Works
The Female Eunuch
Germaine GreerFamous Germaine Greer Quotes
"Introduction," p. xxii
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
Context: While young fools of my generation produced terrifying symptoms by ingesting poisons of various synthetic kinds, I was taken to extraordinary realms by a bacillus carried from human excrement by a fly's foot. I swelled to the size of a mountain and shrank to the size of a pin, flew and sang and fell through exotic configurations, in the intervals between agonizing convulsions on the heavy earthenware vaso, whose lethal contents I had to dispose of in the fields when the fever subsided. When the burning and shivering stopped and I could see again only what was there, I stayed enthralled by clarity. There was nothing to me in biochemical mindbending or bullshit psychedelia that did not have the slimy scent of death about it. I hated being out of touch, isolated by the solipsism of delirium, unable to communicate or comprehend.
The Wicked Womb (p. 57)
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Germaine Greer Quotes about women
“Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.”
p. 263 http://books.google.com/books?ei=7hdeUeCtEOGmiQLnu4HYBg&id=x88du4E7ARAC&dq=%22The+Female+Eunuch%22+1971&q=%22hate+them%22#search_anchor
Often paraphrased as: "women have no idea how much men hate them."
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Revolution
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Sorrow (pg. 183)
The Whole Woman (1999)
Liberation (pg. 336)
The Whole Woman (1999)
Germaine Greer Quotes about men
“The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.”
"Eternal war: Strindberg's view of sex" (3 June 1978), p. 207
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
The Stereotype
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Context: The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the Sexual Object sought by all men, and by all woman. She is of neither sex, for she has herself no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. All she must contribute is her existence. She need achieve nothing, for she has herself no sex at all. her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. All she must contribute is her existence. She need achieve nothing, for she is the reward of achievement. She need never give positive evidence of her moral character because virtue is assumed from her loveliness, and her passivity.
Estrogen (pg. 160)
The Whole Woman (1999)
Source: The Obstacle Race (1979), Chapter V: Dimension (p. 105)
Housework (pg. 141)
The Whole Woman (1999)
Germaine Greer: Trending quotes
Source: The Obstacle Race (1979), Chapter VII: The Disappearing Oeuvre (p. 136)
Context: By 1627 Judith Leyster was famous enough to be mentioned in Ampzing's description of the city of Haarlem; by 1661 she had been so far forgotten that De Bie does not mention her in his Golden Cabinet. Her eclipse by Frans Hals may have begun in her own lifetime, as a consequence of her marriage to Molenaer perhaps, for Sir Luke Schaub acquired the painting now known as The Jolly Companions as a Hals in Haarlem in the seventeenth century.
If Judith Leyster had not been in the habit of signing her work with the monogram JL attached to a star, a pun on the name her father had taken from his brewery, Leyster or Lodestar, her works might never have been reattributed to her: few paintings can boast of a provenance as clear as that of The Jolly Companions. As a result of the discovery that The Jolly Companions bore Leyster's monogram, the English firm which had sold the painting to Baron Schlichting in Paris as a Hals attempted to rescind their own purchase and get their money back from the dealer, Wertheimer, who had sold it to them for £4500 not only as a Hals but "one of the finest he ever painted." Sir John Millars agreed with Wertheimer about the authenticity and value of the painting. The special jury and the Lord Chief Justice never did get to hear the case, which was settled in court on 31st May 1893, with the plaintiffs agreeing to keep the painting for £3500 plus £500 costs. The gentlemen of the press made merry at the experts' expense, for all they had succeeded in doing was in destroying the value of the painting. Better, they opined, to have asked no questions. At no time did anyone throw his cap in the air and rejoice that another painter, capable of equalling Hals at his best, had been discovered.
"Women and power in Cuba" (1985), p. 271
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
Context: In the nuclear family the child is confronted by only two adults contrasted by sex. The tendency towards polarization is unavoidable. The duplication of effort in the nuclear family is directly connected to the family's role as the principal unit of consumption in consumer society. Each household is destined to acquire a complete set of all the consumer durables considered necessary for the good life and per caput consumption is therefore maintained at its highest level. In sex, as in consumption, the nuclear family emphasizes possession and exclusivity at the expense of the kinds of emotional relationships that work for co-operation and solidarity.
