The Whole Woman Quotes

“Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

“The most cursory examination of even the most progressive organs of information reveals a curious inability to recognize women as newsmakers, unless they are young or married to a head of state or naked or pregnant by some triumph of technology or perpetrators or victims of some hideous crime or any combiniation of the above. Women's issues are often disguised as people issues, unless they are relegated to the women's pages which amazingly still suvive. Senior figures are all male; even the few women who are deemed worthy of obituaries are shown in images from their youth, as if the last fourty years of their lives have been without achievement of any kind. If you analyse the by-lines in your morning paper, you will see that the senior editorial staff are all older men, supported by a rabble of junior females, the infinitely replacesable 'hackettes'.”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

“I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

“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.”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

“Women’s liberation did not see the female’s potential in terms of the male’s actual; the visionary feminists of the late sixties and early seventies knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men.”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

“In 'The Female Eunuch' I argued that motherhood should not be treated as a substitute career; now I would argue that motherhood should be regarded as a genuine career option, that is to say, as paid work and, as such, as an alternative to other paid work. What this would mean is that every woman who decides to have a child would be paid enough to raise that child in decent circumstances.”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

“Women seek relief in tears where men seek relief in masturbation, which may be a distinction to be valued”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

“In a society constructed of self-perpetuating elites a grass roots movement exists to be walked on. Elites tumble down but the grass survives to spring again through the thickest pavement.”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

“The insistence that manmade women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males.”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman