86 Facts About Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminism movement in the latter half of the 20th century.

Germaine Greer is a liberation rather than equality feminist.

Germaine Greer's goal is not equality with men, which she sees as assimilation and "agreeing to live the lives of unfree men".

Germaine Greer was born in Melbourne to a Catholic family, the elder of two girls followed by a boy.

Germaine Greer's father, called himself Eric Reginald Greer, he 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.

Germaine Greer learned he was christened Robert Henry Eric Ernest Hambert.

Germaine Greer learned Yiddish, joined a Jewish theatre group, and dated Jewish men.

In January 1942 Germaine 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.

In 1952 Germaine 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".

Germaine Greer described her childhood as a "long remembered boredom", and has said it was her Catholic school that introduced her to art and music.

Germaine Greer achieved the second highest exam results in the state.

Germaine Greer had a difficult relationship with her mother who, according to Greer, probably had Asperger syndrome.

Germaine Greer already thought of herself as an anarchist without knowing why she was drawn to it; through the Push, she became familiar with anarchist literature.

Germaine Greer had significant relationships in the group with Harry Hooton and Roelof Smilde, both prominent members.

Germaine Greer shared an apartment with Smilde on Glebe Point Road, but the relationship did not last; according to Wallace, the Push ideology of "free love" involved the rejection of possessiveness and jealousy, which naturally worked in the men's favour.

Germaine Greer became involved in acting at Sydney and played Mother Courage in Mother Courage and Her Children in August 1963.

Germaine Greer had a kind of histrionic quality which was quite remarkable, added to her real scholarship.

Germaine Greer had been encouraged to move from Sydney by Sam Goldberg, a Leavisite, who had been Challis Chair of English Literature at Sydney since 1963.

Germaine Greer said she switched because she "realized they were not going to teach [her] anything".

At the graduates' table, Germaine Greer was explaining with passion that there could be no liberation for women, no matter how highly educated, as long as we were required to cram our breasts into bras constructed like mini-Vesuviuses, two stitched, white, cantilevered cones which bore no resemblance to the female anatomy.

Germaine Greer lived for a time in the room next to Clive James at Friar House on Bene't Street, opposite The Eagle.

Germaine Greer had a typewriter the size of a printing press.

Germaine Greer, who speaks fluent Italian, finished her PhD in Calabria, Italy, where she stayed for three months in a village with no running water and no electricity.

The trip had begun as a visit with a boyfriend, Emilio, but he ended the relationship so Germaine Greer changed her plans.

Germaine Greer was awarded her PhD in May 1968 for a thesis entitled The Ethic of Love and Marriage in Shakespeare's Early Comedies.

Germaine Greer's family did not fly over for the ceremony.

From 1968 to 1972, Germaine 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.

Germaine Greer 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.

Apparently unfaithful to du Feu seven times in three weeks of marriage, Germaine Greer wrote that she had spent their wedding night in an armchair, because her husband, drunk, would not allow her in bed.

Germaine Greer began writing columns as "Dr G" for Oz magazine, owned by Richard Neville, whom she had met at a party in Sydney.

In parallel with her involvement in Suck, Germaine Greer told Robert Greenfield of Rolling Stone in January 1971 that she was an admirer of the Redstockings, a radical feminist group founded in New York in January 1969 by Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone.

Germaine Greer parted company with Suck in 1972 when it published a naked photograph of her lying down with her legs over her shoulders and her face peering between her thighs.

Germaine Greer resigned, accusing the other editors of being "counter-revolutionary".

Germaine Greer said later that her aim in joining the editorial board had been to try to steer Suck away from exploitative, sadistic pornography.

When she began writing for Oz and Suck, Germaine Greer was spending three days a week in her flat in Leamington Spa while she taught at Warwick, two days in Manchester filming, and two days in London in a white-washed bedsit in The Pheasantry on King's Road.

Crawford had suggested that Germaine Greer write a book for the 50th anniversary of women being given the vote in the UK in 1918.

On 6 March 1971, dressed in a monk's habit, Germaine Greer marched through central London with 2,500 women in a Women's Liberation March.

The toast of New York, Germaine Greer insisted on staying at the Hotel Chelsea, a haunt of writers and artists, rather than at the Algonquin Hotel where her publisher had booked her; her book launch had to be rescheduled because so many people wanted to attend.

Germaine Greer's publishers called her "the most lovable creature to come out of Australia since the koala bear".

Germaine Greer was in a relationship at the time with Tony Gourvish, manager of the British rock band Family, one that began while she was writing The Female Eunuch.

Kleinhenz writes that they lived together for a time, but Germaine Greer ended up feeling that he was exploiting her celebrity, a sense she developed increasingly with her friends, according to Kleinhenz.

Germaine Greer told Richard Neville that she had to spend time away from England because of its tax laws.

Germaine Greer spent part of that summer in Porto Cervo, a seaside resort, with Kenneth Tynan, artistic director of the Royal National Theatre, as guests of Michael White, the impresario.

Germaine Greer had arrived with little luggage, and before dinner found her hair had been blown about by the wind on the ferry.

The point of the visit for Germaine Greer was to discuss Tynan's commission of a translation of Aristophanes's Lysistrata.

Germaine Greer has described the freedom she felt at her home in Italy, which had no electricity when she first moved there.

In or around July 1971 Germaine Greer was interviewed by Nat Lehrman, a member of Playboys editorial board, who flew from the United States to Italy to conduct the interview in her home.

