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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