Germaine Greer

At 85 years old, Germaine Greer has this physical status:

Germaine Greer (born 29 January 1939) is an Australian writer and public intellectual who is considered one of the leading voices of the second-wave feminist movement in the twentieth century's second half.

She has worked at Cambridge's University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge, and at the University of Tulsa in the United States.

She has divided her time since 1990s between Australia and Essex, since her first book, The Female Eunuch (1970), made her a household name.

The book, a best-selling book and a groundbreaking text in the feminist movement, argues that women are compelled to take subordinate positions in society to satisfy male fantasies of what being a woman entails.

She has written more than 20 books, including Sex and Destiny (1984), The Change (1991), The Whole Woman (1999), and Shakespeare's Wife (2007).

White Beech: The Rainforest Years, her 2013 book, describes her efforts to recover a strip of rainforest in Australia's Numinbah Valley.

Greer, rather than equality feminist, has a long line columnist for The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Spectator, The Independent, and The Oldie among others.

Her aim is not equality with men, but rather 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 true identity." Liberation, she says, is about claiming difference rather than "insisting on it as a mark of self-determination and self-determination."

It's a battle for women's rights to "define their own values, order their own priorities, and determine their own destiny."

Early life and education

Greer was born in Melbourne to a Catholic family, followed by a child. Eric Reginald ("Reg) Greer, her father, told her he had been born in South Africa, but she learned after his death that he was born Robert Hamilton King in Launceston, Tasmania, Australia. Margaret ("Peggy") May Lafrank, the singer's mother, had married in March 1937; Reg converted to Catholicism before the wedding. Peggy was a milliner and Reg a newspaper-advertising salesman. Greer became convinced that her father was secretly of Jewish origins despite her Catholic upbringing and her father's outspoken antisemitism. She believed her grandmother was a Jewish woman named Rachel Weiss, but admits she most likely made this up out of a "intense longing to be Jewish." Greer "felt Jewish" and began to participate in the Jewish faith despite not knowing she had no Jewish ancestry and wanted to participate in the Jewish faith. She learned Yiddish, joined a Jewish theatre company, and dated Jewish men. Greer had learned three European languages by the age of 12.

The family lived in Elwood, Melbourne, first in a rented flat near the beach and then in another rented flat on the Esplanade. Greer's father joined the Second Australian Imperial Force in January 1942; after serving with the Royal Australian Air Force, he served on ciphers for the British Royal Air Force in Egypt and Malta. Greer attended St Columba's Catholic Primary School in Elwood from February 1943—the family was then living at 57 Ormond Road, Elwood, and the Holy Redeemer School, Ripponlea, and John Grey.

Greer received 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, in 1952; a school study described her as "a bit of a mad cap and a tyke in her academics and some of her personal responses." Greer said that her childhood was a "long-awaited boredom" and that it was her Catholic school that introduced her to art and music. Artwork by her was on display in the Children's Art Exhibition at Tye's Gallery, which was opened by Archbishop Mannix. Greer's second best exam results in the state. Greer left the Catholic faith a year after leaving school, finding that the nuns' arguments for the existence of God were unconvincing. When she was 18, she moved to a new house. She had a difficult relationship with her mother, who most likely had Asperger syndrome, according to Greer. In 2012, she said that her brother might have forgiven her for "abandoning" them, but that she was not so sure about her sister, "whom I love more than anyone else on earth."

Greer, a 1956 graduate, studied English and French literature and literature at the University of Melbourne on a Teacher's College Scholarship, and lived at home for the first two years on a monthly basis of £8 a week. She was a striking figure at 16 years old by the age of 16. "All, loose-limbed, and very well behaved, she strode around the campus, aware that she was much talked about," says Melbourne journalist Peter Blazey, who was a student. She had some sort of breakdown as a result of depression and was briefly hospitalized. She told Playboy magazine in an interview published in 1972 that she had been assaulted during her second year in Melbourne, an event she recounted in The Guardian in March 1995.

She moved to Sydney, where she became involved with the Sydney Push and the anarchist Sydney Libertarians right before she graduated from Melbourne in 1959 with a second rank. "People talked about truth and only truth," she said, "insisting that the bulk of what we were exposed to during the day was ideology, which was a synonym for lies and bullshit, as they defined it." They will dine in the Royal George Hotel's back room on Sussex Street. Clive James was active with the organisation at the time. Greer "stepped into the Royal George Hotel from a room stinking of stale beer and thick with cigarette smoke," she said, "an uncomfortable discipline that I had to learn." Greer already thought of herself as anarchist without knowing why she was drawn to it; as a result of the Push, she became familiar with anarchist literature. She had strong connections in the company with Harry Hooton and Roelof Smilde, both active participants. She lived in a Glebe Point Road apartment with Smilde, but the relationship did not last; According to Wallace, the Push ideology of "free love" involved the rejection of possession and envy, which naturally served in the men's favour.

Greer enrolled at the University of Sydney to study Byron, where Clive James described her as "famous for her brilliantly foul tongue" after her friendship with Smilde came to an end. Arthur Dignam, one of her many friends, said she was "the only woman we had seen at that time who could confidently, quickly, and amusingly put men down." In August 1963, she became involved in acting in Sydney and appeared in Mother Courage and Her Children. She was granted a first-class MA for a thesis titled "The Growth of Byron's Satiric Mode" and took up a Sydney appointment as a senior tutor in English with an office next door to Stephen Knight in the university's Carslaw Building. "She was unquestionably an excellent tutor," he said. "And one of the few people who could command the Wallace Lecture Theatre with its 600 students." "She had a certain histrionic quality that was very unusual and added to her real scholarship."

Greer was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship, which she funded further studies at the University of Cambridge, commencing in October 1964 at Newnham College, a women-only university. Sam Goldberg, a Leavisite architect who had been Challis Chair of English Literature at Sydney since 1963, had encouraged her to move from Sydney. Originally enrolling in a BA at Cambridge—her scholarship would have enabled her to complete it in two years—Greer managed to change after the first term ("by force of argument," Clive James) to the PhD program to study Shakespeare, directed by Anne Barton, then known as Anne Righter. "They were not going to teach [her] anything," she said. It was Muriel Bradbrook, Cambridge's first female professor of English who persuaded Greer to study Shakespeare; Bradbrook had supervised Barton's PhD.

Women in Cambridge were living in a challenging environment. As Christine Wallace explains, one Newnham woman told her husband that Christ's College accepted "Wives in for sherry only" in 1966. At a formal dinner in Newnham, Lisa Jardine was first introduced to Greer. The principal had requested that speeches be banned. "One person continued to speak as the hush descended, one individual became too involved in her conversation to notice":

Greer auditioned (with Clive James, who she knew from the Sydney Push) for the Footlights, a student acting group based in Falcon Yard, which is above a Mac Fisheries shop. They did a sketch in which he was No.l Coward and she was Gertrude Lawrence. Greer, along with Sheila Buhr and Hilary Walston, were among the first women to be admitted as a full member on the same day as James and Russell Davies. In November 1964, the Cambridge News published a news story about it, referring to the women as "three girls." According to Greer, his reaction to being accepted was: "This place is brimming with freckle-punchers." You can have it on your own," says the author. My Girl Herbert, the Footlights president's homage to her mother, was included in the 1965 film My Girl Herbert, alongside Eric Idle (the Footlights president), John Cameron, Christie Davies, and John Grillo. "An Australian girl with the natural ability to project her voice," a critic said. Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Peter Cook, and David Frost were among the Footlighters' when she was there.

Greer lived in the Friar House on Bene't Street, opposite the Eagle, for a time. In his memoir of Cambridge, James referred to her as "Romaine Rand."

Greer, a fluent Italian, finished her PhD in Calabria, Italy, where she stayed for three months in a village with no running water and no electricity. Emilio's boyfriend had arrived on the trip, but Greer had to change her plans because he ended the relationship. She will clean herself, drink black coffee, and begin typing as she awakenes. In Shakespeare's Early Comedies, she was awarded her PhD in May 1968 for a thesis entitled The Ethic of Love and Marriage. Her family did not attend the service. "I had worked all my life for love, did my best to please everyone, but I didn't have to wait until I reached the top, looked around, and discovered I was all alone."

The Female Eunuch rely heavily on Greer's Shakespearean scholarship, particularly when examining marriage and courtship. Shakespeare's Wife was published in 1986 by Oxford University Press as part of its Past Masters series, and Bloomsbury published Anne Hathaway's biography in 2007.

Later life

Germaine Greer was one of the women highlighted in the Australian Women Changemakers exhibition at the Museum of Australian Democracy in June 2022.

Greer had returned to Australia in 2021 to sell her house and enroll herself in aged care. More women are in care than men are in 2022, according to the 83-year-old Greer. She described herself as "not a patient, but an inmate," and spoke openly about residential aged care, one of the most recent feminist topics today.

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Early career and writing

Greer lived in a Leamington spa apartment with two cats and 300 tadpoles from 1968 to 1972. She was married in 1968 for the first and only time, a marriage that ended in divorce in 1973. She met Paul du Feu, a King's College London English graduate who was building outside a pub in Portobello Road, London, and after a brief courtship, she married at Paddington Register Office using a ring stolen from a pawn shop. Du Feu was already divorced and had two sons, ages 14 and 16, with his first wife.

The friendship lasted just a few weeks. Greer said she had spent their wedding night in an armchair because her husband, inebriated, would not allow her in bed. "I could have any woman in this room," he said as he arrived at a party near Ladbroke Grove. 'Except me,' I said, and walked away for the rest of my life.'

Greer was trying to make a name for herself on television in lieu of teaching. Darling, Do You Love Me (1968), by Martin Sharp (the Australian artist and co-editor of Oz magazine) and Bob Whitaker appeared on Good Old Nocker and Twice for a Fortnight in 1967. Bonne Time, a Granada Television slapstick show starring Kenny Everett, Sandra Gough, and Jonathan Routh, appeared from 1968 to 1969. Her body was discovered in Greer's archive as a housewife bathing in milk supplied by Everett the milkman.

Greer began writing columns for Oz magazine, owned by Richard Neville, who had attended a party in Sydney. After three months and editors' decency had been convicted of obscenity, the Australian Oz had been shut down in 1963, but the editors' decision was later reversed. Neville and his co-editor, Martin Sharp, moved to London to set up Oz. Neville suggested that she write about it when she saw Greer in a 1966 book called "In Bed with the English." Keith Morris photographed her ("Dr. G, the only group with a PhD in captivity") for issue 19 in early 1969; the black-and-white photographs include one of her posing for the cover with Vivian Stanshall and another in which she pretends to play the guitar. "Germaine Greer knits personal parts," an article from Oz's Needlework Correspondent on the hand-knitted Keep It Warm Cock Sock, "a snug corner for a chilly prick." She also wrote a gardening column for Private Eye as "Rose Blight."

Greer, co-founder of Suck: The First European Sex Paper (1969–1974), together with Bill Daley, Jim Haynes, William Levy, Heathcote Williams and Jean Shrimpton, the main aim of which was to create "a new pornography that would demystify male and female bodies." The first issue was reportedly so offensive that Special Branch searched its London office in Drury Lane's Arts Lab and closed its postbox address.

According to Beatrice Faust, Suck released "high misogynist SM art" on issue 7, which included a photo of a man holding a "screaming woman with her legs in the air, while another rapes her anally. Elizabeth Kleinhenz, one of Greer's biographers, wrote that almost nothing was off limits for Suck, including descriptions of child violence, incest, and bestiality. "Sucky Fucky" by Greer included tips for women on how to look after their genitals and how to uncover their vaping secrets. "Anyone who wishes group sex in New York and likes fat girls should contact Lillian Roxon." The jury, which included Greer, awarded Bodil Joensen the first prize at a 1970 Amsterdam film festival in which a woman has sex with animals. "I Am a Whore," Suck based on one interview with Greer (first published in Screw, another pornographic journal).

