Germaine Greer
| Germaine Greer | |||
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At the University of Melbourne, 2013
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| Born |
29 January 1939 Melbourne, Victoria, Australia |
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| Residence | Essex, England | ||
| Other names | pen names: Rose Blight (for Private Eye); Dr. G (for Oz) | ||
| Education | BA, English and French literature, University of Melbourne, 1959 MA, romantic poetry, University of Sydney, 1963 PhD, English literature, University of Cambridge, 1969 |
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| Years active | 1970–present | ||
| Known for | Feminism | ||
| Notable work | The Female Eunuch (1970) | ||
| Parent(s) | Eric Reginald Greer, Margaret Mary Lafrank | ||
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Germaine Greer (/ɡrɪər/; born 29 January 1939) is an Australian-born writer, regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminist movement in the latter half of the 20th century. She lives in the United Kingdom, where she has held academic positions, specializing in English literature, at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge.
Greer's ideas have created controversy ever since her first book, The Female Eunuch (1970), became an international best-seller and made her a household name. In it Greer offered a systematic deconstruction of ideas such as womanhood and femininity, arguing that women are forced to assume submissive roles in society to fulfill male fantasies of what being a woman entails.
Her work since then has focused on literature, feminism and the environment. Later books include Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984), The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991), The Whole Woman (1999), Shakespeare's Wife (2007) and White Beech: The Rainforest Years (2013). She owns and finances Stump Cross Books, which publishes the work of 17th- and 18th-century women poets.
Greer is a liberation rather than equality feminist. 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, "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."
Greer was born in Melbourne, the eldest of three children (two girls and a boy), to South Africa born Eric Reginald (Reg) Greer and Margaret (Peggy) Mary Lafrank. Peggy, a milliner, had married Reg in March 1937. He was a newspaper advertising representative, who served as a wartime RAAF officer. According to Greer, her mother suffered from what was probably Asperger's Syndrome, and as a result they had a difficult relationship. Greer left home because of it when she was 18.
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