Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer at the "Humber Mouth" Hull literature festival 2006
Born	29 January 1939 (1939-01-29) (age 72) Melbourne, Australia
Occupation	Academic writer
Nationality	Australian
Ethnicity	White
Education	University of Melbourne (B.A.) University of Sydney (M.A.) University of Cambridge (Ph.D.)
Period	1970–present
Subjects	Art history, English literature, feminism
Notable work(s)	The Female Eunuch
Influences Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir

Germaine Greer (born 29 January 1939) is an Australian writer, academic, journalist and scholar of early modern English literature, widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the later 20th century.^[1][2][3]

Greer's ideas have created controversy ever since her book The Female Eunuch became an international best-seller in 1970, turning her into a household name and bringing her both adulation and opposition. She is also the author of many other books including, Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984); The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991) and Shakespeare's Wife (2007). She currently serves as Professor Emeritus of English Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick.

Germaine Greer has defined her goal as 'women's liberation' as distinct from 'equality with men'.^[4]

Biography

Early life

Germaine Greer was born in Melbourne in 1939, growing up in the bayside suburb of Mentone. Her father was an Australian newspaper advertising rep 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. After graduating with a degree in English and French language and literature, 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.^[5]

By 1972 Greer would identify as an anarchist communist, close to Marxism.^[6]

In her first teaching post, Greer lectured at the University of Sydney, where she also earned a first class M.A. in romantic poetry in 1963 with a thesis titled 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.

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 ... [W]e 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.^[7]

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.^[8] 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."Germaine Greer has said that ""Cunt" is one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock." ^[9][10]

In 1968 she received her Ph.D. on the topic of Elizabethan drama with a thesis titled The Ethic of Love and Marriage in Shakespeare's early comedies, and accepted a lectureship in English at the University of Warwick in Coventry. The same year, in London, she married Australian journalist Paul du Feu, but the marriage lasted only three weeks, during which, as she later admitted, Greer was unfaithful several times.^[11] The marriage finally ended in divorce in 1973.

Early career

Following her success with the publication in 1970 of The Female Eunuch, Greer resigned her post at Warwick University in 1972 after travelling the world to promote her book. She co-presented a Granada 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 with Pakistan. On the New Zealand leg of her tour in 1972, Greer was arrested for using the words "bullshit" and "fuck" during her speech, which attracted major rallies in her support.^{[1][2][3][12][13][14][15][16][17]}

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."^[18]

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.^[19]

Later career

In 1989, Greer was appointed as a special lecturer and fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. Greer unsuccessfully opposed the election to a fellowship of her transexual colleague Rachael Padman. Greer argued that Padman had been born male, and therefore should not be admitted to Newnham, a women's college. 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.^[20][21][22]

Over the years Greer has continued to self-identify as an anarchist or a 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."^[23]

Speaking on an interview for 3CR (an Australian community radio), 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.^[24]

Works

The Female Eunuch

The 1971 paperback edition of The Female Eunuch featuring John Holmes's iconic cover art

Greer argued in her book, The Female Eunuch, that women do not realise how much men hate them, and how much they are taught to hate themselves. Christine Wallace writes that, when The Female Eunuch was first published, one woman had to keep it wrapped in brown paper because her husband wouldn't let her read it; arguments and fights broke out over dinner tables and copies of it were thrown across rooms at unsuspecting husbands (Wallace 1997). It arrived in the stores in London in October 1970. By March 1971, it had nearly sold out its second printing and had been translated into eight languages.

"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 vigour for delicacy and succulence, and one that's got to be changed."^[25]

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:

The ignorance and isolation of most women mean that they are incapable of making conversation: most of their communication with their spouses is a continuation of the power struggle. The result is that when wives come along to dinner parties they pervert civilised conversation about real issues into personal quarrels. The number of hostesses who wish they did not have to invite wives is legion.

Greer argued that women should get to know and come to accept their own bodies, taste their own menstrual blood, and give up celibacy and monogamy. But they should not burn their bras. "Bras are a ludicrous invention," she wrote, "but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression."

While being interviewed about the book in 1971, she told the New York Times that she had been a "supergroupie." "Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors," she said. "When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage. I think groupies are important because they demystify sex; they accept it as physical, and they aren't possessive about their conquests."

Publications in the 1970s and 1980s

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. It also speculates on the existence of women artists whose careers are not recorded by posterity. Greer translated Aristophanes's Lysistrata in 1972.

Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility, published in 1984, continued Greer's critique of Western attitudes toward sexuality, fertility, family, and the imposition of those attitudes on the rest of the world. Greer's target again is the nuclear family, government intervention in sexual behaviour, and the commercialisation of sexuality and women's bodies. Germaine Greer 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. She argued that the birth control movement had been tainted by such attitudes from its beginning, citing Marie Stopes and others. She cautioned against condemning life styles and family values in the developing world.

In 1986, Greer published Shakespeare, a work of literary criticism, and The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings, a collection of newspaper and magazine articles written between 1968 and 1985. 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 characterized as inevitable in an interview with The Guardian — that in her writing she was projecting her relationship with him onto all other men.

Publications since 1990

The Beautiful Boy, 2003

In 1991, The Change: Women, Ageing, and the Menopause, which the New York Times called a "brilliant, gutsy, exhilarating, exasperating fury of a book" became another influential book in the women's movement. In it, Greer wrote of the various myths concerning 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: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet followed in 1995.

In 1999, the whole woman, which was intended as a sequel to The Female Eunuch was released. In this book she discussed what she saw as the lack of fundamental progress in the feminist movement, and criticized some sections of the women's movement for illusions on that score:^[4]

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.

Chapter titles reveal the themes, including: "Food," "Breast," "Pantomime Dames (about transsexual women)," "Shopping," "Estrogen," "Testosterone," "Wives," "Loathing," "Girlpower" and "Mutilation" (including a discussion of female genital mutilation in the Third World and the West). Her comments about female genital mutilation proved especially controversial in some quarters, for example a United Kingdom House of Commons Committee described her viewpoint as "simplistic and offensive."^[26][27] In fact Greer was opposed to the practice and that feminists fighting to eliminate female genital mutilation in their own countries "must be supported",^[4] but had explored some of the complexities of the issue, and the double standards of the West, and warned against using the issue to "reinforce our notions of cultural superiority".^[4] She had pointed out that the term "female genital mutilation" was itself simplistic being used to describe practices varying from "nicking the prepuce of the clitoris to provoke ritual bleeding",^[4] to the extreme mutilation of infibulation. She questioned the perhaps simplistic view that female genital mutilation was necessarily imposed by men on women rather than by women on women, or even freely chosen, adducing some anecdotal evidence to the contrary^[4] and discussed the issue in relation to some of the forms of genital and other bodily mutilations carried out in the West on men and women. She notes for example that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends female genital mutilation of baby girls with "over long" clitorides and that five such procedures are in fact carried out every day in the United States, without being included in "female genital mutilation" statistics^[4] In particular she compared female genital mutilation to the practice of male genital mutilation^[4]:

Any suggestion that male genital mutilation should be outlawed would be understood to be a frontal attack on the cultural identity of Jews and Muslims.

The same issues are raised by female genital mutilation. As a practical note for activists:^[4]

As UN workers in East Uganda found, women would not abandon female circumcision until some similarly significant procedure could take its place.

Other controversial points in this book include Germaine Greer's opposition to accepting male-born transsexuals as women:^[4]

Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to recognize 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.

In 2003, The Beautiful Boy was published, an art history book about the beauty of teenage boys, which is illustrated with 200 photographs of what The Guardian called "succulent teenage male beauty".^[28] 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" (Greer 2003). The photograph on the cover was of Björn Andrésen in his character of Tadzio in the film Death in Venice (1971). The actor has been quoted by journalists as complaining about the picture's use.^[29][30]

Whitefella Jump Up : The shortest way to nationhood was published in 2003 as Issue 11 of the "Quarterly Essay" series ^[31] Germaine Greer argues that Australians should reimagine Australia as an Aboriginal nation; and discusses some of the consequences of this, and why she regrads it as feasible and desirable. "Jump up" in Aboriginal Kriol can, she writes, mean "to be resurrected or reborn"; and the title refers to occasions when Aborigines apparently accepted whites as reincarnated relatives. Germaine Greer suggests that whites were mistaken in understanding this literally, and that the Aborigines were in fact offering the whites concerned terms on which they could be accepted into the Aboriginal kinship system. The gist of the essay is that it may not be too late for Australia as a nation to root itself in Aboriginal history and culture in an analogous way.

In 2007, Greer contributed an essay to the book Stella Vine: Paintings^[32] which accompanied the major solo exhibition of British painter Stella Vine at Modern Art Oxford museum in England. In May 2007, Greer and Vine took part in a public talk Gender & Culture^[33] as part of the Women's International Arts Festival.^[34] On 18 September 2007, Greer gave a talk about Vine's art with gallery director Andrew Nairne.^[35] Also in 2007, Greer published a biography of Anne Hathaway entitled Shakespeare's Wife, one of the few books to deal with this subject.

In 2008, she wrote the essay On Rage about the widespread rage of indigenous men, published in the series "Little Books on Big Themes" by Melbourne University Publishing, launched by Bob Carr on 15 August 2008.^[36]

Other media

Greer wrote the episode Make Love not War for the 1998 television documentary series Cold War.

Greer responded to Christine Wallace's biography, Germaine Greer: The Untamed Shrew (1997), by claiming that biographies of living persons are morbid and worthless, as they can only be incomplete. She said: "I don't write about any living women ... because I think that's invidious; there is no point in limiting her by the achievements of the past because she's in a completely different situation, and I figure she can break the moulds and start again."^[37]

In 1999, she sat for a nude photograph by the Australian photographer Polly Borland.^[38] The photo was part of an exhibition at the UK's National Portrait Gallery in 2000. It later appeared in a book titled Polly Borland: Australians.^[39]

She has made frequent appearances on the BBC's satirical television panel show Have I Got News For You, including one in the programme's very first series in 1990. Her nine appearances as a panellist is the show's current record for a female guest (beaten only in the all-time list by comedians Alexander Armstrong, and Jack Dee), with the most recent occasion being in November 2008. Her most memorable appearance was in 1995 when Ian Hislop quoted Greer's spat with a fellow broadsheet columnist, Suzanne Moore, which included a reference to Moore wearing "fuck me shoes".

Greer was one of nine contestants in the 2005 series of Celebrity Big Brother UK. She had previously said that the show was "as civilised as looking through the keyhole in your teenager's bedroom door". She walked out of the show after five days inside the 'Big Brother house', citing the psychological cruelty and bullying of the show's producers, the dirt of the house, and the publicity-seeking behaviour of her fellow contestants. However since then she has appeared on spin-off shows Big Brother's Little Brother and Big Brother's Big Mouth.^[40]

In September 2006, Greer's column in The Guardian about the death of Australian Steve Irwin attracted much criticism and some support. Greer said that "The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin". In an interview with the Nine Network's A Current Affair about her comments, Greer said "I really found the whole Steve Irwin phenomenon embarrassing and I'm not the only person who did" and that she hoped that "exploitative nature documentaries" would now end.^{[41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48]}

In October 2006, Greer appeared twice in an episode of Ricky Gervais' Extras playing herself.

In the same month she presented a BBC Radio 4 documentary on the life of American composer and rock guitarist Frank Zappa. She confirmed that she had been a friend of Zappa's since the early 1970s and that his orchestral work "G-Spot Tornado" would be played at her funeral.^[49]

Aboriginal Australians

Germaine Greer has published two pamphlets on Aboriginal issues, noted above.

According to Germaine Greer's 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." ^[50] 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 ^[51] She wrote in 2003:

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. "Its 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. ^[52]

It has been reported in the press that in early 2000, Greer claimed at a press gathering in London that she never set foot in Australia before receiving the permission of the "traditional owners of the land" at Sydney Airport. New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council spokesman Paul Molloy was reported as claiming that she had never asked permission, despite visiting Sydney several times in recent years, and in any case there was no single group of elders that could give such permission to enter Australia.^[53] In assessing the credibility or significance of these press reports it should be noted that Molloy's quoted point was made by Germaine Greer herself in her 2003 pamphlet Whitefella Jump Up ^[54], "...Aboriginal law cannot now be reapplied. In any case no single body of Aboriginal law would ever have applied to the Australian population as a whole...."

Personal assault

On 23 April 2000, Greer was assaulted in her home by a 19-year-old female student from the University of Bath who had been writing to her. The student broke into her home in Essex, tied Greer up in the kitchen, and caused damage to Greer's home. Friends Greer was to have met for dinner elsewhere eventually found Greer lying in a distressed state on the floor, with the student hanging onto her legs. BBC News reported that the student was originally charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm and with false imprisonment, but those charges were dropped and replaced with the harassment charge. She admitted harassing Greer and was sentenced to two years' probation and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment. Greer was not hurt and told reporters: "I am not angry, I am not upset, I am not hurt. I am fine. I haven't lost my sense of humour. I am not the victim here."^[55][56]

In popular culture

• Greer is the subject of a song called "Mother Greer" by Australian band Augie March.^[57]
• Greer is famous for saying :I think that testosterone is a rare poison.^[58]
• An excerpt from a speech made by Greer appears as track one of Sinéad O'Connor's album Universal Mother. The track is called "Germaine" and is from a Greer oration about matriarchy and fraternity.
• The 2008 Beeban Kidron film Hippie Hippie Shake, based on Richard Neville's memoir, features Emma Booth playing Greer. Greer has expressed her displeasure at being depicted in the film.^[59]
• The play The Female of the Species (2006) by Joanna Murray-Smith is loosely based on events in Greer's life, the assault and false imprisonment in 2000, and uses Greer as "inspiration for a comic attack on strident feminism"; the main character's name in that play is Margot Mason.^[60][61] Greer regarded the play as an attack and stated that it was "threadbare". However she has not actually read the script.^[62][63]

References

Further reading

• Kearney, Kay (2008). "The liberation of Germaine Greer". The Australian Women's Weekly: celebrating 75 years as an Australian icon. Sydney, NSW: ACP Books. pp. 164–167. ISBN 9781876624040. 

External links

• Germaine Greer at the Internet Movie Database
• On Rage: Video of Germaine Greer delivering keynote address at Melbourne Writers Festival on SlowTV
• Philm Freax: Germaine Greer, "A Groupie in Women's Lib" Interview for Rolling Stone by Robert Greenfield.

British Underground People Jim Anderson · Edward Barker · Syd Barrett · Mark Boyle · Joe Boyd · Barney Bubbles · Bob Cobbing · Caroline Coon · Felix Dennis · Robin Farquharson · Mick Farren · Germaine Greer · Hapshash and the Coloured Coat · Jim Haynes · John Hopkins · Michael Horovitz · Peter Jenner & Andrew King · Tom McGrath · John Michell · Barry Miles · Richard Neville · Jeff Nuttall · John Peel · Aubrey Powell · Sid Rawle  · Martin Sharp · Steve Peregrin Took · Alexander Trocchi · Heathcote Williams Publications Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain · The Black Dwarf · Friends · Gandalf's Garden · Gay News · Ink · International Times · The Mersey Sound · Oz · Schoolkids OZ · Peace News · Spare Rib Bands AMM · Arthur Brown · Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band · Edgar Broughton Band · Delivery · The Deviants · Fairport Convention · Family · Hawkwind · The Incredible String Band · Pink Fairies · Pink Floyd · The Pretty Things · The Purple Gang · Quintessence · Soft Machine · Third Ear Band · Tomorrow Other Arts Lab · Better Books · BIT · Compendium Books · The 14 Hour Technicolour Dream · Games for May · Granny Takes a Trip · Indica Gallery · International Poetry Incarnation · London Free School · London Film-Makers' Co-op · Release · UFO Club See also British Poetry Revival · Counterculture · English underground · Freak scene · Youth subculture