Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer, born in 1939, Australian writer and feminist, best known for her revolutionary book The Female Eunuch (1970). She was born near Melbourne and received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Melbourne, a master’s degree from the University of Sydney, and a doctorate from England’s University of Cambridge. Renowned for her thinking about women and their roles in society, Greer began at an early age to challenge traditional concepts as a scholarship student at a convent school near Melbourne. A gifted linguist, Greer was also drawn to art, music, and literature. After earning her doctorate in 1967, she became a lecturer at the University of Warwick in England. At the same time she expressed an avid interest in rock music and England’s counterculture by writing articles for underground magazines.

With The Female Eunuch, published in England in 1970 and in the United States in 1971, Greer was in the vanguard of discussion about women’s liberation. In this book she criticized the mechanisms of the traditional nuclear family and advocated a revolutionary empowerment of women. The book became a bestseller and was translated into many languages. Greer went on a massive publicity tour to promote The Female Eunuch, and her engaging feistiness and the controversy that surrounded her brought her much attention. With the income that her success brought her, Greer spent much of the 1970s writing articles and traveling in Asia and Africa. She also gathered research for a book about women painters, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (1979). Her book observed that women could not be truly great artists because of their damaged egos.

In 1979 Greer went to Oklahoma’s University of Tulsa to teach poetry and to direct the Center for Study of Women’s Literature at the university. This venture ended in discord, and Greer put her energies back into writing. In Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984), Greer castigated the Western world for forcing its own methods of birth control on Third World peoples, theorizing that the world was overpopulated only if judged by Western standards of creature comforts and individuality. Many feminists were incensed, arguing that Greer was preaching an antifeminist and condescending message, but the author answered that they misunderstood her thesis. Greer’s subsequent works, Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989) and The Change: Women, Aging, and the Menopause (1992), caused less furor. However, Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (1995) and The Whole Woman (1999), a sequel to The Female Eunuch that condemned the complacency of current feminism, drew predictably strong responses from critics. In The Beautiful Boy (2003), Greer analyzed images that portray boys as sexual objects.