Germaine Greer's sharp mind and strong opinions blaze through these essays like a rampaging fire, sometimes smoking and smoldering, sometimes leaping from the page. Her views on world social and political scenes from the 1950s through the '80s are brutally witty, perceptive and emotional.

Essays about drug and rock scenes re-published from Rolling Stone, Oz and other avant-garde publications explore unconventionality, but her frantic tone and obvious attempt to shock for the sake of shocking weaken her voice. In these early writings, Greer is the Chicken Little of her generation, racing around shouting, "The sky is falling."

Thirty years later, Greer is still racing but her more mature writings show development of a unique set of values and a complexity of spirit. These contemporary essays, like one on women in Cuba and another on resettlement in Ethiopia show passion and an underlying sadness. The adult Greer is still unaware of her own narrowmindedness, a condition that she unhesitatingly condemns in others.

MADWOMAN is definitely worth your consideration. In it Greer is trashy, hysterical, angry and she's also articulate, funny and sagacious. And never dull.

A collection of the most valuable insight and veracity from one of the most influential and human people in western society. Greers collection of work shows not only how her genuis has developed but shows the diversity and extent of her cause.

In Women's Sexual Passages: Finding Pleasure And Intimacy At Every Stage Of Life, midwife and women's health care provider Elizabeth Davis draws upon her many years of experience and expertise to provide a frank and intimate overview of female sexuality and its evolution over a lifetime. She shows how women's sexuality is connected to (and affected by) childbirth, child rearing, stress, grief, and creativity. Her commentary on such issues as sex during menstruation, after childbirth, after menopause, after rape, after infidelity, and the sexuality of celibacy are both candid and informative. By tracing women's sexual cycles through the course of a lunar month and a developmental lifetime, Women's Sexual Passages is a welcome and recommended contribution to personal and women's studies that is enriched for readers with poetry, invocations of ancient goddesses, traces of ritual and herbal wisdom, along with fully up-to-date presentations on endometriosis and PMS.

I was referred to this book by my midwife (Debra O'Conner) as a book that I had to read as it's content was so "right on" and was she ever right. I know alot about my body. I am a licensed massage therapist and a mother of a 3 year old that I had at home. I spent hours and hours learning about my body during the childbirth process. That was great knowledge to add to the physiology I learned during my massage training. This book though, is something that every woman in our culture today should read. I now understand so much about my life and the directions it has taken! I hope to give this to everyone I know who has a daughter. I hope they will read it for themselves and then pass in on to their daughters when they feel the time is right. Our culture today is so lacking in this kind of positive message. It is women's reality and needs to be shared. Of course it is written by a Midwife! Thank you Elizabeth!

I read this book 5 years ago and it changed how I felt about myself as a woman. If only I had known what Elizabeth Davis wrote when I was younger, I would have saved myself a lot of guilt and self-destruction. She made me appreciate myself by revealing how hormones affect women. It also changed how I raised my daughter. Please read this book, you deserve it!

Davis' soothing and confident tone gives us the knowledge we have been denied for so long by the medical establishment. With clarity and vision she describes hormonal changes, the stages of pregnancy, and shares her own experiences and personal theories about women's sexuality. I adored this book and re-read it at least once a month!

I think it interesting that this book does not surface when you search by title but rather the out of print hardcover version of its original publication in the late 70s.

This Book is another one of Greer's mind bending efforts. As a woman artist myself I have had a life changing experience by reading this book. One can not help but comprehend the thoroughness of the research and sharpe historical observations of the course of women artists throughout history. I have nothing but admiration for all of these women who prior to reading this I had absolutely no idea existed. The book runs the gamet of history in women's art from the Cloisters to the 19th century... One only hopes that this generation will have something to say for itself in its artwork with substance and enduring principles as its guide. I recommend this book for everyone but particularly women artists who should be in touch with their heritage...

Germaine Greer takes no prisoners in this extensively researched, insighfully analytical account of human fertility - and the First World's influence upon fertility in the developing world. Unlike many progressive thinkers hesitant to criticize the family planning movement for fear of landing themselves in bed with the "radical religious right", Greer takes on Planned Parenthood founder, eugenicist Margaret Sanger; her cohort, Marie Stopes; UNFPA; USAID; and more. A caustically-written yet somber look at the harm incurred by both misguided and insidious meddling in foreign affairs.