Introduction http://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/greer-germaine/female-eunuch.htm
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Germaine Greer Quotes
"The Wet Dream Film Festival" (1971), p. 57
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
“The struggle which is not joyous is the wrong struggle.”
Introduction
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Context: With them she can discover cooperation, sympathy and love. The end cannot justify the means: if she finds that her revolutionary way leads only to further discipline and continuing incomprehension, with their corollaries of bitterness and diminution, no matter how glittering the objective which would justify it, she must understand that it is a wrong way and an illusory end. The struggle which is not joyous is the wrong struggle. The joy of the struggle is not hedonism and hilarity, but the sense of purpose, achievement and dignity which is the reflowering of etiolated energy. Only these can sustain her and keep the flow of energy coming. The problems are only equalled by the possibilities: every mistake made is redeemed when it is understood. The only ways in which she can feel such joy are radical ones: the more derided and maligned the action that she undertakes, the more radical.
Source: The Obstacle Race (1979), Chapter VII: The Disappearing Oeuvre (p. 136)
Context: By 1627 Judith Leyster was famous enough to be mentioned in Ampzing's description of the city of Haarlem; by 1661 she had been so far forgotten that De Bie does not mention her in his Golden Cabinet. Her eclipse by Frans Hals may have begun in her own lifetime, as a consequence of her marriage to Molenaer perhaps, for Sir Luke Schaub acquired the painting now known as The Jolly Companions as a Hals in Haarlem in the seventeenth century.
If Judith Leyster had not been in the habit of signing her work with the monogram JL attached to a star, a pun on the name her father had taken from his brewery, Leyster or Lodestar, her works might never have been reattributed to her: few paintings can boast of a provenance as clear as that of The Jolly Companions. As a result of the discovery that The Jolly Companions bore Leyster's monogram, the English firm which had sold the painting to Baron Schlichting in Paris as a Hals attempted to rescind their own purchase and get their money back from the dealer, Wertheimer, who had sold it to them for £4500 not only as a Hals but "one of the finest he ever painted." Sir John Millars agreed with Wertheimer about the authenticity and value of the painting. The special jury and the Lord Chief Justice never did get to hear the case, which was settled in court on 31st May 1893, with the plaintiffs agreeing to keep the painting for £3500 plus £500 costs. The gentlemen of the press made merry at the experts' expense, for all they had succeeded in doing was in destroying the value of the painting. Better, they opined, to have asked no questions. At no time did anyone throw his cap in the air and rejoice that another painter, capable of equalling Hals at his best, had been discovered.
"Introduction," p. xxii
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
Context: While young fools of my generation produced terrifying symptoms by ingesting poisons of various synthetic kinds, I was taken to extraordinary realms by a bacillus carried from human excrement by a fly's foot. I swelled to the size of a mountain and shrank to the size of a pin, flew and sang and fell through exotic configurations, in the intervals between agonizing convulsions on the heavy earthenware vaso, whose lethal contents I had to dispose of in the fields when the fever subsided. When the burning and shivering stopped and I could see again only what was there, I stayed enthralled by clarity. There was nothing to me in biochemical mindbending or bullshit psychedelia that did not have the slimy scent of death about it. I hated being out of touch, isolated by the solipsism of delirium, unable to communicate or comprehend.
As quoted in "Germaine Greer — Opinions That May Shock the Faithful" by Judith Weinraub in The New York Times (22 March 1971) http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/greer-shock.html
Context: 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.
Introduction
The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause (1991)
Context: Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.
Introduction
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Context: The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial.
“Such art reinforces human dignity.”
Source: The Obstacle Race (1979), Chapter V: Dimension (p. 105)
Context: Great art, for those who insist upon this rather philistine concept (as if un-great art were unworthy of even their most casual and ill-informed attention), makes us stand back and admire. It rushes upon us pell-mell like the work of Rubens or Tintoretto or Delacroix, or towers above us. There is of course another aesthetic: the art of a Vermeer or a Braque seeks not to amaze and appal but to invite the observer to come closer, to close with the painting, peer into it, become intimate with it. Such art reinforces human dignity.
Introduction
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Context: The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial.
On how she chose the title for The Female Eunuch, in an interview by Nat Lehrman in Playboy (January 1972)
Context: The term eunuchs was used by Eldridge Cleaver to describe blacks. It occurred to me that women were in a somewhat similar position. Blacks had been emancipated from slavery but never given any kind of meaningful freedom, while women were given the vote but denied sexual freedom. In the final analysis, women aren't really free until their libidos are recognized as separate entities. Some of the suffragettes understood this. They could see the connection among the vote, political power, independence and being able to express their sexuality according to their own experience, instead of in reference to a demand by somebody else. But they were regarded as crazy and were virtually crucified. Thinking about them, I suddenly realized, Christ, we've been castrated and that's what it's all about. You see, it's all very well to let a bullock out into the field when you've already cut his balls off, because you know he's not going to do anything. That's exactly what happened to women.
Source: The Obstacle Race (1979), Chapter V: Dimension (p. 105)
Context: Great art, for those who insist upon this rather philistine concept (as if un-great art were unworthy of even their most casual and ill-informed attention), makes us stand back and admire. It rushes upon us pell-mell like the work of Rubens or Tintoretto or Delacroix, or towers above us. There is of course another aesthetic: the art of a Vermeer or a Braque seeks not to amaze and appal but to invite the observer to come closer, to close with the painting, peer into it, become intimate with it. Such art reinforces human dignity.
Womanpower (p. 129)
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Context: Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks. It is a slender case but perhaps it does mean that women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.
Source: The Obstacle Race (1979), Chapter VII: The Disappearing Oeuvre (p. 134)
Context: Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse.
“The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening.”
Introduction
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Context: The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial.
“In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.”
"Still in Melbourne, January 1987"
Source: Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989)
Context: Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace, and wit, reminders of order, calm, and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep, and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.
“Security is the denial of life”
Source: The Female Eunuch
“Status ought not to be measured by a woman's ability to attract and snare a man.”
Source: The Female Eunuch
Mothers (pg. 209)
The Whole Woman (1999)
Womanpower (p. 128)
The Female Eunuch (1970)
The Psychological Sell
The Female Eunuch (1970)
“Man is jealous because of his amour propre; woman is jealous because of her lack of it.”
Love: Egotism (p. 155) http://books.google.com/books?id=mhi0AAAAIAAJ&q=%22Man+is+jealous+because+of+his+amour%22+%22woman+is+jealous+because+of+her+lack+of+it%22&pg=PA155 http://books.google.com/books?id=dtnbrx0pOI4C&q=%22Man+is+jealous+because+of+his+amour+propre+woman+is+jealous+because+of+her+lack+of+it%22&pg=PT170#v=onepage
The Female Eunuch (1970)
“No one goes to the toilet in novels. You'd think none of us had bladders.”
Newsnight Review (2009-07-24)
“Nobody wants a girl whose beauty is imperceptible to all but him…”
The Stereotype (p. 67)
The Female Eunuch (1970)
“Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.”
The Psychological Sell (p. 104)
The Female Eunuch (1970)
“The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.”
Chapter 2 http://books.google.com/books?id=7MGFAAAAIAAJ&q=%22The+management+of+fertility+is+one+of+the+most+important%22+%22of+adulthood%22&pg=PA40#v=onepage
Sex and Destiny : The Politics of Human Fertility (1984)
The Raw Material
The Female Eunuch (1970)
"'Unhelpful to the workers' cause'" [undated], p. 175
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
“As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue.”
"A needle for your pornograph" (22 July 1971), p. 67
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
The Stereotype
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Security (p. 274)
The Female Eunuch (1970)
“Next time round Hitler will be a machine.”
"My Mailer problem" (September 1971), 83
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
"The million-dollar Underground" (July 1969), p. 15
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
Source: Sex and Destiny : The Politics of Human Fertility (1984), Chapter 14
“This sequel to The Female Eunuch is the book I said I would never write.”
"Recantation"
The Whole Woman (1999)
Article "Abortion", The Sunday Times, 21 May 1972
"Not a time to die" (3 December 1972), p. 147
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
"The Big Tease" (October 1972), p. 138
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
“The treatment for jaded sensibilities is not to shatter them, after all.”
"The Wet Dream Film Festival" (1971), p. 57
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
“Kinkiness comes from low energy. It's the substitution of lechery for lust.”
"A groupie's vision" (October 1969), p. 10
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
"Still in Melbourne, January 1987", as quoted in [Fred R Shapiro, The Yale Book of Quotations, https://books.google.com/books?id=ck6bXqt5shkC, 2006, Yale University Press, 0-300-10798-6, 324]
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989)
