I have written about Germaine Greer in the Sunday Age, looking at the way in which The Female Eunuch – published forty years ago this year – helped so many women start groping their way towards freedom, and asking why it is that Greer is still subject to such vicious attacks even today. Read article
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Liberty belle10 comments to Liberty belle |
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Dear Anne,
Thank you for your Germaine Greer article this morning. I read Louis Nowra’s article in The Monthly and disliked intensely its tone of bullying nastiness. I found the discussion of her physical appearance particularly unpleasant. She was a quite extraordinarily beautiful young woman, and in fact is handsome and engaging now, but these things shouldn’t really matter. Nowra’s description is a reflection perhaps of the way we seem to be encouraged to despise old age in this era. He seems to feel her continued outspokenness as a personal affront.
I find Greer abidingly courageous in her choices (even with the Big Brother fiasco). To me, the Nowra piece smacked of resentment and a strong desire to reduce someone who will always be a bigger person, and who will leave a more profound legacy. How he belittled and exposed himself!
Thank you, I read the Louis Nowra article and was having trouble articulating why it upset me.
Anne, read your article, couldn’t agree more. As a 50 year old fella with 4 sisters and a million other female best friends I reckon you are correct in your defence of Germaine. She pisses me off the way she derides her birthplace but at times I can see her point.
I have never read TFE but as I am due to start a course as a telephone counsellor for men with violence issues through the Say No To Violence and Mens Referral Service I feel it might be pretty worthy book to have a look at. All the best. ME.
Re Liberty Belle.
I agree with your thoughts about Germaine. She should be respected and honoured for her intellectual courage.
I’m no feminist but concede the basic argument. And like you (and apart from whether you agree or disagree with GG) I really dislike the stereotyping and small fly nastiness she is unfairly subjected too.
Well done with this article… great topic for a big essay (monthly?) or even a book. I think the issue tells us a lot about where Aust is intellectually.
Thanks.
Re: Liberty Belle, I don’t understand why you criticise Loius Nowra for putting a picture of 71 year old Germaine Greer as she is on the cover. Would you prefer a New Idea style makeover, Botox injections or a Cosmo digital retouch? What’s wrong with age lines? Nothing I (and I’m sure Germaine) would say. Why not support the appreciation of women as they are? You seem to put Greer on a pedestal on one hand and then contradict what she stands for through your view!
Hi Anne, Congrats on your piece on Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. I read Louis’s piece in The Monthly and was dismayed both by the slapdash quality of his analysis, if you can call it that, and the way he seemed to read everything she’d ever written solely in terms of his personal dislike of her; but I was more dismayed by The Monthly’s decision to hand this task to someone who has no particular expertise in the area, whether it be a feminist scholar, a veteran of the women’s movement, or even someone whose life was changed by it (one of those husband-leaving women, perhaps!). What you want in a piece like this is some sort of larger perspective on an important text. Louis and The Monthly offered neither – just cheap shots at someone who the Australian media love to hate. To me, it demonstrates that the Australian media and many readers still prefer women who know their place and keep themselves nice. GG is annoying, and a bit of a fame hound, but she’s also fearless and can be very incisive. And it almost doesn’t need to be said that no-one has been bagging out male writers of a similar age for looking like a mad grandad. Sigh. But on we go.
Dear Anne,
Thankyou for your article on Germaine Greer in the Sunday Age 7/3/10. I have a dim recollection of her as a rather challenging tutor in first year English at Sydney University in the early 1960s – could this be so? As a rather naïve male, I was later certainly influenced by her contributions to feminist perspectives. In the early 1970s and living in Michigan, I subscribed to both Ms magazine, and Playboy (`for the articles’), but I confess this was partly for the notoriety of being a contrarian.
That aside, the most influential `feminist’ book for me personally was Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977). It truly shocked me with its portrayal of what I could only surmise were typical middle class marriages among Mira and her friends, and which I probably unconsciously accepted as `normal’, until I read it. The `second layer’ of male assumptions was just as disturbing to me, when Mira’s later `soul-mate’ lover, Ben, never asked her if she wanted to go to Africa; he had just assumed that she would. Then just as she was beginning to believe she could actually go with him despite the difficulty of completing her degree in Africa, he compounded his assumptions by talking about their child, and he was unable to accept that she wanted no more children.
This fictional but true-sounding situation was much more influential in changing my consciousness, than all the more theoretical or rhetorically persuasive books and articles from feminist sources, and more so than discussions with real women, who seemed either too angry and drastic, or still too confused about what they really wanted. Marilyn French managed to get inside me, with some semblance of what it was really like to be a woman, and disempowered.
But the situation with Ben raises a real and continuing dilemma, when both men and women have equal rights to a career which might separate them geographically or ideologically, as well as differences about a desire for parenthood. It is very hard to balance all this, in the more complex world in which we now live. And the empty beach at the end of the novel is not very inspiring; not too real, I hope, for many of the new generation of women.
Dear Anne,
I’m now living in Melbourne so have only just read (online) your piece on Germaine. Thank you for such a sane response to the very personal attack on her by the Monthly.
The cover photograph was exactly the kind of harridan pic of her so beloved by the Oz and, alas, the Fairfax press, but I would have expected a magazine of ideas to do better, especially one whose previous editor established its reputation for high quality photography. And I read Louis’ demolition job with amazement. He’s so furious with Germaine that he can allow her nothing at all. She’s not even allowed to grow old, let alone be clever and witty and cheeky.
And she’s certainly not allowed to dislike her mother. Fancy a woman not getting on with her mother! Tut tut. And Louis and I seem to have read a different version of Daddy, We Hardly Knew You.
It seems to me that, amongst other, more obvious things, Louis misses entirely the scholarly aspect of what she does. He dismisses Shakespeare’s Wife, for instance, with a crude sexual remark, but appears to have no idea of the value of of the research she has done, work that now begs to be followed up, whether you agree with her conclusions about Mrs Shakespeare or not.
I was a bit taken aback when she went on Big Brother but then Dale Spender said, ‘Isn’t that just like her. She’s always wanted to try things, and now she’s trying this. Good on her.’
I’m sure you’ve seen her in action, delivering a talk or a lecture. I think she’s at her best then, a brilliant, funny and utterly engaging speaker, and sardonically self-deprecating. Like you, I often feel both infuriated and inspired by Germaine, usually at the same time. But she is fearless, and keeps on thinking and provoking, so that often it’s the disagreeing with her that forces me to work out what I think about whatever it is. I admire her, and am immensely grateful to her. And how much duller our lives would have been without her.
Warmest regards
Suzy
Well said Anne.
Tis the folly of the young.
They do not wish to understand the courage of the brave who forged before them!!
Anne – thank you for your respnse to Nowra’s diatribe
Germaine Greer influenced the upbringing of my daughters who are independent, aware and tackling life with their sense of self which comes partly from my own awakening from Germaine and others, such as yourself, but I am fearful for my daughters and their daughters, as social and religious attitudes and restraints are becoming commonplace, to subdue their logical reasoning and expectations for a decent life.Ignore Louis Nowra but question why he was published?