This amazing book was offered to me by an older woman friend (and confirmed feminist) when I began to wonder aloud about perimenopausal reactions such as hot flashes and unexpected heavy menstrual bleeding. Having been buried in infant childcare and graduate schoolwork during Greer's writing heyday, I had heard her name and been "interested but too busy". Her writings are today a gift for the spirit to me.
Greer's no-holds-barred descriptions and truth-telling are a welcome and often hilarious relief from the myriad of opinions, fears, whispered innuendos and symptom-treating attitudes of friends and the medical establishment around this natural change. The description of living a life biased by estrogen-induced mood swings and attitudes for 35 years, followed by a return of the stable, freedom-loving self really hit home for me.
This overarching theme of return to the self makes hilarious the attitudes toward older women called "immature" or "irresponsible" when they follow a path determined by their heart instead of that laid out for them by patriarchal rules. The only possible reaction from a woman truly returning to herself is to laugh in the face of people who would like her to now become invisible, be silent and tend only to her grandchildren or her aging spouse. The world NEEDS the clear-headed involvement of the only adult humans not affected by sexual hormones and the subsequent mood swings -- women after menopause. Menopause is liberation -- bring it on!

So many books with menopause deal with it on the most condescending and superficial level, telling women nothing is really happening to them, except physical discomfort such as hot flashes, etc. In other words, shut up and stop the fuss. Greer validated for me what a cataclysm this is; the most traumatic episode in a woman's life until her death. Facing this hard, hard truth is paradoxically liberating. Only when a woman is stripped of the two overriding reasons society values her (physical beauty and childbearing) is she free to become her real self, or as Greer puts it, can she evolve from a body to a soul. If you remember the girl you were before menstruation started, that girl will sustain you. Any woman close to or over 50 who feels her life is the same as over (as I did) has to read this book. It will save your life. I will always love Germaine Greer for having written this book.

Greer's international take on the medicalization of menopause distinguishes her book from others. What is considered state of the art in Britain, France, Australia, and the United States is somewhat different from country to country. Drugs and treatments available in one country are unavailable in others. The pet drug in each country is one produced by a drug company headquartered in that country. The United States, of course, comes out as champion in the medicalization of menopause. Greer did not hesitate to put forth her pet theories in the midst of statistics and reports of double-blind studies. She is very much present in her writing, and the book greatly benefits. Greer believes the second half of life is about becoming spiritual, and the second half of her book is her testimonial of her midlife passage, liberally sprinkled with testimonials from diaries and novels dating back to the 1700s. The reader experiences her passage, from the first chapters with her femini! sm in full view as she lambasts the medicalization of menopause to the final chapters when she describes her joy on being on the other side of fifty: "Before, I felt less on greater provocation; I lay in the arms of young men who loved me and felt less bliss than I do now. What I felt then was hope, fear, jealousy, desire, passion, a mixture of real pain, and real and fake pleasure, a mash of conflicting feelings, anything but this deep still joy. I needed my lovers too much to experience much joy in our travailed relationships. I was too much at their mercy to feel much in the way of tenderness; I can feel as much in a tiny compass now when I see a butterfly still damp and crinkled from the chrysalis taking a first flutter among the brambles." For those among us who approach our climacteric "alone," Greer makes clear that the relationship with the self can be the most joyous and satisfying of all relationships.

Sex, war, peace, the ingredients to a great play. Lysistrata is about women who are tired of losing their sons in battle. The women band together to bring peace by forming a pact, they refuse sexual intercourse with their husbands unless the war is brought to an end. However, that is only the beginning of the bag of tricks she has up her sleeve.
The play is an absolute riot. I've seen this play performed live and while there were some good moments, I liked the book better. The book has a lot more witty humor and a sense of building frustration that the play lacked. The sexual innuendos are nothing too rash as to be insulting or offensive but rather appropriate, something college students can well appreciate. The "love scene" between Myrrhine and her husband Kinesias will leave you rolling on the floor. The use of props such as the "phalli" and towels are brilliant in accompanying the humor. It's funny to read (and picture) how the women "man-handle" their husbands to try to bring peace to the land. As a college student I've read and studied this book and found many interesting values covered that are appropriate for a Rhetoric or gender studies course. The theme of women suffrage, rising up against the men in a time when women need to be heard, is dominant in the play. Women banding together to fight for a common cause is something I have not read before and was pleasantly surprised of. For a Greek play, the women are portrayed as being very human, rather than being serial killers and jealous lovers and the sort. The women are characterized as being very sleek and sexy, something always to look forward to! The men aren't desensitized either; rather the men are just as human as the women.
I recommend this book for any college rhetoric course or even an Interpretation of Literature course. It's the best of both worlds in terms of being very entertaining and having a fair share of educational value.

Lysistrata, wife of an influential Athenian has had it with 20+ years of war with Sparta and calls on her sisters from around Greece (including Sparta) to plot to end the war once and for all. The two-pronged plan is elegant in its simplicity: take over the treasury so that no more money can be spent on war, and deny their husbands marital congress until they agree to make peace with each other. The beauty of the play (and what makes it enjoyable to the 21st century reader) is that it speaks to the most basic needs of the human condition while allowing the reader to freely translate the action to modern times. Part of the fun is envisioning the staging of this play - the battle between the women and the graybeards (a slightly distressing scene since my acquisition of an AARP card) - and the approach of the envoys for the peace talks whose obvious sexual distress assures the women of the impending success of their plan provoked an image that actually had me laughing out loud. All in all, it helps support the notion that the classics can be (and should be) fun.

