Germaine Greer Quotes

Deny a young boy the right to have a toy gun and you will suppress his destructive urges, and he will turn out to be a homosexual - or worse!

Women's magazines sadly remark that children can have a disruptive effect on the conjugal relationship, that the young wife's involvement with her children and her exhaustion can interfere with her husband's claims on her. What a notion- a family that is threatened by its children! Contraception has increased the egotism of the couple: planned children have a pattern to fit into; at least unplanned children had some of the advantages of contingency. First and foremost they were whether their parents liked it or not. In the limited nuclear family the parents are the principals and children are theirs to manipulate in a newly purposive way. The generation gap is being intensified in these families where children must not inconvenience their parents, where they are disposed of in special living quarters at special times of day, their own rooms and so forth. Anything less than this is squalor. Mother must not have more children than she can control: control means full attention for much of the day, then isolation.

Everybody who meddles with Shakespeare biography readily accepts that the Bard was unfaithful to his wife and excuses him for it, but infidelity on the part of his wife is sufficient to justify estrangement.

This sequel to The Female Eunuch is the book I said I would never write.

On ladies' nights they watch frozen-faced while their men embrace and fool about commenting to each other that they are all overgrown boys. Of the love of fellows they know nothing. They cannot love each other in this easy, innocent, spontaneous way because they cannot love themselves.

The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.

Where did you get the idea that the most wonderful thing I could be in life was obedient?

Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.

We can say the brotherhood of man, and pretend that we include the sisterhood of women, but we know that we don't. Folklore has it that women only congregate to bitch an absent member of their group, and continue to do so because they are to well aware of the consequences if they stay away. It's meant to be a joke, but like jokes about mothers-in-law it is founded in bitter truth.

Now as before, women must refuse to be meek and guileful, for truth cannot be served by dissimulation. Women who fancy that they manipulate the world by pussy power and gentle cajolery are fools. It is slavery to have to adopt such tactics.

If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?

If she is efficient and capable or ambitious, it is assumed that she has failed to find satisfaction as a normal woman, even to the extent of implying a glandular abnormality or sexual perversion.

I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.

Women's work, married or unmarried, is menial and low paid. Women's right to possess property is curtailed, more if they are married. How can marriage provide security? In any case a husband is a possession which can be lost or stolen and the abandoned wife of thirty odd with a couple of children is far more desolate and insecure in her responsibility than an unmarried woman with or without children ever could be.

Stupid people sometimes complain that there is no sex in Austen's novels. In fact, they are driven by the oceanic force of suppressed female desire, which dwarfs any opportunity for enactment. Actual sexual intercourse is the off-stage climax of the Austen novel. The possibility that defloration may be an anti-climax is to be found in the tingling ironies that cling to every word that Austen writes.