Greer told Robert Greenfield of Rolling Stone in January 1971 that she was an admirer of the Redstockings, a radical feminist group established in New York by Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone in January 1969. feminists have chastised her for her connection with Suck, a feminist narrator, told a Screw interviewer in May 1971.

In 1972, Greer parted company with Suck, publishing a naked photograph of her lying down with her legs over her shoulders and her face peering between her thighs. The photograph was submitted on the understanding that nude photographs of all the editors would be published in a book about a film festival. She resigned after accusing the other editors of being "counter-revolutionary." Greer said later that her motivation in joining the editorial board had been to keep Suck away from exploitative, sadistic pornography.

Greer spent three days in Leamington Spa, two days in Manchester filming, and two days in London in a white-washed bedit in The Pheasantry on King's Road when she started writing for Oz and Suck. Before she arrived in London, she had remained in John Peel's spare room before being invited to take the bedsit in The Pheasantry, a room just below Martin Sharp's; accommodations were only permitted.

She was also writing The Female Eunuch. Sonny Mehta of MacGibbon & Kee had lunch in Golden Square, Soho, on March 17th. She repeated a suggestion of her agent, Diana Crawford, that she write about female suffrage when he asked for new books. Crawford had suggested that Greer write a book to commemorate women (or a portion of them) who were granted the vote in the United Kingdom in 1918. The mere thought of it made her angry, and she began "raging" about it. "I want the book I want," he said. When she agreed to the deal, she earned her £750 and another £250. "If Eldridge Cleaver's book about the negro's frozen soul as part of the evolution toward a more accurate representation of the coloured man's disease, a woman will eventually take steps toward denoting the female condition as she finds it scored on her intuition."

"I think it is to release my guilt of being an uncle Tom to my sex," the author continued. I don't like women. I would certainly participate in all the unconscious and unconscious contempt that men pour on women." Janis Joplin performs at Albert Hall in a note at the time, and she referred to 21 April 1969 as "the day on which my book begins" for her. Yesterday, the title was Strum Voluntary—what will it be today?" In July 1969, she told the Sydney Morning Herald that the book was nearly finished and would explore, "the myth of the ultra-feminine woman" in the reporter's words, "the myth of the ultra-feminine woman, which both sexes are fed and which both sexes are fed and which both sexes are exposed and which both sexes are fed and that both sexes are fed." "The Slag-Heap Erupts," she published in Oz in February 1970, giving a glimpse of her later views, namely that women were to blame for their own oppression. "Men don't really like women," she wrote, "and that is mainly why they don't use them." Women don't particularly like women, and they can also be depended on to have men over over women." Several British feminists, including Angela Carter, Sheila Rowbotham, and Michelene Wandor, retaliated angrily. Wandor wrote a rejoinder in Oz, "On the eve of Servile Penitude: A tribute to Germaine's cunt power," asserting that Greer was writing about a feminist movement in which she had no involvement and about which she had no knowledge.

The Female Eunuch was launched in the United Kingdom by MacGibbon & Kee in 1970, dedicated to Lillian Roxon and four other women. On the first day, the first print run of 2+1,2 thousand copies sold out. The book, which claims that the suburban, consumerist, nuclear family represses and devitalizes women, has become a worldwide bestseller and a watershed text in the feminist movement. According to Greer, McGraw-Hill paid $29,000 for the American rights and Bantam $135,000 for the paperback. Greer was a "Saucy feminist that even men like," according to Life magazine and the book "#1: the ultimate word on sexual liberation" in Bantam. When it first appeared that it had to be reprinted monthly, it was out of print, and it has never been out of print. Wallace describes one woman who wrapped it in brown paper and kept it under her shoes because her husband wouldn't let her read it. In the United Kingdom alone, it had sold over one million copies by 1998.

