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| Germaine Greer | |
|---|---|
 Germaine Greer at the "Humber Mouth" Hull literature festival 2006 | |
| Born | 29 January 1939 (age 69) Melbourne, Australia |
| Occupation | academic writer |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Writing period | 1970-present |
| Subjects | English literature, feminism, art history |
|
Influences | |
Germaine Greer (born 29 January 1939) is an Australian born writer, journalist and scholar of early modern English literature, widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the later 20th century.
Greer\'s ideas have created controversy ever since her ground-breaking The Female Eunuch became an international best-seller in 1970, turning her overnight into a household name and bringing her both adulation and criticism. She is also the author of Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984); and The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991), and most recently Shakespeare\'s Wife (2007).
Contents |
Greer was born in Melbourne in 1939, growing up in the bayside suburb of Mentone. Her father was a leading Australian insurance executive, who served as a Wing Commander in the wartime RAAF. After attending a private convent school, Star of the Sea College, in Gardenvale, Melbourne, 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, a group of intellectual left-wing anarchists many of whom practised polygamy. Christine Wallace, in her unauthorised biography, describes Greer at this time:
| “ | ” |
By 1972 Greer would identify as an "anarchist communist", close to Marxism. Greer on Revolution Germaine on Love. Overland 50/51 Autumn 1972 (Recorded February 1972). Retrieved on 2007-08-16. “"I am much more political now than I was then [i.e. than when a Sydney Libertarian] - I\'m an anarchist still, but I\'d say now I am an anarchist communist which I wasn\'t then .....The libertarians may have a good deal of intellectual prestige in Sydney, but seeing that they speak in self-evident truths and tautologies most of the time it\'s not difficult for them to get intellectual recognition. What disappoints me most about all the radical groups in Australia is that they have not yet managed to make the Marxist dialogue a part of the cultural life of the country as a whole, which it is say for example in India - it\'s something you expect to see discussed in the daily papers."”
In her first teaching job, Greer lectured at the University of Sydney, where she also gained 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:
| “ | Insert the text of the quote here, without quotation marks. | ” |
Greer joined the student amateur acting company, the Cambridge Footlights, which launched her into the London arts and media scene. Using the nom de plume 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 Oz magazine, owned by the Australian writer Richard Neville.Oz magazine richardneville.com.au 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 also posed nude for Oz on the understanding that the male editors would do likewise: they did not.
In 1968 she received her Ph.D. in 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, UK. 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.Enough Rope Andrew Denton, ABC TV, September 15 2003, Retrieved on February 8 2007. The marriage finally ended in divorce in 1973.
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 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.Jardine, Lisa. "Growing up with Greer", The Guardian, March 7, 1999.Bone, Pamela. "Western sisters failing the fight", The Australian, March 8, 2007."Germaine Greer," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007.Why does everyone hate me? January 17 2007Gibson, Owen. "Greer walks out of \'bullying\' Big Brother", The Guardian, January 12, 2005Greer, Germaine. "Filth!", The Sunday Times, January 16, 2005Jardine, Lisa. Growing up with Greer, The Guardian, March 7, 1999Pickering, Charlie. "Nasty Creatures Invading Our Habitat; When a recently deceased crocodile hunter meets a reptile of the press, it\'s hardly a fair contest.", City Weekly, September 14, 2006Shukor, Steven. "From feminist sister to Big Brother housemate", The Guardian, January 7, 2005Weintraub, Judith. "Germaine Greer - Opinions That May Shock the Faithful", New York Times, March 22, 1971
During the 1970s Greer reinvented herself as an art historian, and undertook research for The Obstacle Race, the Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work .
Also in 1979, she accepted a post at 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 1981-2."Tulsa Studies in Women\'s Literature" - About
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 male, and Newnham was a women\'s college. A June 25, 1997 article by Clare Longrigg in The Guardian about the incident, entitled "A Sister with No Fellow Feeling", disappeared from websites on the instruction of the newspaper\'s lawyers.In the news:1997 Press For Change.org.ukBrilliant Careers - Germaine GreerThe genius of Madonna
Stephanie Merritt wrote in The Guardian: Template:Cquote2
Greer\'s latest academic appointment is as a Professor in the Department of English Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick, Coventry.
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."New York Times, 22 March 1971
Two of the book\'s themes already pointed the way to Sex and Destiny fourteen 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 change had to come about by revolution, not evolution. 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."
Her second book, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, was published in 1979. This work details the life and experiences of female painters until the end of the nineteenth century. It also speculates on the existence of women artists whose careers are not recorded by posterity.
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. 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. Female genital mutilation had to be considered in context, she wrote, and might be compared with breast augmentation in the West. The book consequently attracted a great deal of criticism. Pamela Bone wrote in The Australian:
| “ | Insert the text of the quote here, without quotation marks. | ” |
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 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. "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" (The Age, July 13, 2002).
Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet followed in 1995 and, in 1999, the whole woman, intended as a sequel to The Female Eunuch, 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. The chapter titles reveal the theme: "Food," "Breast," "Pantomime Dames," "Shopping," "Estrogen," "Testosterone," "Wives," "Loathing," "Girlpower", mirroring the arrangement of chapters in the earlier book. Greer wrote in the introduction: "The contradictions women face have never been more bruising than they are now. The career woman does not know if she is to do her job like a man or like herself ... Is motherhood a privilege or a punishment? ... [F]ake equality is leading women into double jeopardy ... It\'s time to get angry again."
