The Female Eunuch
Greer argued in her book,
The Female Eunuch, that women do not realise how much men hate them, and how much they are taught to hate themselves. Christine Wallace writes that, when
The Female Eunuch was first published, one woman had to keep it wrapped in brown paper because her husband wouldn't let her read it; arguments and fights broke out over dinner tables and copies of it were thrown across rooms at unsuspecting husbands (Wallace 1997). It arrived in the stores in London in October 1970. By March 1971, it had nearly sold out its second printing and had been translated into eight languages.
"The title is an indication of the problem," Greer told the
New York Times in 1971, "Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master's ulterior motives — to be fattened or made docile — women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It's a process that sacrifices vigour for delicacy and succulence, and one that's got to be changed."
Two of the book's themes already pointed the way to
Sex and Destiny 14 years later, namely that the nuclear family is a bad environment for women and for the raising of children; and that the manufacture of women's sexuality by Western society was demeaning and confining. Girls are feminised from childhood by being taught rules that subjugate them, she argued. Later, when women embrace the stereotypical version of adult femininity, they develop a sense of shame about their own bodies, and lose their natural and political autonomy. The result is powerlessness, isolation, a diminished sexuality, and a lack of joy:
The ignorance and isolation of most women mean that they are incapable of making conversation: most of their communication with their spouses is a continuation of the power struggle. The result is that when wives come along to dinner parties they pervert civilised conversation about real issues into personal quarrels. The number of hostesses who wish they did not have to invite wives is legion.
Greer argued that women should get to know and come to accept their own bodies, taste their own menstrual blood, and give up celibacy and monogamy. But they should not burn their bras. "Bras are a ludicrous invention," she wrote, "but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression."
While being interviewed about the book in 1971, she told the
New York Times that she had been a "supergroupie." "Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors," she said. "When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage. I think groupies are important because they demystify sex; they accept it as physical, and they aren't possessive about their conquests."
Publications in the 1970s and 1980s
Greer's second book,
The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (1979) covers its subject until the end of the nineteenth century. It also speculates on the existence of women artists whose careers are not recorded by posterity. Greer translated Aristophanes's
Lysistrata in 1972.
Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility, published in 1984, continued Greer's critique of Western attitudes toward sexuality, fertility, family, and the imposition of those attitudes on the rest of the world. Greer's target again is the nuclear family, government intervention in sexual behaviour, and the commercialisation of sexuality and women's bodies. 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. She argued that the birth control movement had been tainted by such attitudes from its beginning, citing Marie Stopes and others. She cautioned against condemning life styles and family values in the developing world.
In 1986, Greer published
Shakespeare, a work of literary criticism, and
The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings, a collection of newspaper and magazine articles written between 1968 and 1985. In 1989 came
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, a diary and travelogue about her father, whom she described as distant, weak and unaffectionate, which led to claims — which she characterized as inevitable in an interview with
The Guardian — that in her writing she was projecting her relationship with him onto all other men.
Publications since 1990
In 1991,
The Change: Women, Ageing, and the Menopause, which the
New York Times called a "brilliant, gutsy, exhilarating, exasperating fury of a book" became another influential book in the women's movement. In it, Greer wrote of the various myths concerning menopause, advising against the use of hormone replacement therapy. "Frightening females is fun," she wrote in
The Age. "Women were frightened into using hormone replacement therapy by dire predictions of crumbling bones, heart disease, loss of libido, depression, despair, disease and death if they let nature take its course." She argues that scaring women is "big business and hugely profitable." It is fear, she wrote, that "makes women comply with schemes and policies that work against their interest".
Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet followed in 1995.
