page_title: Germaine Greer
section_title: Cambridge
hierarchical_section_title: Germaine Greer / Early life and education / University / Cambridge
caption_attribution_description: English: Friar House, Cambridge viewed from The Eagle pub in October 2018.
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: The MA won Greer a Commonwealth Scholarship, with which she funded further studies at the University of Cambridge, arriving in October 1964 at Newnham College, a women-only college. She had been encouraged to move from Sydney by Sam Goldberg, a Leavisite, who had been Challis Chair of English Literature at Sydney since 1963. Initially joining a BA course at Cambridge—her scholarship would have allowed her to complete it in two years—Greer managed to switch after the first term ("by force of argument", according to Clive James) to the PhD programme to study Shakespeare, supervised by Anne Barton, then known as Anne Righter. She said she switched because she "realized they were not going to teach [her] anything". It was Muriel Bradbrook, Cambridge's first female Professor of English, who persuaded Greer to study Shakespeare; Bradbrook had supervised Barton's PhD.
  Cambridge was a difficult environment for women. As Christine Wallace notes, one Newnham student described her husband receiving a dinner invitation in 1966 from Christ's College that allowed "Wives in for sherry only". Lisa Jardine first encountered Greer at a formal dinner in Newnham. The principal had asked for silence for speeches. "As a hush descended, one person continued to speak, too engrossed in her conversation to notice":
  At the graduates' table, Germaine was explaining with passion that there could be no liberation for women, no matter how highly educated, as long as we were required to cram our breasts into bras constructed like mini-Vesuviuses, two stitched, white, cantilevered cones which bore no resemblance to the female anatomy. The willingly suffered discomfort of the Sixties bra, she opined vigorously, was a hideous symbol of male oppression.
  As soon as she arrived, Greer auditioned (with Clive James, whom she knew from the Sydney Push) for the student acting company, the Footlights, in its club room in Falcon Yard above a Mac Fisheries shop. They performed a sketch in which he was Noël Coward and she was Gertrude Lawrence. Joining on the same day as James and Russell Davies, Greer was one of the first women to be admitted as a full member, along with Sheila Buhr and Hilary Walston. The Cambridge News carried a news item about it in November 1964, referring to the women as "three girls". Greer's response to being accepted was reportedly: "This place is jumping with freckle-punchers. You can have it on your own." She did take part in its 1965 revue, My Girl Herbert, alongside Eric Idle (the Footlights president), John Cameron, Christie Davies and John Grillo. A critic noticed "an Australian girl who had a natural ability to project her voice". Other members of the Footlights when she was there included Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Peter Cook and David Frost.
  Greer lived for a time in the room next to Clive James at Friar House on Bene't Street, opposite The Eagle. Referring to her as "Romaine Rand", James described her room in his memoir of Cambridge, May Week Was In June (1991):
  Drawing on her incongruous but irrepressible skills as a housewife, she had tatted lengths of batik, draped bolts of brocade, swathed silk, swagged satin, niched, ruffed, hemmed and hawed. There were oriental carpets and occidental screens, ornamental plants and incidental music. The effect was stunning. ... Romaine, however, once she had got her life of luxury up and running, did not luxuriate. She had a typewriter the size of a printing press. Instantly she was at it, ten hours a day. Through the lath-and-plaster wall I could hear her attacking the typewriter as if she had a contract, with penalty clauses, for testing it to destruction.
  Greer finished her PhD in Calabria, Italy, where she stayed for three months in a village with no running water and no electricity. The trip had begun as a visit with a boyfriend, Emilio, but he ended the relationship so Greer had changed her plans. Rising before dawn, she would wash herself at a well, drink black coffee and start typing. She was awarded her PhD in May 1968 for a thesis entitled The Ethic of Love and Marriage in Shak
caption: Greer lived in the room next to Clive James at Friar House (white building), Bene't Street, Cambridge.
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