That year Germaine Greer was appointed director of the Center of the Study of Women's Literature at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in 1982 she founded the Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, an academic journal that highlights unknown or little-known women writers.

Germaine Greer would spend five months a year in Tulsa and the rest in the UK.

Germaine Greer argued that the Western promotion of birth control in the Third World was in large part driven not by concern for human welfare but by the traditional fear and envy of the rich towards the fertility of the poor.

Germaine Greer cautioned against condemning life styles and family values in the developing world.

In 1984 Germaine Greer bought The Mills, a Georgian farmhouse on three acres of land in Great Chesterford, Essex, where she planted a one-acre wood, which she said made her prouder than anything else she had done, and tried to keep "as a refuge for as many other earthlings" as she could.

In 1989 she wrote Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, a diary and travelogue about her father, whom Germaine Greer portrayed as distant, weak and unaffectionate, which led to the criticism that in her writing she was projecting her relationship with him onto all other men.

Germaine Greer became a special lecturer and bye-fellow that year of Newnham College, Cambridge, a position she held until 1998.

Germaine Greer founded Stump Cross Books, based at The Mills, which published the work of 17th- and 18th-century female poets.

Germaine Greer returned to the University of Warwick, accepting a personal Chair as Professor in the English and Comparative Studies department.

Germaine Greer was appearing regularly on television in the UK and Australia during this period, including on the BBC's Have I Got News for You several times from 1990.

One of the journalists, an undercover Mail on Sunday reporter, managed to gain entry and avail himself of her hospitality for two days, which included Germaine Greer washing his clothes and teaching him how to bake bread.

Germaine Greer's conclusion is that women were held to lower standards than men, and the poetic tradition discouraged good poetry from women.

Germaine Greer's comments on female genital mutilation proved controversial, particularly that opposition to it is an "attack on cultural identity", just as outlawing male circumcision would be viewed as an attack on Jews and Muslims.

Germaine Greer wrote that feminists fighting to eliminate FGM in their own countries should be supported, but she explored the complexities of the issue and the double standards of the West regarding other forms of bodily mutilation, including that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended surgery at that time on baby girls with clitorises over three-eighths of an inch long.

Germaine Greer questioned the view that FGM is imposed by men on women, rather than by women on women, or even freely chosen.

Germaine Greer's writing on gender has brought her into opposition with the transgender community.

Germaine Greer responded by reaffirming, during an interview with Kirsty Wark for BBC Newsnight, that she did not regard transgender women as women; she argued that the nomination of Caitlyn Jenner for Glamour Woman of the Year had been misogynist.

Germaine Greer believed that reporting it would be pointless; she had danced with him at the party, had left with him voluntarily, and he was a pillar of the community.

Germaine Greer argued, in two Guardian columns, that it was not the rapist's penis that had hurt her, but his fists and "vicious mind", and the loss of control, invasion of self, and "being made to speak the rapist's script".

Germaine Greer has commented several times on the Me Too movement.

Germaine Greer has published several essays on Aboriginal issues, including "Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood", first published in Quarterly Essay in August 2003, and later as a book in the UK.

Germaine Greer argued that Australians should re-imagine the country as an Aboriginal nation.

Germaine Greer returned that year to Newnham College, Cambridge, as a special supervisor.

In 2001 Germaine Greer bought 60 hectares of land in Australia for $500,000 at Cave Creek in the Numinbah Valley, near the Natural Bridge section of Springbrook National Park in South East Queensland.

Friends of Gondwana Rainforest, a charity Germaine Greer registered in England in 2011, funds and oversees the project.

Germaine Greer wrote that "entering fully into the multifarious life that is Earthling's environment, while giving up delusions of controlling it, is a transcendental experience".

Germaine Greer has received several honorary doctorates: a Doctor of Letters from York University in 1999, a Doctor of Laws from the University of Melbourne in 2003, a Doctor of Letters at Anglia Ruskin University in 2003, and a Doctor of Letters from the University of Sydney in 2005.

The National Portrait Gallery in London has purchased eight photographs of Germaine Greer, including by Bryan Wharton, Lord Snowdon and Polly Borland, and one painting by Paula Rego.

Germaine Greer was selected as an Australian National Living Treasure in 1997, and in 2001 was inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women.

Sarah Ditum wrote that Germaine Greer "doesn't get into trouble occasionally or inadvertently, but consistently and with the attitude of a tank rolling directly into a crowd of infantry".

Germaine Greer said that the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses was his own fault, although she added her name that year to a petition in his support.

Germaine Greer called her biographer, Christine Wallace, a "flesh-eating bacterium" and Wallace's book, Untamed Shrew, "a piece of excrement".

Germaine Greer criticized the wife of the newly elected American president Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, for her dress on the night of the 2008 US election, and in 2012 she advised Australia's first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, to change the cut of her jackets because she had "a big arse".

In June 2022 Germaine Greer was among the women highlighted in the Australian Women Changemakers exhibition at the Museum of Australian Democracy.

In 2021 Germaine Greer had returned to Australia to sell her home and put herself into aged care.

In 2022 the 83 year old Germaine Greer noted more women are in care than men.

Germaine Greer described herself as 'not a patient, but an inmate' and spoke frankly about residential aged care being one of the more pressing feminist issues today.

Germaine Greer sold her archive in 2013 to the University of Melbourne.

Germaine Greer said that her receipt from the sale would be donated to her charity, Friends of Gondwana Rainforest.