This is probably the most entertaining play I've ever read, and it was written more than 2,000 years ago! Aristophanes brilliantly critiques the rigid gender roles of ancient Greek society in several dozen hilarious pages.

Aristophanes writes of a group of Greek women who, in protest of war, refuse to have sex with their husbands, and the plot is a glorious success. Aristophanes depicts men begging their wives for sex, and paints a picture of Greek women not very dissimilar to the women of contemporary Western society.

"Lysistrata" is a crucial reading for anyone interested in Greek history, feminism, or anyone who just wants to read a devastatingly funny comedy about sex.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!

Christine Wallace has written a perceptive, if rather hostile, book about Germaine Greer. (We should note that Greer opposed Wallace's writing this book.) She contends that Greer's life and work are so entwined that they demand a biography and review combined, and this she tries to provide.

For Greer, education was always the way forward. She had a drive to succeed through scholarship and writing. These achievements moved her on throughout her life, first from her Catholic upbringing, then from Sydney's self-indulgent Bohemia.

One of the two key influences on her intellectual development was the great literary critic Frank Leavis, passionately engaged with great literature, morally serious and contemptuous of commercial values. The other influence was the gloomy, Bohemian anarchism of the Australian philosopher John Anderson.

So academe and Bohemia have warred within Greer. Academe led to her life as a scholar and a literary and cultural critic. But the downside of Leavisism was its cultural warring, that ends up attacking ordinary people and 'suburban values', in unbalanced displays of self-hatred.

Bohemia led to the self-obsessed Byronism of her celebrity role, in which she claimed that sexual freedom was the key to, and criterion of, all other freedoms and helped to promote the modern commercial, sex-saturated culture, with its commodification of fetishes. Reaction easily co-opted this radical individualism and sexual freedom.

Greer united the best and worst of both traditions and their contradictions, generating both her dazzling dialectics and her wild excesses. Wallace concludes that Greer has never been tamed. But although she has rejected professional, urban and family life, what does she have to show for it? She leads a solitary, rural life, punctuated by dramatic incidents and epigrammatic performances on late night TV chat shows. She has written a series of books, brilliant in patches but basically incoherent and unsatisfying. She seems more like a performing scandaleuse than a free spirit.

I read this book at a time when a friendship I'd held near and dear ended irrationally and insensitively, my kids were growing into independent teens, but also a time when my 18-year marriage was coming into a state of profound comfort and happiness. However, I was also in the midst of finishing a college degree, working on writings I hoped to have published, and coping with the diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. This book brought me down to earth, in a way, because I think we tend to look upon writers as a special breed of people with no personal difficulties, when quite the opposite is actually true. If nothing else, this book taught me that it could very well be my current travails that put me into print!

It is amazing how effectively Greer can belittle and expose the anglo-capitalist agendas of Talk Show-feminists clawing for that elusive "key to the executive washroom," of the recent crop of "bimbo feminists" like Naomi Wolfe and the Spice Girls, and of low-IQ liberal bigots in general. Greer correctly points out that these sorts feel no solidarity with "the Cuban feminists struggling to counter-act the crippling effects of the American blockade", nor for "the women who denounce cultural imperialism...donned the chador and howled the Americans out of Iran." There is not as much radically new material here as there was in her earlier work "Sex and Destiny" (- for example, the evils of Barbie and Silicon implants are already well publicised.) However, the chapters on the Womb, Pantomime Dames, Shopping, Sex, Daughters, and Girl Power, are revelatory. The book has an appeal that transcends cultures, gender and economic systems. As a muslim male banker, I found Greer's manifesto to be a truly invigorating read.

This is a hard-hitting book that most people won't like, because most despise honesty & prefer lukewarm discussions of "gender equality" that only serve to keep women in the same vicious circle they've been suffering in for millenium. I greatly appreciate Ms. Greer's capacity to "tell it like it is" despite the typical & expected backlash. As a medical doctor, I can tell you that her discussion of AIS and of "pantomime dames" in general is right on target. Thank Goddess someone has the guts to speak the truth about these "politically incorrect" insults to femaleness.

There are a lot of mixed reviews about this book. I picked up this book (hardcover edition) just out of curiosity because my knowledge of this subject is rather limited. I didn't know what to expect, but what I found was a very thoughtful and provocative piece of work that has opened me into a subject matter that I had yet to explore. I love the book. Greer points out some of the flaws of what some might call modern feminism, and even before this book I felt the same way. I really like how "The Whole Woman" looked at how consumerism and the economics of women have affected not just feminism, but women as a whole. Bottom line this brought forth questions that I would not have considered, and did get me inspired. If you agree with her or not, this is a must read book.