Germaine Greer Quotes

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

It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along.

If women could regard childbearing not as a duty or an inescapable
destiny but as a privilege to be worked for, the way a man might
work for the right to have a family, children might grow up without
the burden of gratitude for the gift of life which they never asked
for.

Society seems to find it irresistible to characterise the “unworldliness” of the male intellectual and academic in terms of his failure to control the women in his life.

Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading.

Man is jealous because of his amour propre; woman is jealous because of her lack of it.

Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them.

When abandoned women follow their fleeing males with tear-stained faces, screaming you can't do this to me, they reveal that all that they have offered in the name of generosity and altruism has been part of an assumed transaction, in which they were entitled to a certain payoff.

Probably the commonest form of non-criminal rape is rape by fraud - by phoney tenderness or false promises of an enduring relationship, for example.

Thirty years on, femininity is still compulsory for women — and has become an option for men — while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity. Meanwhile, the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character.

English children have lost their innocence, for their first lessons have been in the exploitation of their adult slave. A sterilized parent is a eunuch in his children's harem
m. to be sure, I recognize that efficient contraception is necessary for sexual pleasure, and that sexual pleasure is necessary, but contraception for economic reasons is another matter. 'We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'. A sterilized parent is forever bound to those children he has, more than ever immobile and predictable, and those children are more securely bound to him. 'We can only afford two children' really means, 'We only like clean, well-discipline middle-class children who grow up to be professionals', for children manage to use up all the capital that is made available for that purpose, whatever proportion it may be of the family's whole income, just as housework expands to fill the time available. The sterilized parent is the ultimate domestic animal.

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.

Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.

...some claim that one is only ever really in love once in a lifetime, others that it is better the second time around, others that the first time is the only genuine manifestation, still others that they fall in love every week or even every day.

The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial.