Germaine Greer - Biography, The Female Eunuch, Other publications, Recent events in her life, Trivia, Books by Germaine Greer
Feminist, writer, and lecturer, born in Melbourne, Victoria, SE Australia. She studied at Melbourne, Sydney, and Cambridge universities, and became a lecturer in English at Warwick University (196873) and is currently professor of English and Comparative Studies there. Her controversial and highly successful book The Female Eunuch (1970) portrayed marriage as a legalized form of slavery for women, and attacked the misrepresentation of female sexuality by male-dominated society. She was director (197982) of the Tulsa Center for the Study of Women's Literature, OK, and since 1989 has been special lecturer and unofficial fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. Later works include The Change (1991), Slip-shod Sibyls (1995), The Whole Woman (1999), which takes stock of the current situation of the feminist movement, The Beautiful Boy (2003), and Whitefella Jump Up (2004).
|
Greer in 2006 |
|
| Born: |
January 29, 1939 Melbourne, Australia |
|---|---|
| Occupation(s): | professor, media personality |
| Nationality: | Australian |
| Writing period: | 1970-present |
| Subject(s): | English Literature, Women's issues |
| Literary movement: | feminism |
| Influenced: | Camille Paglia |
Germaine Greer (born January 29, 1939) is an Australian academic, writer, and broadcaster, who is widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the 20th century.
Greer is Professor Emeritus of English literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick in England after having recently retired, and is the author of several highly acclaimed books. Greer's ground-breaking The Female Eunuch became an international bestseller when it was published in 1970, turning Greer overnight into a household name, and bringing her both adulation and criticism.
Her ideas have created controversy ever since.
"[Her] mind provokes us like no other," journalist Catherine Keenan wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald, "but for all the wrong reasons."
Biography
Greer was born in Melbourne in 1939, growing up in the bayside suburb of Mentone. The writer Christine Wallace describes Greer at that time:
For Germaine, [the Push] provided a philosophy to underpin the attitude and lifestyle she had already acquired in Melbourne.
In her first teaching job, Greer lectured at the University of Sydney, gaining an M.A.
Professor Lisa Jardine, who was at Newnham with her, recalled the first time she met Greer, at a college formal dinner:
The principal called us to order for the speeches.
Greer joined the student amateur acting company, the Cambridge Footlights, which launched her into the London arts and media scene. The July 29, 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 received her Ph.D.
Following her 1970 success with The Female Eunuch, Greer left Warwick in 1972 after flying around 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 traveling 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.
In 1989, Greer returned to Newnham College, Cambridge as a special lecturer and fellow, but left after attracting negative publicity in 1996 for allegedly "outing" Dr. Rachel Padman, a transsexual colleague. Greer unsuccessfully opposed Padman's election to a fellowship, on the grounds that Padman had been born a man, and Newnham was a women's college.
Stephanie Merritt wrote in The Guardian:
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.
The Female Eunuch
Greer argued in her book, The Female Eunuch, that women don't realize how much men hate them, and how much they are taught to hate themselves.
The book's main thesis is that the traditional, suburban, consumerist, nuclear family represses women sexually, and that this devitalizes them, rendering them "eunuchs".
"The title is an indication of the problem," Greer told the New York Times, "Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality.
Two of the book's themes already pointed the way to her later book Sex and Destiny, namely that the nuclear family is a bad environment for women and for the raising of children; 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.
Greer argued that change had to come about by revolution, not evolution.
While being interviewed about the book in 1971, she told the New York Times that she had been a "supergroupie."
Other publications
Her second book, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, was published in 1979.
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 behavior, and the commercialization of sexuality and women's bodies. Greer's apparent approval of life styles and family values in the developing world — the world is over-populated, she argued, only by Western standards of comfortable living — and of poverty in preference to consumerism, led her to endorse practices frequently at odds with the beliefs of most Western feminists.
In 1986, she 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 and unaffectionate, weak, craven, and feeble, which led to claims — as she knew it would, according to The Guardian — that in her writing she was projecting her relationship with him onto all other men.
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 tries to dispel myths about the menopause and ill health, advising against the use of hormone replacement therapy. It is fear, she wrote, that "makes women comply with schemes and policies that work against their interest" (The Age, July 13, 2002).
Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet followed in 1995 and, in 1999, two books: The Female Misogynist, in which she attacked both men and women for what she saw as the lack of progress in the feminist movement, and The Whole Woman. Greer wrote in the introduction: "The contradictions women face have never been more bruising than they are now.
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", alleging that Greer had appeared to reinvent herself as a "middle-aged pederast." Greer described the book as an attempt to address 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).
Recent events in her life
On April 23, 2000, Greer was harassed in her home by a nineteen-year-old student from the University of Bath who had been writing to Greer. The student broke into her home in Essex, tied Greer up in the kitchen, and caused damage to Greer's home. Dinner guests eventually found Greer lying in a distressed state on the floor, with the student hanging onto her legs. She admitted harrassing 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.
In 2001, she attracted publicity again for a proposed treaty with Aboriginal Australia.
She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sydney.
She has made eight appearances on the British television panel show Have I Got News For You since 1990, a record she holds jointly with Will Self. 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, as Greer had written, "'fuck me' shoes".
In September 2006, Greer's column in The Guardian newspaper about the death of Australian Steve Irwin attracted criticism for what was reported as a "distasteful tirade". 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 she "really found the whole Steve Irwin phenomenon embarrassing and [that she was] not the only person who did, or indeed the only Australian who did" and that she hoped that "exploitative nature documentaries" would now end.
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.
Trivia
Germaine Greer is the subject of a song called "Mother Greer" by Australian band Augie March.
User Comments Add a comment…