" on YouTube, All About Women festival, Sydney Opera House, 8 March 2015 (Greer and others discussing feminism).
• Greer, Germaine. "The habit of a lifetime – Germaine Greer on her sex-obsessed school days", The Guardian, 27 November 2003.
• Greenfield, Robert. "Germaine Greer, A Groupie in Women's Lib", Rolling Stone, 7 January 1971.

Germaine Greer
Australian theorist, academic and journalist Germaine Greer is best know for her 1970 book 'The Female Eunuch'. She is photographed for Esquire magazine in New York City, 1971. (Photo by Baron Wolman/Getty Images)

 Germaine Greer (Melbourne, 29 gennaio 1939) è una scrittrice e giornalista australiana, considerata da molti una delle maggiori voci del femminismo del XX secolo.

Biografia

Docente di letteratura inglese all'Università di Warwick in Inghilterra, ha raggiunto una vasta notorietà con la pubblicazione del saggio L'eunuco femmina, edito nel 1970 e divenuto un bestseller internazionale, accolto da critiche sia positive che negative. L'eunuco femmina rimane ancora oggi un libro importante nella letteratura femminista perché, pur non proponendo nuovi spunti di elaborazione teorica, fornisce una ricchissima varietà di fonti letterarie e storiche, che documentano quanto le donne siano state "castrate" come individui, avvalorando la tesi di fondo del libro che è quella della necessaria liberazione sessuale e individuale delle donne. Una "liberazione" delle donne da non confondersi con "l'uguaglianza" con gli uomini. Greer afferma che la liberazione delle donne significa abbracciare le differenze di genere in modo positivo - lottare per la libertà delle donne di definire i propri valori, fare ordine fra le proprie priorità e determinare il proprio destino. Al contrario, Greer vede l'uguaglianza come mera assimilazione e "adeguamento" a vivere la vita di "uomini non liberi".
Da allora le sue idee sono sempre state oggetto di controversie. In particolare Greer rivendica il diritto delle donne a riappropriarsi del corpo: schiave di una società consumistica, le donne sono diventate vittime del loro stesso corpo, afferma Greer, che pone in discussione l'intero sistema di valutazione del corpo femminile, finora analizzato da voci maschili. La schiavitù della donna è un'arma a doppio taglio, che coinvolge anche l'uomo, costretto in un ruolo opprimente di machismo.
Tra le sue opere anche Il ragazzo (The Beautiful Boy, 2003) nel quale l'autrice presentava come oggetti del desiderio femminile giovani ragazzi semi-nudi, fatto che ha suscitato accuse di pedofilia ^.


Germaine Greer (1939 – vivente), intellettuale femminista australiana.

• Barbie è stata uno strumento per insegnare alle donne dalle spalle larghe, dalle gambe corte e dal corpo massiccio, alle donne reali di tutto il mondo, a disprezzare il loro corpo come noi disprezziamo il nostro, così da indurle a spendere quel denaro che potrebbe essere impiegato per acquistare libri o computer o biciclette in prodotti "di bellezza", fabbricati a basso costo e venduti in confezioni costose. Dopo l'implosione dell'Urss, i primi negozi occidentali che aprirono nelle vecchie città sovietiche furono i franchise di prodotti cosmetici, così che, prima di poter comprare un'arancia o una banana, una donna russa poteva acquistare un rossetto di marca. (citato in Loredana Lipperini, Ancora dalla parte delle bambine)

front cover of Germaine Greer's 'The Female Eunuch' a twentieth century feminist narrative...
UNSPECIFIED - CIRCA 1754: front cover of Germaine Greer's 'The Female Eunuch' a twentieth century feminist narrative (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
 Germaine Greer

It's better to print and be damned, because you'll be damned anyway.

Germaine Greer (born 29 January 1939) is an Australian author, academic, critic and journalist.

Germaine Greer Pointing
(Original Caption) Author Germaine Greer shown in lobby of Chelsea Hotel where she is staying.

