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Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer (/ɡrɪər/; born 29 January 1939) is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the radical feminist movement in the latter half of the 20th century.

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.

Greer's ideas have created controversy ever since her first book, The Female Eunuch (1970), made her a household name.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.

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.

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"

Greer was born in Melbourne to a Catholic family, the elder of two girls followed by a boy. Her father, Eric Reginald ("Reg") Greer, told her he had been born in South Africa, but she learned after his death that he was born Robert Hamilton King in Launceston, Tasmania.[9] He and her mother, Margaret ("Peggy") May Lafrank, had married in March 1937; Reg converted to Catholicism before the wedding.[10] Peggy was a milliner and Reg a newspaper-advertising salesman.[11][c] Despite her Catholic upbringing and her father's open antisemitism, Greer became convinced that her father was secretly of Jewish heritage. She believed her grandmother had been a Jewish woman named Rachel Weiss, but admits that she probably made this up out of an "intense longing to be Jewish." Despite not knowing whether she had any Jewish ancestry, Greer "felt Jewish" and began to involve herself in the Jewish community. She learned Yiddish, joined a Jewish theatre group, and dated Jewish men.

The family lived in the Melbourne suburb of Elwood, at first in a rented flat in Docker Street, near the beach, then in another rented flat on the Esplanade. In January 1942 Greer's father joined the Second Australian Imperial Force; after training with the Royal Australian Air Force, he worked on ciphers for the British Royal Air Force in Egypt and Malta.[15] Greer attended St Columba's Catholic Primary School in Elwood from February 1943—the family was by then living at 57 Ormond Road, Elwood—followed by Sacred Heart Parish School, Sandringham, and Holy Redeemer School, Ripponlea.

In 1952 Greer won a scholarship to Star of the Sea College in Gardenvale, a convent school run by the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary; a school report called her "a bit of a mad-cap and somewhat erratic in her studies and in her personal responses".[17] That year, artwork by her was included in the under-14 section of the Children's Art Exhibition at Tye's Gallery, opened by Archbishop Mannix.[18] She abandoned the Catholic faith a year after leaving school, as a result of finding the nuns' arguments for the existence of God unconvincing,[19] and left home when she was 18. She had a difficult relationship with her mother who, according to Greer, probably had Asperger syndrome. In 2012 she said that her brother might have forgiven her for "abandoning" them, but she was not so sure about her sister, "whom I love more than anyone else on earth".

From 1968 to 1972, Greer worked as an assistant lecturer at the University of Warwick in Coventry, living at first in a rented bedsit in Leamington Spa with two cats and 300 tadpoles.[58][59] In 1968 she was married for the first and only time, a marriage that ended in divorce in 1973. She met Paul du Feu, a King's College London English graduate who was working as a builder, outside a pub in Portobello Road, London, and after a brief courtship they married at Paddington Register Office, using a ring from a pawn shop.[ Du Feu had already been divorced and had two sons, aged 14 and 16, with his first wife.

The relationship lasted only a few weeks. Apparently unfaithful to du Feu seven times in three weeks of marriage, Greer wrote that she had spent their wedding night in an armchair, because her husband, drunk, wo not allow her in bed.Eventually, during a party near Ladbroke Grove, "'[h]e turned to me and sneered (drunk as usual): 'I could have any woman in this room.' 'Except me,' I said, and walked away for ever.'"

In addition to teaching, Greer was trying to make a name for herself in television. In 1967 she appeared in the BBC shows Good Old Nocker and Twice a Fortnight and had a starring role in a short film, Darling, Do You Love Me (1968), by Martin Sharp (the Australian artist and co-editor of Oz magazine) and Bob Whitaker. From 1968 to 1969 she featured in a Granada Television slapstick show, Nice Time, with Kenny Everett, Sandra Gough and Jonathan Routh.[66] One set of outtakes found in Greer's archive at the University of Melbourne features her as a housewife bathing in milk delivered by Everett the milkman.

Courtesy-wikipedia
- Germaine Greer

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