Germaine Greer

Author

1939 –

 Credit »
51

Who is Germaine Greer?

Germaine Greer is an Australian academic and journalist, and was a major feminist voice of the mid-20th century.

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; The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause; Shakespeare's Wife; and The Whole Woman.

Greer has defined her goal as "women's liberation" as distinct from "equality with men". She asserts that women's liberation meant embracing gender 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".

Greer's various views, not just related to feminism, have attracted much controversy throughout her career.

Famous Quotes:

  • The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
  • All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.
  • Maybe I couldn't make it. Maybe I don't have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky ass, a sexy voice. Maybe I don't know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I'm sick of the masquerade. I'm sick of pretending eternal youth. I'm sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I'm sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I'm sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I'm sick of the Powder Room. I'm sick of pretending that some fatuous male's self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I'm sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I'm sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.
  • 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.
  • Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.
  • There has come into existence, chiefly in America, a breed of men who claim to be feminists. They imagine that they have understood what women want and that they are capable of giving it to them. They help with the dishes at home and make their own coffee in the office, basking the while in the refulgent consciousness of virtue. Such men are apt to think of the true male feminists as utterly chauvinistic.
  • Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.
  • I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.
  • 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.
  • We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.

We need you!

Help us build the largest biographies collection on the web!

Born
Jan 29, 1939
Melbourne
Also known as
  • Dr. Germaine Greer
  • Prof. Germaine Greer
  • Professor Germaine Greer
Spouses
Ethnicity
  • Australians in the United Kingdom
Nationality
  • Australia
Profession
Education
  • University of Melbourne
  • Newnham College, Cambridge
  • University of Warwick
  • University of Sydney
  • University of Cambridge

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

Citation

Use the citation below to add to a bibliography:

Style:MLAChicagoAPA

"Germaine Greer." Biographies.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Mar. 2024. <https://www.biographies.net/people/en/germaine_greer>.

Discuss this Germaine Greer biography with the community:

0 Comments

    Browse Biographies.net