Women's History - 20th Century, Women's Rights, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Feminists & Women's Rights Activists - Biography

Germaine Greer

Name: Germaine Greer
Author: Christine Wallace
ISBN: 9780571199341

by Christine Wallace

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Overview

Living her own flamboyant fusion of feminism and sexual freedom with tumultuous results, Germaine Greer put theory into practice. When she contrasted this version of feminism with conventional mores in The Female Eunuch, highlighting the extent to which women were the constructs and handmaidens of men, the shock of recognition it produced was profound. The women of an entire generation were compelled to reconsider their lives, their partners, their families, their work, their whole way of being. Later characterizations of Greer as a "bad" feminist or an "anti-feminist" miss the point. Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew portrays an exceptionally talented, spirited, gutsy woman at odds with the family and era into which she was born, who went on to have a major - if ambiguous - impact for the good of women in her time. In later works (Daddy, We Hardly Knew You; Sex and Destiny; Slip-shod Sibyls; The Obstacle Race), Greer has continually challenged feminist and sexual orthodoxies, confounding the women's movement and generating headlines over three decades in the process.

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Editorials

Desley Deacon

...[Her] re-visiting of Greer...makes Wallace's book so interesting....[I]t is invigorating to see an intelligent woman of the next geneation interpreting, for her contemporaries, the life and work of one of my feminist icons. — The Women's Review of Books

Linda Colley

...[H]ighly intelligent and abysmally titled....According to Wallace, Greer opposed this study from the outset, presumably because of what it would reveal.
—London Review of Books

Publishers Weekly

In this unauthorized biography, Australian journalist Wallace relentlessly stalks Germaine Greer, ultimately finding few redeeming intellectual, creative or social attributes in her subject. Wallace starts out with an apparently even-tempered investigation of Greer's upbringing in 1950s Australia, her early career as actress-cum-journalist and her completion of a doctorate in English literature at Cambridge, leading to Greer's explosion into celebrity in 1970 with The Female Eunuch, a book Wallace calls a testament to "hegemonic heterosexuality." Although the bestseller made Greer synonymous with women's liberation, Wallace argues that Greer was an opportunist who took advantage of a historical moment to feather her own nest. She quotes scholars and participants in the feminist movement who saw Greer as a quisling to both the women's movement and the sexual revolution. Wallace often gets in a quick left-right, as when she concludes that Greer derived her premise for The Female Eunuch from Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver's "Allegory of the Black Eunuch," in Soul on Ice, and then charges that Greer's book was "politically naive." She also contends that Greer capitulated to men by blaming women for the male violence inflicted on them in language that "relied on traditional rhetorical ploys," such as Greer's Marxist allusion to women as "sexual proletariats." Greer's disenchantment with Catholicism, her problematic relationship with her parents and husband (a man whom Wallace casts as the "culmination of her heterosexual rough trade fantasy") and her role as a bomb thrower against the women's movement are all covered. But all these issues are raised as part of a one-sided treatment of Greer and her writings. Photos not seen by PW. (Mar.)

Library Journal

Feminist Germaine Greer became a controversial star of the women's movement with the 1970 publication of The Female Eunuch. Exercising her propensity for polemic, Greer vehemently objected to this unauthorized biography by journalist and fellow Australian Wallace. (Untamed Shrew was published in Australia in 1997 and ignited an invasion-of-privacy debate.) Wallace persevered and has produced a reasonable and convincing account of a major 20th-century figure and the movement she epitomizes. Wallace focuses not on a detailed account of Greer's life but on the formative experiences (especially her relationship with her parents) and intellectual influences that made Greer's contributions so contradictory and so influential. Wallace uses articles, interviews, speeches, and Greer's writings judiciously. She gives considerable attention to Greer's historic milieu and reviews the content and impact of Greer's major works. Whether this four-year undertaking was as "honest" and "well intentioned" as Wallace claims, readers will have to decide for themselves. Recommended for public and academic libraries.--Carol Ann McAllister, Coll. of William & Mary Lib., Williamsburg, VA

Booknews

An examination of the life and work of the feminist Germaine Greer. The author's goal is not to present a conventional biography, but rather to focus on why Greer was different from other second-wave feminists, why she could be so contradictory and why, regardless of this, the net impact of her influence has been generally positive. She focuses on Greer's book The Female Eunuch, the book that the author feels secured Greer's place in the history of feminism. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Camille Paglia

Wallace['s]...story...is spellbinding....[She] gives an invaluable overview of the bohemian coteries and intellectual trends of...[the] combination of anarchism, moralism, and liberalism in Greer's thinking....[Her] chronicle of Greer's...tumultuous debate with Normal Mailer at Town Hall in New York City is a major contribution to cultural history.
— The New York Times Book Review

Desley Deacon

Kirkus Reviews

An unauthorized and exhaustive biography of the author still best known for her 1971 feminist polemic The Female Eunuch. Wallace is a journalist and writer based in Australia, where Greer was born and educated by Roman Catholic nuns. Although Greer apparently objected strenuously to this biography and offered no cooperation, Wallace was able to tap sources worldwide, including those in Australia who knew the controversial author as either a well-behaved schoolgirl, a budding actress, or a flamboyant graduate student, challenging sexual and social mores. Her anti-authoritarian social philosophy was formed on the fringes of Australian academe, while she wrote a master's thesis on Lord Byron that ignored his misogyny. Later, at England's Cambridge University, her Ph.D. thesis included an analysis of The Taming of the Shrew. One of her conclusions: "There is hardly a woman alive who is not deeply attracted to a man capable of exercising [Petruchio's] kind of sexual and domestic dominion." Greer went on to become a 1960s groupie, teaching college courses during the day, bedding down with rock stars at night, and writing about it for magazines like Suck. Within a few years, The Female Eunuch had made her an international evangelist for a brand of countercultural feminism that eschewed sisterhood in favor of sex, but also examined the dynamics of marriage and women's low self-esteem. Greer wrote other books, including a moving memoir about her emotionally absent father, yet none created the stir of her first. Now settled on a farm in England, she remains a favorite talk-show guest because of her sharp wit and still contentious opinions, and is said to have a new book in the works to bepublished this year. Ambivalent to women, wavering in her commitment to truth in Wallace's portrait, Greer remains a flawed but fascinating subject. (16 b&w photos, not seen) .