 
Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing

Jill Johnston At 'Dialogue On Womens Liberation'
During a 'Dialogue on Womens Liberation' as part of the 'Theater for Ideas' series, American journalist and author Jill Johnston (1929 - 2010) (left) kisses an unidentified woman onstage at Town Hall, New York, New York, April 30, 1971. Johnston was participating in a panel discussion moderated by author Norman Mailer that also featured the National Organization for Women president Jaqueline Ceballos, critic Diana Trilling, and author Germaine Greer. The entire event was filmed by D.A. Pennebaker as the film 'Town Bloody Hall.' (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images)

Quotes

Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.

The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening...

• Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master's ulterior motives — to be fattened or made docile — women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It's a process that sacrifices vigour for delicacy and succulence, and one that's got to be changed.
  • As quoted in "Germaine Greer — Opinions That May Shock the Faithful" by Judith Weinraub in The New York Times (22 March 1971)

• The term eunuchs was used by Eldridge Cleaver to describe blacks. It occurred to me that women were in a somewhat similar position. Blacks had been emancipated from slavery but never given any kind of meaningful freedom, while women were given the vote but denied sexual freedom. In the final analysis, women aren't really free until their libidos are recognized as separate entities. Some of the suffragettes understood this. They could see the connection among the vote, political power, independence and being able to express their sexuality according to their own experience, instead of in reference to a demand by somebody else. But they were regarded as crazy and were virtually crucified. Thinking about them, I suddenly realized, Christ, we've been castrated and that's what it's all about. You see, it's all very well to let a bullock out into the field when you've already cut his balls off, because you know he's not going to do anything. That's exactly what happened to women.
  • On how she chose the title for The Female Eunuch, in an interview by Nat Lehrman in Playboy (January 1972)

• Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.
  • The Times, London (1986-02-01)

• No one goes to the toilet in novels. You'd think none of us had bladders.
  • Newsnight Review (2009-07-24)

• The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.
  • Article "Abortion", The Sunday Times, 21 May 1972

The Female Eunuch (1970)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-52762-8

We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well...

• Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
  • Introduction
• With them she can discover cooperation, sympathy and love. The end cannot justify the means: if she finds that her revolutionary way leads only to further discipline and continuing incomprehension, with their corollaries of bitterness and diminution, no matter how glittering the objective which would justify it, she must understand that it is a wrong way and an illusory end. The struggle which is not joyous is the wrong struggle. The joy of the struggle is not hedonism and hilarity, but the sense of purpose, achievement and dignity which is the reflowering of etiolated energy. Only these can sustain her and keep the flow of energy coming. The problems are only equalled by the possibilities: every mistake made is redeemed when it is understood. The only ways in which she can feel such joy are radical ones: the more derided and maligned the action that she undertakes, the more radical.
  • Introduction
• The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial.
  • Introduction

• If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood - if it makes you sick, you've got a long way to go, baby.
  • The Wicked Womb (p. 57)

• In that mysterious dimension where the body meets the soul the stereotype is born and has her being. She is more body than soul, more soul than mind. To her belongs all that is beautiful, eve the very word beauty itself. All that exists, exists to beautify her.
  • The Stereotype

• The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the Sexual Object sought by all men, and by all woman. She is of neither sex, for she has herself no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. All she must contribute is her existence. She need achieve nothing, for she has herself no sex at all. her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. All she must contribute is her existence. She need achieve nothing, for she is the reward of achievement. She need never give positive evidence of her moral character because virtue is assumed from her loveliness, and her passivity.
  • The Stereotype
• Nobody wants a girl whose beauty is imperceptible to all but him...
  • The Stereotype (p. 67)

• Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.
  • The Psychological Sell (p. 104)
• Nothing is more chilling than such a spectacle of unremitting self-sacrifice. This is a woman born to be abandoned by her ungrateful husband at the very pinnacle of success she helped to make for him, for a shameless hussy of nineteen.
  • The Psychological Sell
• Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.
  • Womanpower (p. 128)

• The failure of women to produce great works of art and all that can be explained in terms of this statement. Insofar as she escapes or rejects her conditioning, the little girl may excel in those kinds of intellectual activity that are called creative, but eventually she either capitulates to her conditioning, or the conflicts become so pressing that her efficiency is hampered.
  • The Raw Material

Women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.

• Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks. It is a slender case but perhaps it does mean that women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.
  • Womanpower (p. 129)

• The principle of the brotherhood of man is that narcissistic one, for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.
  • The Ideal (p. 159)

• Man is jealous because of his amour propre; woman is jealous because of her lack of it.
  • Love: Egotism (p. 155)

• Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.
  • (p. 263)
    • Often paraphrased as: "women have no idea how much men hate them."

• Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
  • Security (p. 274)

• They still say "fuck you" as a venomous insult; they still find "cunt" the most degrading epithet outside the dictionary.
  • On men, in Hate (p. 287)

• The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
  • Revolution

The Obstacle Race (1979)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-22412-9

Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth.

• Great art, for those who insist upon this rather philistine concept (as if un-great art were unworthy of even their most casual and ill-informed attention), makes us stand back and admire. It rushes upon us pell-mell like the work of Rubens or Tintoretto or Delacroix, or towers above us. There is of course another aesthetic: the art of a Vermeer or a Braque seeks not to amaze and appal but to invite the observer to come closer, to close with the painting, peer into it, become intimate with it. Such art reinforces human dignity.
  • Chapter V: Dimension (p. 105)

• The element of heroic maleness had always been present in the concept of the artist as one who rides the winged horse above the clouds beyond the sight of lesser men, a concept seldom applied to those who worked with colours until the nineteenth century. When the inevitable question is asked, "Why are there no great women artists?" it is this dimension of art that is implied. The askers know little of art, but they know the seven wonders of the painting world.
  • Chapter V: Dimension (p. 105)

• Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse.
  • Chapter VII: The Disappearing Oeuvre (p. 134)

At no time did anyone throw his cap in the air and rejoice that another painter, capable of equalling Hals at his best, had been discovered.

• By 1627 Judith Leyster was famous enough to be mentioned in Ampzing's description of the city of Haarlem; by 1661 she had been so far forgotten that De Bie does not mention her in his Golden Cabinet. Her eclipse by Frans Hals may have begun in her own lifetime, as a consequence of her marriage to Molenaer perhaps, for Sir Luke Schaub acquired the painting now known as The Jolly Companions as a Hals in Haarlem in the seventeenth century.
  If Judith Leyster had not been in the habit of signing her work with the monogram JL attached to a star, a pun on the name her father had taken from his brewery, Leyster or Lodestar, her works might never have been reattributed to her: few paintings can boast of a provenance as clear as that of The Jolly Companions. As a result of the discovery that The Jolly Companions bore Leyster's monogram, the English firm which had sold the painting to Baron Schlichting in Paris as a Hals attempted to rescind their own purchase and get their money back from the dealer, Wertheimer, who had sold it to them for £4500 not only as a Hals but "one of the finest he ever painted." Sir John Millars agreed with Wertheimer about the authenticity and value of the painting. The special jury and the Lord Chief Justice never did get to hear the case, which was settled in court on 31st May 1893, with the plaintiffs agreeing to keep the painting for £3500 plus £500 costs. The gentlemen of the press made merry at the experts' expense, for all they had succeeded in doing was in destroying the value of the painting. Better, they opined, to have asked no questions. At no time did anyone throw his cap in the air and rejoice that another painter, capable of equalling Hals at his best, had been discovered.
  • Chapter VII: The Disappearing Oeuvre (p. 136)

Sex and Destiny : The Politics of Human Fertility (1984)

Olympic Marketing, ISBN 0-06091-250-2

• The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
  • Chapter 2

• The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people’s reproductive behaviour, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not.
  • Chapter 14

The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)

Little, Brown and Company, ISBN 0-87113-308-3

When the burning and shivering stopped and I could see again only what was there, I stayed enthralled by clarity.

