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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).
 Early
life
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, 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 anarchists, many of whom practised
polygamy. Christine Wallace, in her unauthorised biography, describes Greer at this
time:
For Germaine, 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 to 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.
By 1972 Greer would identify as an "anarchist communist", close to Marxism.
In her first teaching job, 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 ... 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.
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 magazine Oz,
owned by the Australian writer Richard Neville. 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. 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."
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. 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. The
marriage finally ended in divorce in 1973.
Prominence
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.
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.
Later
career
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.
Greer's latest academic appointment is as a Professor in the Department of English
Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick, Coventry.
Some of the information on this page came from a
Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation License.
©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Germaine
Greer - Generator - Biography
