Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew [Hardcover]

Christine Wallace (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1999

This first unauthorized biography of wildly controversial, groundbreaking feminist Germaine Greer portrays an exceptionally talented, spirited, gutsy woman at odds with the family and era into which she was born, who has had a major, if ambiguous, impact for the good of women in her time. 34 photos.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Germaine Greer didn't want this book to be written. Indeed, she described its author, an Australian journalist with a background in parliamentary reporting, as an "amoeba," a "dung-beetle," and a "brain-dead hack." Greer's loss, however, is a reader's gain. This profile of the nonfeminist's feminist is an admirable attempt to analyze Greer's celebrity, and the sales of The Female Eunuch, as a paradigm of postwar media success: "Take a great title, arresting cover artwork, a promotable, quotable author, add sex...." Greer's life makes a compelling story because, like so many professional polemicists, she has never been inhibited by fact, logic, or consistency. Christine Wallace's efforts to unearth the successive layers of Greer's myth reveal her as a young nonfeminist who initially dismissed her agent's suggestion for a book on the status of women; a sexual libertarian who attacked her Cambridge women's college for hiring a transsexual; and a trained scholar who subsequently declared all women academics hopelessly neurotic--only to return to the ivory tower at financially expedient intervals.

Yet in one respect Greer has remained constant: as this biography demonstrates, the media's favorite feminist has been a lifelong misogynist, singling out women (painters, poets, other feminists, her mother, the female eunuch) for opprobrium. Wallace's analysis of this extraordinary career is careful, well-informed (particularly on the Australian intellectual traditions that contributed to Greer's bizarre combination of moral certainty, libertarianism, and political pessimism), and--given her subject's threats and libels--surprisingly fair. As she stresses, The Female Eunuch may have made little impact on organized feminism, but its "vision of assertive women in hot pursuit of pleasure, independence, and spontaneity" empowered the women who read it far beyond the realms of activism. Whether Greer's subsequent writings ever contributed to anything other than her bank account is a different question. In a final irony, the biography she didn't want was published in Britain to coincide with a new book of her own. --Mandy Merck, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

In this unauthorized biography, Australian journalist Wallace relentlessly stalks Germaine Greer, ultimately finding few redeeming intellectual, creative or social attributes in her subject. Wallace starts out with an apparently even-tempered investigation of Greer's upbringing in 1950s Australia, her early career as actress-cum-journalist and her completion of a doctorate in English literature at Cambridge, leading to Greer's explosion into celebrity in 1970 with The Female Eunuch, a book Wallace calls a testament to "hegemonic heterosexuality." Although the bestseller made Greer synonymous with women's liberation, Wallace argues that Greer was an opportunist who took advantage of a historical moment to feather her own nest. She quotes scholars and participants in the feminist movement who saw Greer as a quisling to both the women's movement and the sexual revolution. Wallace often gets in a quick left-right, as when she concludes that Greer derived her premise for The Female Eunuch from Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver's "Allegory of the Black Eunuch," in Soul on Ice, and then charges that Greer's book was "politically naive." She also contends that Greer capitulated to men by blaming women for the male violence inflicted on them in language that "relied on traditional rhetorical ploys," such as Greer's Marxist allusion to women as "sexual proletariats." Greer's disenchantment with Catholicism, her problematic relationship with her parents and husband (a man whom Wallace casts as the "culmination of her heterosexual rough trade fantasy") and her role as a bomb thrower against the women's movement are all covered. But all these issues are raised as part of a one-sided treatment of Greer and her writings. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 333 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber; First edition. edition (March 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571199348
• ISBN-13: 978-0571199341
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,920,392 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book that suits its subject, April 14, 2006

By 

Elizabeth A. Root (Laurel, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew (Hardcover)

Ever since a delusional friend told me that I would be very impressed by The Female Eunuch, I have wondered why Greer seems to attract so much admiration. I read most of her books, attempting to discover the attraction. (I gave up after the dreadful Daddy, We Hardly Knew You.) I would suggest that the reader who wants to see her at her best read the appropriately named The Mad Woman's Underclothes. Her earlier essays are witty, incisive and clever. The quality does deteriorate as the book goes on, but at least I had some insight into what people admire. I read this biography hoping to understand Greer's admirers; I still don't but perhaps that isn't Wallace's fault.

It is always difficult to ascertain how accurate biographical material is unless there is a lot of it to be compared. Therefore, I cannot say if Christine Wallace is accurate and insightful, but I will say that my readings of Greer's works make this biography very plausible.

