Germaine Greer, Australian feminist later living in London, published The Female Eunuch in 1970, with its feisty tone (and her own attractive self and unapologetically straight sexuality) assuring her place in the public eye as an "in your face" feminist. In her later books, including Sex and Destiny: the Politics of Human Fertility and The Change: Women, Ageing, and Menopause, drew fire from feminists and others. Less well known is her career as a literature scholar and professor, where her unique perspective comes through, as in her 2000 essay, "Female Impersonator," about male poets speaking as female voices, or her book, Slip-shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection, and the Woman Poet, where she suggests that a reason many pre-modern women poets are absent from standard curricula is that they were not that skilled, focused on the "morbid exercise" of wallowing in emotion.
Selected Germaine Greer Quotations
• Women's liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let's get on with it.
• I think that testosterone is a rare poison.
• The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.
• The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle.
• Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
• I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.
• The house wife is an unpaid employee in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee.
• Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.
• Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?
• One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.
• After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is. Though feminists have been arguing for years that there is a self-defining female energy, and a female libido that is not expressed merely in response to demands by the male, and a female way of being and of experiencing the world, we are still not close to understanding what it might be. Yet every mother who has held a girl child in her arms has known that she was different from a boy child and that she would approach the reality around her in a different way. She is a female and she will die female, and though many centuries should pass, archaeologists would identify her skeleton as the remains of a female creature.
• The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people's reproductive behavior, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not.
• The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.
• The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
• Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.
• All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysis and to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defense. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.
• Mother is the dead heart of the family, spending father's earnings on consumer goods to enhance the environment in which he eats, sleeps and watches the television.
• There has come into existence, chiefly in America, a breed of men who claim to be feminists. They imagine that they have understood 'what women want' and that they are capable of giving it to them. They help with the dishes at home and make their own coffee in the office, basking the while in the refulgent consciousness of virtue. Such men are apt to think of the true male feminists as utterly chauvinistic.
• The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.
• Women fail to understand how much men hate them.
• All men hate some women some of the time and some men hate all women all of the time.
• The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.
• For a male child to become a man, he has to reject his mother. It's an essential part of masculinisation.
• Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.
• All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.
• The most threatened group in human societies as in animal societies is the unmated male: the unmated male is more likely to wind up in prison or in an asylum or dead than his mated counterpart. He is less likely to be promoted at work and he is considered a poor credit risk.
• Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.
• Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