I hated being out of touch, isolated by the solipsism of delirium, unable to communicate or comprehend.

Consensus politics means that you cannot afford to give the many-headed beast, the public, anything to vote against, for voting against is what gargantuan pseudodemocracy has to come down to...

Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.

• While young fools of my generation produced terrifying symptoms by ingesting poisons of various synthetic kinds, I was taken to extraordinary realms by a bacillus carried from human excrement by a fly's foot. I swelled to the size of a mountain and shrank to the size of a pin, flew and sang and fell through exotic configurations, in the intervals between agonizing convulsions on the heavy earthenware vaso, whose lethal contents I had to dispose of in the fields when the fever subsided. When the burning and shivering stopped and I could see again only what was there, I stayed enthralled by clarity. There was nothing to me in biochemical mindbending or bullshit psychedelia that did not have the slimy scent of death about it. I hated being out of touch, isolated by the solipsism of delirium, unable to communicate or comprehend.
  • "Introduction," p. xxii

• Kinkiness comes from low energy. It's the substitution of lechery for lust.
  • "A groupie's vision" (October 1969), p. 10

• Once a paper admits any principle of censorship for survival, the we-don't-want-to-do-it-but-we-don't-want-to-lose-the-printer kind of censorship, it jeopardizes the integrity of its editorial principle. It's better to print and be damned, because you'll be damned anyway.
  • "The million-dollar Underground" (July 1969), p. 15

• The treatment for jaded sensibilities is not to shatter them, after all.
  • "The Wet Dream Film Festival" (1971), p. 57

• The pain of sexual frustration, of repressed tenderness, of denied curiosity, of isolation in the ego, of greed, suppressed rebellion, of hatred poisoning all love and generosity, permeates our sexuality. What we love we destroy.
  • "The Wet Dream Film Festival" (1971), p. 57

• As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue.
  • "A needle for your pornograph" (22 July 1971), p. 67

• Next time round Hitler will be a machine.
  • "My Mailer problem" (September 1971), 83

• Compulsory motherhood is not ennobling, although the friends of the foetus are at pains to point out that most women denied abortions end up loving their issue just the same. Whether they love them just the same as they would have if they had wanted them is of course unverifiable; most women are not so perverse and unjust as to punish their children for the crimes of society (their fathers), but the oppression of their circumstances is real notwithstanding. For the oppressors themselves to take credit for the women's magnanimity is sickeningly smug. The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.
  • "Abortion ii" (21 May 1972), p. 115

• Consensus politics means that you cannot afford to give the many-headed beast, the public, anything to vote against, for voting against is what gargantuan pseudodemocracy has to come down to.
  • "The Big Tease" (October 1972), p. 138

• Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.
  • "Not a time to die" (3 December 1972), p. 147

• Doctors, lawyers and even accountants have always understood that they would have to stand firm, functioning as a solid group protecting its own expertise and hence its earning capacity, from the tendency of all merchants to buy cheap and sell dear. They made of their special knowledge a rare and valuable commodity, insisted on a mystique and protected each other by an immovable professional code. They were cynical enough to know that if they were once cast in the role of public martyrs, working harder and more generously than most other groups of workers, they would be left with nothing but masochism, exhaustion and despair to show for it. Like successful trade unions, who have always worked on the principle that the job is worth whatever you can force the employer to pay for it and not a penny more or less, they understood that nobody was going to pay them their fees out of gratitude, that if they left it to the man whose life they had saved to pay them what he thought fit, they would wind up with half an old penny.
  • "'Unhelpful to the workers' cause'" [undated], p. 175

• The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.
  • "Eternal war: Strindberg's view of sex" (3 June 1978), p. 207

• In the nuclear family the child is confronted by only two adults contrasted by sex. The tendency towards polarization is unavoidable. The duplication of effort in the nuclear family is directly connected to the family's role as the principal unit of consumption in consumer society. Each household is destined to acquire a complete set of all the consumer durables considered necessary for the good life and per caput consumption is therefore maintained at its highest level. In sex, as in consumption, the nuclear family emphasizes possession and exclusivity at the expense of the kinds of emotional relationships that work for co-operation and solidarity.
  • "Women and power in Cuba" (1985), p. 271

Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989)

Ballantine, ISBN 0-449-90561-6

In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.

• Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace, and wit, reminders of order, calm, and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep, and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.
  • "Still in Melbourne, January 1987"

• Military mythology has to pretend that real men are in the majority; cowards can never be allowed to feel that they might be the normal ones and the heroes are insane.
  • "Anxiety"

The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause (1991)

Ballantine Books, ISBN 0-44990-853-4

• Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.
  • Introduction

The Whole Woman (1999)

Doubleday, ISBN 0385 60016X

• This sequel to The Female Eunuch is the book I said I would never write.
  • "Recantation"

• A woman's pleasure is not dependent upon the presence of a penis in the vagina; neither is a man's.
  • Abortion (pg. 95)

• Men have still not realized that letting women do so much of the work for so little reward makes a man in the house an expensive luxury rather than a necessity.
  • Work (pg. 136)

If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?

• The few men who do a hand's turn around the house expect gratitude and recognition, so sure are they that, though it is their dirt, it is not their job.
  • Housework (pg. 141)

• How you answer the question, whether individuals should be persuaded to live their whole lives in a state of chemical dependency, first upon contraceptive steroids and then on replacement therapy, depends upon your regard for the autonomy of the individual. If men would not live their lives this way, why should women?
  • Estrogen (pg. 160)

• We can put women on Prozac and they will think they are happy, even though they are not. Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too, which rather suggests that misery is a response to unbearable circumstances rather than constitutional.
  • Sorrow (pg. 183)

• If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?
  • Sorrow (pg. 189)

• In a sane society no woman would be left to struggle on her own with the huge transformation that is motherhood, when a single individual finds herself joined by an invisible umbilical cord to another person from whom she will never be separated, even by death.
  • Mothers (pg. 209)

• Regardless of the dutiful pushing of condoms in the girls' press, the exposure of baby vaginas and cervixes to the penis is more likely to result in pregnancy and infection than orgasm.
  • Girlpower (pg. 332)

• The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more.
  • Liberation (pg. 336)

Quotes about Greer

• She has been in the business of shaking up a complacent establishment for nearly 40 years now and was employing the most elemental shock tactic of getting naked in public both long before and long after it ever crossed Madonna's mind. She has repeatedly written about her own experiences of lesbian sex, rape, abortion, infertility, failed marriage (she was married for three weeks to a construction worker in the 1960s) and menopause, thereby leaving herself open to claims that she shamelessly extrapolates from her own condition to the rest of womankind and calls it a theory … In part, her ability to remain so prominently in the public consciousness comes from an astute understanding and well-established symbiotic relationship with a media as eager to be shocked as she is to shock.
  • Stephanie Merritt, in "Danger mouth" in The Observer (5 October 2003)

• "The Female Eunuch" is a fitful, passionate, scattered text, not cohesive enough to qualify as a manifesto. It's all over the place, impulsive and fatally naive — which is to say it is the quintessential product of its time.
  So was Greer. … If Greer were a bit more honest and had a bit more perspective, she'd have a useful message to relay to young women about the perils of confusing sexual autonomy with the real but ephemeral ability to manipulate men. She could elucidate the difference between a sexual freedom that abuses body and soul and a sexual freedom that cherishes and respects them. But Greer has always spoken directly from the tangles of her personal experience, shamelessly extrapolating from her own condition to the rest of womankind and seemingly unaware of her presumption. … In the '70s, she admonished women who lacked her confidence, stylishness and libido for their timorousness. Today, feeling betrayed, she's become grim and hectoring, a feminist more cartoonishly man-hating than the ones she supposedly defied in the '70s, nattering on about body hair and bras.
  • Laura Miller in Brilliant Careers - "Germaine Greer" profile at Salon (22 June 1999)