I was actually a trifle surprised that other reviewers described Wallace as hostile: I thought she was kinder than Greer deserved. Sometimes when a subject comes across poorly, it is because of their own flaws, not the biographer's. Wallace actually admired a number of things about Greer: she thinks that The Female Eunuch was a powerful book, even if she did think that Greer was cashing in on the times. She admires her defiance of convention in her college days, remarks on her intelligence, her creativity and her talent for acting.

As for the charges that Greer is hypocritical, inconsistent, and tells wildly variant versions of her life, I can only suggest that the reader consult Greer's own work. Her thought is rather warped by mother-blaming and the conviction that in any society other than what I'll call Western-Industrial, all children are loved and well treated. How bad a mother was Mrs. Greer? Extremely abusive and probably mental ill, according to her daughter's writings, but Wallace says that Greer now denies that she was abused. Greer wants women in the Western-Industrial cultures to make a spectacle, particularly a sexual spectacle of themselves, while admiring the modesty of traditional cultures.

Greer is the woman, who in The Female Eunuch, so admired close-knit Italian family life that she wanted to buy a farm and leave her child(ren) to be raised in Italy by her tenants, while she continued to live her sophisticated life in England. (She has denied this, but I read the book.) She doesn't seem to care to live by her own convictions, or I suppose that she would be living in an arranged marriage in her beloved India. She wondered, I believe it was in Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, why Australians thought that she doesn't like them. My guess would be that they read her earlier books. A case can be made for many of the points that Greer raises, but taken altogether she is incoherent.

I don't sympathize with Greer's claims that this book has invaded her privacy. Even a public person has the moral, if not legal right to withdraw into privacy, but Wallace is not like the papparazzi muscling their way in. In most cases, Wallace has relied on Greer's own writings, interviews and public comments - it's not an invasion of privacy to comment on public materials. Her interviews with other people are chiefly about subjects that Greer herself made public. It is not as if Greer has sent her books out into the world while trying to live an otherwise retired life. She has gone to great lengths to make herself a provocative public figure. Those who participate in the brawl, excuse me, marketplace of ideas, have to accept the right of others to respond.

5.0 out of 5 stars Arguably the most popularly influential feminist of the entire second wave, August 24, 2010

By 

Malcolm Gorman (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew (Hardcover)

Among Western women born before 1960 Germaine has immense recognition, frequently accompanied by warmth and spirited regard. Her message might be mixed, her polemic often led to practical cul-de-sacs rather than liberation, but Greer's in-your-face style and determination to lead her own flagrantly unconventional life to her own satisfaction have been an incendiary inspiration to the mousy-brown downtrodden of the domestic world. Even those who were not following Germaine's example could gain vicarious pleasure from it, and were just that much less likely to accept a dull, dreary, handmaidenish existence.

That's a pretty fair picture of Germaine Greer if I do say so myself -- which I didn't, and it is actually a direct quotation from page 331 of Greer: Untamed Shrew by Christine Wallace herself. So much for some negative views about Untamed Shrew.

The biography is thoroughly researched, well written and rings true in relation to The Female Eunuch which I read when it came out, and more recent interviews you can see with Germaine Greer on the web.

Second wave feminism needed Germaine Greer, and Christine Wallace makes that clear. Greer does not come out of the biography all light and goodness by any means, but her complexity probably contributed to her effectiveness both as an author and in debating forums. My own view of Germaine Greer became more sympathetic reading the Wallace biography, and gave me a sense of the personal history and polemical tactics that make The Female Eunuch such a riveting read.

7 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Casualty of celebrity status, October 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew (Hardcover)

Christine Wallace's writing made me a proud member of the anonymous society. Teh above statement encompasses, Wallace's attempt at writing Greer's biography. The title and the subject matter remain to be the only points of interest in the book. Based upon Ms. Wallace's personal opinions, perceptions and most importantly judgements, the book fails to deliver what it claims (A book that Greer tried to stop from publishing). Her assessment of Greer barely attempts to penetrate the epidermis of the woman who caused a stir and caused the Western society to "smell the coffee" by writing "The Female Eunuch". Wallace claims that Greer was never a feminist - Eunuch was an accident she wrote. It sounds like a personal opinion, which brings about a debate, but nevertheless, it is not a biography. Weak bibliography, jumpy and choppy paragraphs and unsupported claims make this an insult to all biographers of modern times. This is truly a book that would scare any celebrity merely because it doesn't reveal anything, yet it claims so much. A personal advise for Christine Wallace: Your talents would be better suited to a publication like the National Enquirer or the Globe.