Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer
Greer at the University of Melbourne in 2013
Born (1939-01-29) 29 January 1939 (age 85)
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Other names
Education
PhD thesisThe Ethic of Love and Marriage in Shakespeare's Early Comedies (1968)
OccupationWriter
Years active1970–present
EraSecond-wave feminism
Notable workThe Female Eunuch (1970)
Spouse
​
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(m. 1968; div. 1973)​
Germaine Greer speaking
Recorded August 2007 from Bookclub, BBC Radio 4

Germaine Greer (/ɡrɪər/; born 29 January 1939) is an Australian writer and feminist, regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminism movement in the latter half of the 20th century.[1]

Specializing in English and women's literature, she has held academic positions in England at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge, and in the United States at the University of Tulsa. Based in the United Kingdom since 1964, she has divided her time since the 1990s between Queensland, Australia, and her home in Essex, England.[2]

Greer's ideas have created controversy ever since her first book, The Female Eunuch (1970), made her a household name.[3] An international bestseller and a watershed text in the feminist movement, it offered a systematic deconstruction of ideas such as womanhood and femininity, arguing that women were forced to assume submissive roles in society to fulfil male fantasies of what being a woman entailed.[4][5]

Greer's subsequent work has focused on literature, feminism and the environment. She has written over 20 books, including Sex and Destiny (1984), The Change (1991), The Whole Woman (1999), and The Boy (2003). Her 2013 book, White Beech: The Rainforest Years, describes her efforts to restore an area of rainforest in the Numinbah Valley in Australia. In addition to her academic work and activism, she has been a prolific columnist for The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Independent, and The Oldie, among others.[6]

Greer is a liberation (or radical) rather than equality feminist.[a] Her goal is not equality with men, which she sees as assimilation and "agreeing to live the lives of unfree men". "Women's liberation", she wrote in The Whole Woman (1999), "did not see the female's potential in terms of the male's actual." She argues instead that liberation is about asserting difference and "insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self-determination". It is a struggle for the freedom of women to "define their own values, order their own priorities and decide their own fate".[b]

  1. ^ Magarey 2010, pp. 402–403; Medoff 2010, p. 263; Standish 2014, p. 263; Francis & Henningham 2017. For the date of birth, Wallace 1999, p. 3.
  2. ^ Francis & Henningham 2017.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Winant2015 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Saracoglu, Melody (12 May 2014). "Melody Saracoglu on Germaine Greer: One Woman Against the World", New Statesman.
  5. ^ Reilly 2010, p. 213.
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference Buchanan7Jan2018 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ How to be a feminist on YouTube, All About Women festival, Sydney Opera House, 8 March 2015 (Greer and others discussing feminism; at 01:06:04)
  8. ^ Greer 1999, p. 2.


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