• Women who were housewives, who were pretty miserable … felt inspired by her book and their life changed. They didn't become megastars, but they became a librarian or something. I've heard women say again and again when the subject of Germaine comes up: 'Well, her book changed my life for the better.' And they'll be modest women living pretty ordinary lives, but better lives.
  • Susan Ryan as quoted in Brilliant Careers - "Germaine Greer" profile by Laura Miller at Salon (22 June 1999)

• She enjoys what most women do not enjoy, and therefore it's valuable, which is going out and doing battle with men.
  • Gloria Steinem as quoted in Brilliant Careers - "Germaine Greer" profile by Laura Miller at Salon (22 June 1999)

Greer Licks Frets
Australian writer and journalist Germaine Greer licking the fretboard of a guitar in a photo shoot for the underground, satirical magazine Oz, March 1969. (Photo by Estate Of Keith Morris/Redferns) 

Photo of Germaine GREER and Vivian Stanshall
UNITED KINGDOM - JANUARY 01: Photo of Germaine GREER and Vivian Stanshall of the BONZO DOG DOO DAH BAND, posed in a studio. (Photo by Estate Of Keith Morris/Redferns)

Guitar Romp
Australian writer and journalist Germaine Greer holds a guitar between her legs in a photo shoot for the underground, satirical magazine Oz, March 1969. (Photo by Estate Of Keith Morris/Redferns) 

Guitar Romp
Australian writer and journalist Germaine Greer holds a guitar between her legs in a photo shoot for the underground, satirical magazine Oz, March 1969. (Photo by Estate Of Keith Morris/Redferns) 

Photo of BONZO DOG DOO DAH BAND and Vivian STANSHALL and Germaine GREER
UNITED KINGDOM - MARCH 21: Photo of BONZO DOG DOO DAH BAND and Vivian STANSHALL and Germaine GREER; Vivian Stanshall & Germaine Greer, studio, posed (Photo by Estate Of Keith Morris/Redferns)

Greer On The Fence
Australian-born feminist author and journalist Germaine Greer, firewood under one arm, steps over a fence near her home in Warwick, England, March 1971. (Photo by Terence Spencer/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

Feminist author Germaine Greer
UNITED KINGDOM - MARCH 01: Feminist author Germaine Greer (Photo by Terence Spencer/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

Germaine Greer at a women's liberation march, 11 March 1972. SMH Picture by BER
(AUSTRALIA OUT) Germaine Greer at a women's liberation march, 11 March 1972. SMH Picture by BERRY (Photo by Fairfax Media/Fairfax Media via Getty Images)

Australian feminist author Germaine Greer,
Australian feminist author Germaine Greer, 1970s. (Photo by The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media via Getty Images)

Germaine Greer
Feminist writer Germaine Greer. (Photo by Terry O'Neill/Iconic Images/Getty Images)

 LONDON - OCTOBER 02: Writer, Feminist Germaine Greer poses for a portrait shoot on October 02, 2000 in London. (Photo by Polly Borland/Contour by Getty Images)

 Germaine Greer
LONDON - OCTOBER 02: Writer, Feminist Germaine Greer poses for a portrait shoot on October 02, 2000 in London. (Photo by Polly Borland/Contour by Getty Images)

Melbourne Writers Festival - Opening Night
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - AUGUST 22: Germaine Greer speaks at The Age Book of the Year Awards as part of the opening night of the Melbourne Writers Festival on August 22, 2008 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Kane Hibberd/Getty Images)

The Oldie of the Year Awards
LONDON, ENGLAND - FEBRUARY 07: Germaine Greer attends The Oldie of the Year Awards at Simpson's in the Strand on February 7, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images,)