Greer Germaine - Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew

Germaine Greer, Daddy,WeHardlyKnewYou (Penguin: London, 1990), p. 172.

Bertolt Brecht, MotherCourageandherChildren (Methuen: London, 1983), p. 52.

This book is about Germaine Greers life. Equally, it tells the story of TheFemaleEunuch, without which Greer might well have been just another talented expatriate antipodean making a splash on one side of the Atlantic.

With TheFemaleEunuch Germaine Greer secured an enduring place in the history of feminism. Nearly thirty years after the publication of that book, her principal works are overdue for review and evaluation. Given the unusual degree to which her life and work are entwined, neither a biography nor a work of review and criticism alone could succeed in doing justice to the subject as well as the two approaches do together.

One fascinating, and generally unnoticed, point about Greer and TheFemaleEunuch is the profound disjuncture in the way they have been received.

Ask baby boomers and their elders in the English-speaking world to name a feminist, and more often than not they will name Germaine Greer and mention TheFemaleEunuch. This response is far less common from the feminists among them, particularly those who read Greers SexandDestiny, widely considered to be second-wave feminisms first big backlash book. As well as telling the story of Greers life and evaluating her main works, GermaineGreer:UntamedShrew seeks to describe and explain this disjuncture.

Greer was initially highly effective as a polemicist: TheFemaleEunuch really did change lives. Later characterizations of her as a bad feminist or anti-feminist somewhat miss the point. GermaineGreer:UntamedShrew portrays an exceptionally talented, spirited, gutsy woman at odds in many ways with the family and era into which she was born, who went on to have a major, if not unambiguous , impact for the good on women in her time.

This book is not a conventional biography; it does not pretend to be an exhaustive account of Germaine Greers life. Rather it focuses on why she was different from other second-wave feminists, why she could be so contradictory and why, despite this, the net impact of her influence has been generally positive. It concentrates on the formative experiences and intellectual influences which made the woman, and her contribution, so distinctive.

Feminism is one of the major political movements of the twentieth century, and it was Germaine Greers unique role in it, as well as our shared Australian nationality, which drew me to her as a subject. From my vantage point as a political correspondent in our national capital when the book was conceived, it was intriguing to contemplate what her impact might have been had she engaged in parliamentary politics at home rather than in libertarian and sexual politics on the world stage.

I was still a child when the second wave began its great roll forward, and just eleven years old when TheFemaleEunuch was published in Australia. Germaine was a familiar figure early on in my psychic landscape one shared with most others from my generation and the one before it. For the newest generation of feminists, the early groundwork covered by the major figures of the second wave is fading in memory or obscured by later work. Rediscovering the value, as well as dismissing the dross, in their pioneering contribution is a valuable endeavor for a movement prone to historical amnesia.

Greer opposed this book from the outset, and went to some lengths to sabotage what was always an honest and well-intentioned project. Her attack included personal threats and vilification, and the warning off of sources by letter, in print and through speeches.

This was part of her long-expressed hostility toward literary biography, in particular that concerned with living writers. The co-operation I received from Greers family and friends tended to be in inverse relationship to their physical distance from her. Biographies which follow especially those written, as she would prefer, after her death will obviously provide more detail on her years in Britain.

The issue of authorized versus unauthorized biography was canvassed widely in the media during the writing and publication of this book. In the wake of Diana Spencers death, one Australian commentator likened the authors of unauthorized biographies to paparazzi an absurd and offensive comparison.

Where authorized biography is concerned, there is a serious risk that authorized will mean compromised, that some trimming of the sails will be required by the subject. This can jeopardise the ethical obligations incumbent on all writers dealing with the real world: obligations to readers as well as to subjects and sources. Interestingly, Greer commented to one reporter on a recent visit to Melbourne that authorized biographies tend to be boring anyway.