The year 1970 was a pivotal one for second-wave feminism. In February, 400 women attended Ruskin College, Oxford, for the first Women's Liberation Conference in the United Kingdom. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics was published in New York in August; the Women's Strike for Equality was held throughout the United States on August 26; and, by the time her book had sold 15,000 copies (although Time magazine stated that she was a lesbian forbidding people from accepting feminism in December). Sisterhood Is Powerful, edited by Robin Morgan, and Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex appeared in September and October. Greer marched through central London on March 6, 1971, wearing a monk's costume, with 2,500 people in a Women's Liberation March. By the month, The Female Eunuch had been translated into eight languages and had just about sold out its second printing. In the United States, McGraw-Hill published it on April 16, 1971. Greer's toast in New York, Greer, insisted on staying at the Hotel Chelsea, a writer and artist haunt, rather than at the Algonquin Hotel, where her publisher had reserved her; her book launch had to be postponed due to so many people attending. According to a New York Times book review, she was described as "[s]ix feet tall, restlessly attractive, with blue-gray eyes and a profile like Garbo." "The most lovable creature to come out of Australia since the koala bear," her publishers wrote.

A Paladin paperback was followed by a coat of arms by British artist John Holmes, who was inspired by René Magritte's René Magritte, with a female torso hanging from a rail and a handle on each hip. "Probably the most memorable and unnerving book cover ever created," Clive Hamilton said. "Some fibreglass cast on a factory production line," Christine Wallace said. Holmes' first version was a faceless, breastless, naked woman, "unmistably Germaine...", "presumably amputated in the design of a 'female eunuch' based on an alleged equivalence of testicles and mammary glands." Farrar, Straus & Giroux reissued the book in 2001, following Jennifer Baumgardner, a leading third-wave feminist and editor of the publisher's Feminist Classics series. Greer emerged as "the third wave's most popular second-wave feminist," according to Justyna Wlodarczyk.

The Female Eunuch explores how a male-dominated world influences a female's sense of self, as well as how sexist stereotypes undermine female logic, autonomy, and sexuality. The message is that women must search within for personal liberation before attempting to change the world. Greer addresses the stereotypes, myths, and misinterpretation that contribute to the oppression in a series of chapters in five sections: Body, Soul, Love, Hate, and Revolution. "Do what you want and need what you do, not take it up the arse," the book's position in 2018 was described as "Do what you like and want what you do." Wallace argues that this is a libertarian message with its roots in the Sydney Push rather than one that grew out of the feminism of the day. The book's first paragraph establishes the book's place in feminist historiography (in a previous draft): "So far the female liberation movement is tiny, privileged, and overrated": the book's first paragraph.

What will you do?"

Two of the book's themes prefigured Sex and Destiny, namely that the nuclear family is a dangerous environment for women and the raising of children, and that the production of women's sexuality by Western culture is demeaning and confining. Girls are feminized from childhood by being taught rules that subjugate them. Later on, as women embrace the stereotypical image of adult femininity, they suffer a sense of anxiety about their own bodies and lose their inherent and political autonomy. The result is powerlessness, loneliness, a lack of sexuality, and a lack of joy. "Who are castrated in farming in order to please their master's ulterior motives," she told The New York Times in March 1971, "women have been barred from action." "W]omen have no idea how much men hate them," the book claims, "[m]en do not know the depth of their hatred." Feminism, the first-wave, had failed in its revolutionary aspirations. "Reaction is not revolution," she wrote. "It is not a sign of a revolution" where the oppressed take the oppressors' style and practice oppression on their own behalf." "When women ape men, it is not a sign of progress," Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), has called for women's "equality of opportunity within the status quo, free admission to the world of the ulcer and the coronary."

Although Greer's book made no use of autobiographical information, unlike other feminist works at the time, it was not used in autobiographical terms. Greer's "entire oeuvre" was regarded as autobiographical by Mary Evans, who argued against the female body's powerlessness against the backdrop of the missing male hero (her father). Arlyn Diamond, a feminist scholar who wrote the book for The Massachusetts Review in 1972, wrote that although flawed, it was also "intuitively and brilliantly correct," but she chastised Greer for her gender roles.

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