Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Germaine Greer
Oration given on Thursday 10 July 2003
Chancellor, the Senate has resolved that the
degree of Doctor of the University be conferred upon GERMAINE GREER
Comparing a degree congregation today with one
thirty years ago, one could not help but be struck by the enormous
change in the gender composition of graduands. In 1970 the vast majority
were male, while today women account for an ever increasing proportion,
not only in the humanities and social sciences, but also in less
traditional areas like mathematics and medicine, where sixty per cent of
student intake is now female. How far increasing educational equality
will be consolidated into real equality in future professional and
public life is an open question, and in part the responsibility of
today’s graduates to take up the challenge. But at least a beginning has
been made. Women students today no longer hide their brains under
beehive hairstyles nor are they led to see marriage and children as
their ultimate goal in life.
Germaine Greer must take credit for some of the
massive shift in attitudes by both women and men underlying gender
change. Together with other feminist writers in the late 1960s and early
1970s, she brought into sharp focus conflicts and inequalities between
the sexes, arguing that these were a feature not only of external public
life but also went to the heart of personal, intimate, family and sexual
relationships. For good reason, her book The Female Eunuch,
published in 1970, became known as the iconic/iconoclastic feminist
text. Many women claim their lives were changed forever by reading her
detailed dissections of body and soul, love and hate, and her
exhortation to raise their expectations and revolutionise their lives.
Her central argument was that physical and
psychological suppression of their energy castrated women, turning them
into eunuchs who could only live vicariously through men. She issued a
call to arms for women to stop collaborating in their own oppression,
and to seek not simply emancipation and equal rights, but rather
personal and sexual liberation, which would in the long run improve the
lives of men as well as women.
The book caused a sensation and by 1977 was being
reprinted monthly. It reached and emboldened thousands, possibly
millions, of women who would otherwise have little access to such ideas.
Germaine Greer was not the only advocate of women’s liberation, but
unlike other second-wave feminists Shulamith Firestone, Juliet Mitchell,
Kate Millett, Betty Friedan and Valerie Solanas, she was the only one to
become a household name. The Female Eunuch still adorns many
bookshelves, including that of Edwina Currie, former Conservative
Minister and mistress of a future Prime Minister. Her boast to own but
never to have read the book is the ultimate accolade by someone who
convinced herself that she was already wielding the power feminists
could only dream of.
In the intervening years Germaine Greer has
continued her challenge to received thinking about gender and sexuality
in a series of always controversial and sometimes contradictory texts.
In Sex and Destiny: the Politics of Human Fertility (1984) she
reappraised the relation between sex and reproduction, now criticising
the advocacy of total sexual freedom and praising the extended family.
This book also broadened its vision to women in the developing world,
celebrating the strength of female collectivities in segregated
societies and questioning the motives underlying western promotion of
fertility control. The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause
followed in 1991, an indictment of medicalised menopause management
which draws out the positive side and ‘peculiar satisfactions’ of
growing older. 1999 saw the publication to wide critical acclaim of
The Whole Woman. This sequel to The Female Eunuch speaks to a
new generation of young women, criticising the limitations of current
equal rights policies and social pressures to be sexually active.
Germaine Greer argues for the continuing relevance of a more radical and
unashamedly feminist agenda which can also address newly recognised
problems such as eating disorders and self mutilation.
But to concentrate on Germaine Greer’s polemical
feminism would be to understate her scholarly contribution to the study
of English literature. She has degrees in literature from the
universities of Melbourne, Sydney and Cambridge, held academic positions
in several universities and is currently Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Warwick University. Amongst other
contributions, she is the author of the Past Masters Series volume on
Shakespeare (1986) and the editor of Kissing the Rod (1988),
Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet
(1995) and other anthologies. Indeed her own publishing company, Stump
Cross Books, was largely established to recover and bring to the reading
public the work of hitherto unrecognised 17th and 18th
century women poets.
Poetry constitutes for Germaine Greer the crux of
human achievement. ‘Faith in poetry as the acme of human creative
expression is an absolute requirement of any who choose to study it’,
she wrote in her enquiry into the conditions of recognition and
rejection of the female writer over a long historical period. Germaine
Greer argues staunchly that, whether writers or not, women should be
recognised for their human status, rather than classified amongst
angels or divinities. She is concerned most with, as she puts it,
‘literary women who took themselves seriously, who risked ridicule,
exploitation and calumny because they thought they had something to
say’. In her earlier book The Obstacle Race: the fortunes of women
painters and their work (1979), Germaine Greer was concerned, as the
title clearly indicates, with how societal viewing of women painters’
endeavour and achievement might lead to an undervaluing of their worth.
Always, whether writing of others or herself,
Germaine Greer stays in touch with the question as to whether human
potential is being lived up to or not. In her book on her Australian
family origins, Daddy We Hardly Knew You (1989), she discovers
that far from being the hero she wished him to be, her father had hidden
from her and the rest of the family many human failings throughout his
life. Finding out about those weaknesses was profoundly disappointing.
But at the end of a pain-filled search Greer discovered someone she had
not even been looking for, her father’s original foster mother, never
spoken about by Greer’s father during Germaine’s own upbringing. This
now long-deceased woman from Tasmania, ‘had in abundance all the human
characteristics I most prize, tenderness, energy, intelligence,
resource, constancy, honesty, courage, imagination, endurance,
compassion...’
Germaine Greer relishes the role of maverick
individualist, always challenging, always controversial, contradicting
the establishment, including feminism itself in its establishment
manifestation, and sometimes contesting her own earlier views.
She is renowned for other accomplishments and
interests too. She is a keen cook, entomologist and horticulturalist,
the author of gardening columns for Private Eye under the
pseudonym Rose Blight. She farms and publishes in Essex, and is
patron of Colchester Rape Crisis Line. There can be few people equally
at home as a Professor in the lecture theatre and in the television
studio as panellist on Have I Got News For You or Newsnight
Review, or who can claim both a mention in Bridget Jones’ Diary
and a portrait, by Paula Rego, hanging in the National Portrait Gallery.
Chancellor, I present to you Germaine Greer
Orator: Professor Miriam Glucksmann