Daily Inspiration Quote by Germaine Greer

Greer’s line lands like a compliment that refuses to stay flattering. It offers women “closer contact with reality” as a hard-earned advantage, then twists the knife: that intimacy with the real is “just recompense” for being denied “idealism.” The phrasing is doing two jobs at once. On the surface, it elevates women’s practicality; underneath, it indicts a culture that has historically rationed abstraction, leisure, and grand self-mythologizing to men.

“Perhaps” is key. Greer doesn’t present this as a biological verdict but as a social outcome, one produced by division of labor and division of permission. If men get to traffic in ideals, it’s because someone else is keeping the lights on: managing bodies, money, schedules, consequences. Greer’s sarcasm is controlled; “just recompense” echoes the language of moral accounting, as if patriarchy were a court that occasionally pays damages. But the payment is perverse: reality isn’t a prize, it’s the workload.

The subtext pushes back against sentimental feminism that tries to redeem women’s subordination by romanticizing it as moral superiority. Greer’s point isn’t that women are naturally wiser; it’s that women have been forced into the position of knowing what things cost. The line comes out of second-wave feminism’s argument that the personal is political: domestic “reality” isn’t apolitical drudgery, it’s the infrastructure of male “idealism.” She’s also warning that ideals can be a luxury belief, a form of innocence preserved by power. Women, denied that innocence, become fluent in the world as it is.