page_title: Germaine Greer
section_title: Melbourne and Sydney
hierarchical_section_title: Germaine Greer / Early life and education / University / Melbourne and Sydney
caption_attribution_description: English: hotel, sussex street, sydney
context_page_description: Germaine Greer is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the radical feminist movement in the later half of the 20th century.
  Specializing in English and women's literature, she has held academic positions in England at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge, and in the United States at the University of Tulsa. Based in the United Kingdom since 1964, she has divided her time since the 1990s between Queensland, Australia and her home in Essex, England.
  Greer's ideas have created controversy ever since her first book, The Female Eunuch, made her a household name. An international bestseller and a watershed text in the feminist movement, the book offered a systematic deconstruction of ideas such as womanhood and femininity, arguing that women are forced to assume submissive roles in society to fulfil male fantasies of what being a woman entails.
  Her work since then has focused on literature, feminism and the environment. She has written over 20 books, including Sex and Destiny, The Change, The Whole Woman, and Shakespeare's Wife.
context_section_description: From 1956 Greer studied English and French language and literature at the University of Melbourne on a Teacher's College Scholarship, living at home for the first two years on an allowance of £8 a week.
  Six feet tall by the age of 16, she was a striking figure. "Tall, loose-limbed and good-humoured, she strode around the campus, aware that she was much talked about", according to the journalist Peter Blazey, a contemporary at Melbourne. During her first year she had some kind of breakdown as a result of depression and was briefly treated in hospital. She told Playboy magazine, in an interview published in 1972, that she had been raped during her second year at Melbourne, an experience she described in detail in The Guardian in March 1995.
  Just before she graduated from Melbourne in 1959 with an upper second, she moved to Sydney, where she became involved with the Sydney Push and the anarchist Sydney Libertarians. "[T]hese people talked about truth and only truth", she said, "insisting that most of what we were exposed to during the day was ideology, which was a synonym for lies—or bullshit, as they called it." They would meet in a back room of the Royal George Hotel on Sussex Street. Clive James was involved with the group at the time. One of Greer's biographers, Christine Wallace, wrote that Greer "walked into the Royal George Hotel, into the throng talking themselves hoarse in a room stinking of stale beer and thick with cigarette smoke, and set out to follow the Push way of life, 'an intolerably difficult discipline which I forced myself to learn'". Greer already thought of herself as an anarchist without knowing why she was drawn to it; through the Push, she became familiar with anarchist literature. She had significant relationships in the group with Harry Hooton and Roelof Smilde, both prominent members. She shared an apartment with Smilde on Glebe Point Road, but the relationship did not last; according to Wallace, the Push ideology of "free love" involved the rejection of possessiveness and jealousy, which naturally worked in the men's favour.
  When the relationship with Smilde ended, Greer enrolled at the University of Sydney to study Byron, where, Clive James wrote, she became "famous for her brilliantly foul tongue". One of her friends there, Arthur Dignam, said that she "was the only woman we had met at that stage who could confidently, easily and amusingly put men down". She became involved in acting at Sydney and played Mother Courage in Mother Courage and Her Children in August 1963. That year she was awarded a first-class MA for a thesis entitled "The Development of Byron's Satiric Mode", and took up an appointment at Sydney as senior tutor in English, with an office next door to Stephen Knight in the university's Carslaw Building. "She was undoubtedly an excellent teacher", he said. "And one of the best lecturers—one of the few who could command the Wallace Lecture Theatre, with its 600 students. She had a kind of histrionic quality which was quite remarkable, added to her real scholarship."
caption: Royal George Hotel, Sydney, 2010
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