Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer is widely regarded as the most significant and famous soldiers of gender war in the Twentieth century. This amazing Australian academic, writer and broadcaster was born on January 29, 1939.

Germaine Greer grew up in the bayside suburb of Mentone in Melbourne. After attending a convent, Star of the Sea College, in Gardenvale, Melbourne, she won a teaching scholarship in 1959. Germaine Greer then enrolled at the University of Melbourne, where she earned her nickname Germaine Queer and gradated with a B.A Honours in 1959. She then moved to Sydney, where she became involved with the Sydney Push, a group of intellectual left-wing anarchists who practiced non-monogamy. The writer describes Greer at the time:

"For Germaine, [the Push] 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' (Wallace 1997)."

Germaine Greer, while in Sydney, she lectured at the University of Sydney, she received a M.A in 1963 for a thesis on Byron. 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.

Greer joined the student amateur acting company. The Cambridge Footlights, which launched her into the London arts and media scene. She then wrote a gardening column for the satirical magazine Private Eye and became a regular contributor to the underground London Oz Magazine as Dr.G.

In 1968; Greer received her PhD in 1968 for a thesis on Shakespeare's early comedies and accepted a lectureship in English at the University of Warwick. In the same year, in London, she married Australian journalist Paul du Feu, but the marriage only lasted a short three weeks, and ended in divorce five years later, in 1973.

Germaine's reputation was made in 1970 when she wrote The Female Eunuch. The book helped mobilize the women's movement and it turned its author into one of the most important voices in feminism.

Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch was THE feminist book of the 1970's. It was world-wide best seller and was translated into more than 12 languages. Men were particularly agreeable to Greer's arguments that women were incomplete and stunted and this lead to the name of the book, The Female Eunuch. This book argued that

a woman has the right to express her own sexuality. Women were attracted by the message that they too could become more sexually assertive, although Greer supplied little if any evidence that this was in fact possible let alone desirable. Greer later described her book as an analysis of sex oppression.

Another main issue addressed in The Female Eunuch was sexual liberation. Greer had been involved with progressive Australian and British intellectuals who despised sexual liberation. Consequently, much of Greer's understanding of and solution to women's oppression had to do with sexual relations between men and women. What men didn't do was read between the lines of The Female Eunuch. Greer's understanding was that the root cause of the sexually castrated woman was masculinity. According to Greer, the essence of masculinity was a split between thought and feeling and a tendency towards violence.

" While men are busy conquering and controlling nature and woman, women are obsessed with controlling their own bodies. Man believes he survives through his enduring achievements. Woman is her mortal body. A man's relationship to his body, then, appears to be

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