WisdomArea — Wisdom & Inspiration

"The chief means of liberating women is replacing of compulsiveness and compulsion by the pleasure principle. Cooking, clothes, beauty, and housekeeping are all compulsive activities in which the anxiety quotient has long since replaced the pleasure or achievement quotient. It is possible to use even cooking, clothes, cosmetics and housekeeping for fun. The essence of pleasure is spontaneity. In these cases spontaneity means rejecting the norm, the standard that one must live up to, and establishing a self-regulating principle."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"It was not until much later when, after a deep and satisfying orgasm, I suddenly realised the true meaning of the fairy tale and the nature of the magic kiss of which it speaks."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"Human beings love, despite their compulsions to limit it and exploit it chaotically. Their love persuades them to make vows, build houses and turn their passion ultimately to duty."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"What is certain is that he [the baby] has too much attention from the one person who is entirely at his disposal. The intimacy between mother and child is not sustaining and healthy. The child learns to exploit his mother's accessibility, badgering her with questions and demands which are not of any real consequence to him, embarrassing her in public, blackmailing her into buying sweets and carrying him."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate. Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"Rather than seek to be squired and dated by their rivals why should it not be possible for women to find relaxation and pleasure in the company of their 'inferiors'? They would need to shed their desperate need to admire a man, and accept the gentler role of loving him. A learned woman cannot castrate a truck-driver like she can her intellectual rival, because he has no exaggerated respect for her bookish capacities. The alternative to conventional education is not stupidity, and many a clever girl needs the corrective of a humbler soul's genuine wisdom."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood - if it makes you sick, you've got a long way to go, baby."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"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."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"The Poison Maiden has conceived by him, and is plumb ready to enter the divine category of mother, only one last fiend clubs her to death. The final clinch of male romanticism is that each man kills the thing he loves; whether she be Catharine in A Farewell to Arms, or the Grecian Urn, the 'tension that she be perfect' means that she must die, leavinf the hero's status as a great lover unchallenged. The pattern is still commonplace: the hero cannot marry. The sexual exploit must be conquest, not cohabitation and mutual tolerance."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"The point of an organi family is to release the children from the disadvantages of being extensions of their parents so that they can belong primarily to themselves. They may accept the services that adults perform for them naturally without establishing dependencies."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"A child must have care and attention, but that care and attention need not emanate from a single, permanently present individual. Children are more disturbed by changes of place than by changes in personnel around them, and more distressed by friction and ill-feeling between the adults in their environment than by unfamiliarity."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"It [childbearing] was never intended to be as time-consuming and self-conscious a process as it is. One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. But of forty-eight chromosomes only one is different: on this difference we base a complete separation of male and female, pretending as it were that all forty-eight were different."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"Properly speaking, altruism is an absurdity. Women are self-sacrificing in direct proportion to their incapacity to offer anything but this sacrifice. They sacrifice what they never had: a self. The cry of the deserted woman, 'What have I done to deserve this' reveals at once the false emotional economy that she has been following."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"The problem of the survival of humanity is not a matter of ensuring the birth of future generations but of limiting it. The immediate danger to humanity is that of total annihilation within a generation or two, not the failure of mankind to breed. A woman seeking alternative modes of life is no longer morally bound to pay her debt to nature."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"Every wife who slaves to keep herself pretty, to cook her husband's favourite meals, to build up his pride and confidence in himself at the expense of his sense of reality, to be his closest and effectively his only friend, to encourage him to rejectthe consensus of opinionand find reassurance only in her arms is binding her mate to her with hoops of steel that will strangle them both."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"It is agreed that 'girls take more bringing up' than boys: what that really means is that girls must be more relentlessly supervised and repressed if the desired result is to ensue."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"The occupational hazard of being a Playboy Bunny is the aching facial muscles brought on by obligatory smiles."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

"If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence and sensuality?"

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

Get more quotes like Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch's — every morning.

Add to Collection

Save to Your Library