In 1999,
the whole woman, which was intended as a sequel to
The Female Eunuch was released. In this book she discussed what she saw as the lack of fundamental progress in the feminist movement, and criticized some sections of the women's movement for illusions on that score: "Even if it had been real, equality would have been a poor substitute for liberation; fake equality is leading women into double jeopardy. The rhetoric of equality is being used in the name of political correctness to mask the hammering that women are taking. When
The Female Eunuch was written our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves. On every side speechless women endure endless hardship, grief and pain, in a world system that creates billions of losers for every handful of winners. It's time to get angry again."Chapter titles reveal the themes, including: "Food," "Breast," "Pantomime Dames (about transsexual women)," "Shopping," "Estrogen," "Testosterone," "Wives," "Loathing," "Girlpower" and "Mutilation" (including a discussion of female genital mutilation in the Third World and the West). Her comments about female genital mutilation proved especially controversial in some quarters, for example a United Kingdom House of Commons Committee described her viewpoint as "simplistic and offensive."
In fact, Greer was opposed to the practice and said that feminists fighting to eliminate female genital mutilation in their own countries "must be supported", but had explored some of the complexities of the issue, and the double standards of the West, and warned against using the issue to "reinforce our notions of cultural superiority". She had pointed out that the term "female genital mutilation" was itself simplistic being used to describe practices varying from "nicking the prepuce of the clitoris to provoke ritual bleeding", to the extreme mutilation of infibulation. She questioned the perhaps simplistic view that female genital mutilation was necessarily imposed by men on women rather than by women on women, or even freely chosen, adducing some anecdotal evidence to the contrary and discussed the issue in relation to some of the forms of genital and other bodily mutilations carried out in the West on men and women. She notes for example that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends female genital mutilation of baby girls with "over long" clitorides and that five such procedures are in fact carried out every day in the United States, without being included in "female genital mutilation" statistics In particular she compared female genital mutilation to the practice of male genital mutilation"Any suggestion that male genital mutilation should be outlawed would be understood to be a frontal attack on the cultural identity of Jews and Muslims. The same issues are raised by female genital mutilation. As a practical note for activists:" As UN workers in East Uganda found, women would not abandon female circumcision until some similarly significant procedure could take its place." Other controversial points in this book include Germaine Greer's opposition to accepting male-born transsexuals as women:"Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to recognize as women men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it, because they see women not as another sex but as a non-sex. No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight. The insistence that man-made women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males."
In 2003,
The Beautiful Boy was published, an art history book about the beauty of teenage boys, which is illustrated with 200 photographs of what
The Guardian called "succulent teenage male beauty". Greer described the book as an attempt to address modern women's apparent indifference to the teenage boy as a sexual object and to "advance women's reclamation of their capacity for, and right to, visual pleasure" (Greer 2003). The photograph on the cover was of Björn Andrésen in his character of Tadzio in the film Death in Venice (1971). The actor has been quoted by journalists as complaining about the picture's use.
Whitefella Jump Up : The shortest way to nationhood was published in 2003 as Issue 11 of the "Quarterly Essay" series Germaine Greer argues that Australians should reimagine Australia as an Aboriginal nation; and discusses some of the consequences of this, and why she regrads it as feasible and desirable. "Jump up" in Aboriginal Kriol can, she writes, mean "to be resurrected or reborn"; and the title refers to occasions when Aborigines apparently accepted whites as reincarnated relatives. Germaine Greer suggests that whites were mistaken in understanding this literally, and that the Aborigines were in fact offering the whites concerned terms on which they could be accepted into the Aboriginal kinship system. The gist of the essay is that it may not be too late for Australia as a nation to root itself in Aboriginal history and culture in an analogous way.
In 2007, Greer contributed an essay to the book
Stella Vine: Paintings which accompanied the major solo exhibition of British painter Stella Vine at Modern Art Oxford museum in England. In May 2007, Greer and Vine took part in a public talk
Gender & Culture as part of the Women's International Arts Festival. On 18 September 2007, Greer gave a talk about Vine's art with gallery director Andrew Nairne. Also in 2007, Greer published a biography of Anne Hathaway entitled
Shakespeare's Wife, one of the few books to deal with this subject.
In 2008, she wrote the essay
On Rage about the widespread rage of indigenous men, published in the series "Little Books on Big Themes" by Melbourne University Publishing, launched by Bob Carr on 15 August 2008.
