The charges of oppression that privileged white feminists once leveled indiscriminately at men ended up being turned back on them by women of color.
The setting: Town Hall in New York City on the evening of April 30, 1971. The event: a debate about “Women’s Liberation,” occasioned by Norman Mailer’s new book, The Prisoner of Sex, and featuring Mailer himself as moderator. His gruff, snarky opening remarks are followed by four talks in widely differing styles: an earnest, deadly dry presentation of the feminist ideology of the day by Jacqueline Ceballos, a commissarlike representative of the National Organization for Women; a barbed, witty attack on Mailer, the nuclear family, and much else (not to mention praise for Mao Zedong’s “analysis of society”) by the glamorous Australian author Germaine Greer, who’s riding high with her bestselling The Female Eunuch, and whose irreverence and unabashed sexiness set her apart from other superstars of Women’s Lib, a movement already notorious for its humorlessness; a sober, dispassionate analysis of ’70s feminism by New York intellectual doyenne Diana Trilling, a voice for reason and pre-New Left liberalism; and Village Voice scribe Jill Johnston.
