Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer is an Australian writer, academic and broadcaster whose 1970 book The Female Eunuch made her one of the most-recognized figures of second-wave feminism. She was born on January 29, 1939, in Melbourne, Australia, and educated at the Star of the Sea College, the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney before moving to England in 1964.

She took her doctorate at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1967 with a thesis on the early comedies of Shakespeare under the supervision of Muriel Bradbrook. From 1967 to 1972 she lectured in English at the University of Warwick. During the same period she contributed to the underground magazines Oz and Suck and appeared regularly on British television.

Her 1970 book The Female Eunuch, published by MacGibbon & Kee, sold widely in its first two years and was translated into many languages; its argument that the nuclear family suppresses female sexuality made it one of the central texts of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s. Her later books include The Obstacle Race (1979) on women painters before the 20th century, Sex and Destiny (1984), The Change (1991) on female menopause, The Whole Woman (1999) and Shakespeare's Wife (2007).

She was Special Lecturer and Unofficial Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1989, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick from 1998 to 2003. She bought a property at Cave Creek in northern New South Wales in 2001 and has run rainforest restoration there for more than two decades; she gave the property to the University of Melbourne in 2011. Her positions on transgender identity, in particular in The Whole Woman and her 2015 lectures, have produced sustained public controversy.

Her name Germaine is the French feminine form of Germain, from the Latin Germanus, originally an ethnic name meaning "German" or, in the broader Latin sense, "genuine, of the same parents." It is a feminine name borne in France particularly in honor of Saint Germaine of Pibrac.