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."Danger mouth October 5, 2003 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). The boy pictured on the cover was Björn Andresen, who has said that the use of his picture is "distasteful", and he was not consulted about its use.\'I feel used\' October 16, 2003I\'m not Germaine\'s toy, says cover boy October 18, 2003
A biography by Christine Wallace, Germaine Greer, The Untamed Shrew, was published in 1997. Greer responded that biographies of living persons are morbid and worthless, because 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."Four Corners, ABC, September 1979.
In 1999, she sat for a modest nude photograph by the respected Australian photographer Polly Borland.Germaine Greer by Polly Borland NPG x88457 , October 1999 The photo was part of a National Portrait Gallery exhibition in 2000. It later appeared in a book titled Polly Borland: Australians.Polly Borland: Australians
Belinda Luscombe in Time Magazine called Greer "the ultimate Trojan Horse, gorgeous and witty, built to penetrate the seemingly unassailable fortress of patriarchy and let the rest of us foot soldiers in," describing her as "a joy to read, an eloquent maniac." Angela Carter described her as "a clever fool", while former British Conservative MP Edwina Currie called her "a great big hard-boiled prat".Stephanie Merritt. Danger Mouth, The Guardian, October 5, 2003[opinion needs balancing]
"[Her] mind provokes us like no other," journalist Catherine Keenan wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald, "but for all the wrong reasons." Catherine Keenan. "A new outbreak of Germ\'s warfare", Sydney Morning Herald, August 28, 2004.
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. In an embarrassing turn of events, New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council spokesman Paul Molloy later claimed 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.\'Germaine, try this on for size\' September 08, 2006
On April 23, 2000, Greer was harassed in her home by a nineteen-year-old female 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. 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."Sapsted, David. "Stalker jumped on Greer crying \'Mummy, Mummy\'", The Daily Telegraph, July 5, 2000.\'Infatuated\' student harassed Greer, BBC News, July 4, 2000. Retrieved on 1 November, 2006.
In 2001, she attracted publicity again for a proposed treaty with Aboriginal Australia. In 2004, Australian Prime Minister John Howard called her "elitist" and "condescending" after she criticised Australians as "too relaxed to give a damn" and derided her native country as being "defined by suburban mediocrity." She called Australia a sports-obsessed suburban wasteland devoid of cerebral stimulation. This prompted a lot of reaction, including reaction from Prime Minister John Howard who called her comments "pathetic"."Outrage as Greer brands Australians dull as Neighbours", The Scotsman, January 28 2004. Retrieved on 1 November 2006.
Since 1990 she has made eight appearances on the British television panel show Have I Got News For You, 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 "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."Germaine Greer: Filth!", The Sunday Times, January 16 2005. Retrieved on 1 November 2006.
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 "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. Queensland Premier Peter Beattie labelled her comments "stupid" and "insensitive", one of a number of Australian political leaders to make similar comments. While several Australian newspapers reproduced part of her column they also published letters from readers incensed by her comments the following day. Other Australian commentators, such as P. P. McGuinness, a past editor of Quadrant, supported her comments. In a mixed newspaper opinion piece she repeated her criticism of Irwin while saying that it was "disgraceful that it has taken the Australian national portrait gallery six months to" exhibit a portrait of "this most famous Australian".Greer, Germaine. "That sort of self-delusion is what it takes to be a real Aussie larrikin", The Guardian, 2006-09-05. Retrieved on 2006-06-06. Hudson, Fiona. "Feminist Greer slams Steve\'s antics", News Limited, 2006-09-06. Retrieved on 2006-06-06. "Greer draws anger over Irwin comments", The Age, 2006-09-06. Retrieved on 2006-06-06. "Australian feminist Greer attacks Croc Hunter", Daily News & Analysis, 2006-09-06. Retrieved on 2006-06-06. "Greer not surprised Irwin "came to grief"", Reuters, 2006-09-06. Retrieved on 2006-06-06. Holloway, Grant. "Storm breaks over attack on Irwin", CNN, 2006-09-07. Retrieved on 2006-06-07. McGuinness, P. P. "Germaine Greer is right, Irwin took silly risks", Crikey, 2006-09-07. Retrieved on 2006-09-10. Irwin portrait looks unmanly: Greer Feb. 20, 2007
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 since the early 1970s and that his orchestral work "G-Spot Tornado" would be played at her funeral.Freak Out! The Frank Zappa Story, BBC Radio 4, October 7 2006. Retrieved on 1 November 2006.
In July 2007 Greer attacked the then Australian Prime Minister John Howard over his indigenous intervention policy saying the crisis would be turned into "proliferating catastrophe".Home invasion 2007-07-05
In August 2007 Greer made comments regarding Princess Diana, calling her a "devious moron", a "desperate woman seeking applause", "disturbingly neurotic" and "guileless". Greer launches another attack on Diana. smh.com.au 2007-08-26
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Greer, Germaine |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | academic writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 29, 1939 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Melbourne, Australia |
| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
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