Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer at the "Humber Mouth" Hullliterature festival 2006
Born	29 January 1939 (age 76) Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Pen name	Rose Blight (for Private Eye) Dr. G (for Oz)
Language	English
Nationality	Australian
Alma mater	University of Melbourne University of Sydney University of Cambridge
Period	1970–present
Genre	Feminism
Subject	English literature, French literature, romantic poetry
Notable works	The Female Eunuch

Germaine Greer at the "Humber Mouth" Hullliterature festival 2006

29 January 1939 (age 76)
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Rose Blight (for Private Eye)
Dr. G (for Oz)

English

Australian

University of Melbourne
University of Sydney
University of Cambridge

1970–present

Feminism

English literature, French literature, romantic poetry

The Female Eunuch

Germaine Greer (/ɡrɪər/; born 29 January 1939) is an Australian theorist, academic and journalist, and is regarded as having been a major feminist voice of the mid-20th century.^[1] She resides in the United Kingdom, where she is currently emeritus professor in English Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick.^[2]

Greer's ideas and her various views, not just those related to feminism, have created controversy ever since her book The Female Eunuch became an international best-seller in 1970, bringing her both adulation and opposition. She is the author of many other books including Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984); The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991); Shakespeare's Wife (2007); and The Whole Woman (1999).

Greer has defined her goal as "women's liberation", as distinct from "equality with men". She asserts that women's liberation means embracing sex differences in a positive fashion – a struggle for the freedom of women to define their own values, order their own priorities and determine their own fates. In contrast, Greer sees equality as mere assimilation and "settling" to live the lives of "unfree men".^[3]

Early life and career[edit]

Greer was born in Melbourne in 1939,^[4] the eldest of three children of Reginald and Peggy Greer. She grew up in the bayside suburb of Sandringham. Her father was a newspaper advertising representative who served in the wartime RAAF. After attending a private convent school, Star of the Sea College, in Gardenvale, she won a teaching scholarship in 1956 and enrolled at the University of Melbourne. She left home permanently due to conflict with her parents.^[5] After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English and French language and literature in 1959, she moved to Sydney, where she became involved with the Sydney Push social milieu and the anarchist Sydney Libertarians at its centre. Christine Wallace, in her unauthorised biography, describes Greer at this time:

For Germaine, [the Push] provided a philosophy to underpin the attitude and lifestyle she had already acquired in Melbourne. She walked into the Royal George Hotel, into the throng talking themselves hoarse in a room stinking of stale beer and thick with cigarette smoke, and set out to follow the Push way of life – "an intolerably difficult discipline which I forced myself to learn". The Push struck her as completely different from the Melbourne intelligentsia she had engaged with in the Drift, "who always talked about art and truth and beauty and argument ad hominem; instead, these people talked about truth and only truth, 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". Her Damascus turned out to be the Royal George, and the Hume Highway was the road linking it. "I was already an anarchist", she says. "I just didn't know why I was an anarchist. They put me in touch with the basic texts and I found out what the internal logic was about how I felt and thought.^[6]

By 1972 Greer would identify as an anarchist communist, close to Marxism.^[7]

In her first teaching post, Greer lectured at the University of Sydney, where she also earned a first class MA in romantic poetry in 1963 with a thesis entitled The Development of Byron's Satiric Mode. A year later, the thesis won her a Commonwealth Scholarship, which she used to fund her doctorate at the University of Cambridge in England, where she became a member of the all-women's Newnham College. Greer permanently relocated to England for more opportunity, finding her life in Australia dull and further stated that she "did believe in the greatAustralian ugliness".^[8]

Professor Lisa Jardine, who was at Newnham at the same time, 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, two stitched white cantilevered cones which bore no resemblance to the female anatomy. 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.^[9]

Greer joined the student amateur acting company, the Cambridge Footlights, which launched her into the London arts and media scene. Using the pen name Rose Blight, she also wrote a gardening column for the satirical magazine Private Eye, and as Dr. G, became a regular contributor to the underground London magazine Oz, owned by the Australian writer Richard Neville.^[10] The 29 July 1970 edition was guest-edited by Greer, and featured an article of hers on the hand-knitted Cock Sock, "a snug corner for a chilly prick". She also posed nude for Oz on the understanding that the male editors would do likewise: they did not. Greer was also editor of the Amsterdam underground magazine Suck, which published a full-page photograph of Greer: "stripped to the buff, looking at the lens through my thighs". Greer has said that "cunt" is one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock.^[11][12]

In 1968, Greer received her Ph.D. on the topic of Elizabethan drama with a thesis entitled The Ethic of Love and Marriage in Shakespeare's Early Comedies and accepted a lectureship in English at the University of Warwick in Coventry.

§

Middle career[edit]

Greer's first book, The Female Eunuch, was published in 1970, and became an international bestseller and an important text in the feminist movement. The main thesis of the book is that the "traditional" suburban, consumerist, nuclear family represses women sexually, and that this devitalizes them, rendering them eunuchs.

Following the success of The Female Eunuch, Greer resigned her post at the University of Warwick in 1972 after travelling the world to promote her book. She co-presented aGranada Television comedy show called Nice Time with Kenny Everett and Jonathan Routh, bought a house in Italy, wrote a column for The Sunday Times, then spent the next few years travelling through Africa and Asia, which included a visit to Bangladesh to investigate the situation of women who had been raped during the conflict withPakistan.

In the mid-1970s, Greer appeared on conservative William F. Buckley's Firing Line. In his memoir, Buckley recalled that Greer had "trounced him" during the debate. He wrote, "Nothing I said, and memory reproaches me for having performed miserably, made any impression or any dent in the argument. She carried the house overwhelmingly."^[13] In 1979 Greer was appointed to a post in the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, as the director for the Center of the Study of Women's Literature. She was also the founding editor of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, an academic journal, during 1981–82.^[14]

§Later career[edit]

Greer refused to sign a petition in support of Salman Rushdie's controversial 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, stating that it was "about his own troubles", and adding that Rushdie was "a megalomaniac, an Englishman with a dark skin".^[15]

In 1989, Greer was appointed as a special lecturer and fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge, England. Greer unsuccessfully opposed the election to a fellowship of hertranssexual colleague Rachael Padman. Greer argued that Padman had been born male, and therefore should not be admitted to Newnham, a women's college.^[16][17][18]Greer resigned in 1996 after the case attracted negative publicity. An article concerning the incident was published on 25 June 1997 by Clare Longrigg of The Guardian. Entitled "A Sister with No Fellow Feeling", it disappeared from websites after print publication, on the instruction of the newspaper's lawyers.^[19][20]

In 1997, Greer lamented the fact that J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings had topped several opinion polls as "the greatest novel of the twentieth century". According to Greer, "Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964 and encountered a tribe of full-grown women wearing puffed sleeves, clutching teddies, and babbling excitedly about the doings of hobbits, it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad dream has materialized. At the head of the list, in pride of place as the book of the century, stands The Lord of the Rings."^[21]

In 2000 a female student was charged with assault and unlawful imprisonment of Greer in her own house. The student subsequently pleaded guilty to harassment, and the other charges were withdrawn.^[22][23]

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Greer appeared alongside Daniel O'Donnell, the popular Irish crooner, on an RTÉ chat show in 2006. While O'Donnell spoke about love, cooking and his mother's pancakes, Greer mocked him by making faces to camera behind his back. The normally unflappable O'Donnell confronted her and some bitter words were exchanged.^[24]

Over the years Greer has continued to self-identify as an anarchist or Marxist. In her books she has dealt very little with political labels of this type, but has reaffirmed her position in interviews. She stated on ABC Television in 2008 that "I ought to confess I suppose that I'm a Marxist. I think that reality comes first and ideology comes second," and elaborated later in the program to a question on whether feminism was the only successful revolution of the 20th century saying:

The difficulty for me is that I believe 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.^[25]

Speaking on an interview for 3CR (an Australian community radio station), also in 2008, she described herself as "an old anarchist" and reaffirmed that opposition to "hierarchy and capitalism" were at the centre of her politics.^[26]

In January 2012, Greer appeared on the BBC television programme Question Time and affirmed her membership of the British Liberal Democrats party.^[27]

The University of Melbourne announced on 28 October 2013 that it will become the global repository for the lifetime archive of Greer's work. The archive includes letters from family, friends, writers, artists, academics, broadcasters, editors, scholars, critics, politicians and neighbours, in addition to numerous other items and will fill over 150 filing cabinet drawers. The transfer of the archive from Greer's British home will commence in July 2014 and the University will raise A$3 million in donations to facilitate the entire process. Greer has stated that the payment she will personally receive will be donated to her charity, The Friends of Gondwana Rainforest.^[28]

^{This News is Reprinted from site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germaine_Greer}