Germaine Greer: Woman

“A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.”

Germaine Greer

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.

Girl

“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.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

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.

Men , Sex

“Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.”

Germaine Greer

Source: The Whole Woman

Beauty , Failure

“Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?”

Germaine Greer

Shoe

“Status ought not to be measured by a woman's ability to attract and snare a man.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

Source: The Female Eunuch

“In a sane society no woman would be left to struggle on her own with the huge transformation that is motherhood, when a single individual finds herself joined by an invisible umbilical cord to another person from whom she will never be separated, even by death.”

Germaine Greer

Mothers (pg. 209)
The Whole Woman (1999)

Death , Personality

“Nothing is more chilling than such a spectacle of unremitting self-sacrifice. This is a woman born to be abandoned by her ungrateful husband at the very pinnacle of success she helped to make for him, for a shameless hussy of nineteen.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

The Psychological Sell
The Female Eunuch (1970)

Success , Help

“Man is jealous because of his amour propre; woman is jealous because of her lack of it.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

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)