The Town Hall Affair

Defiant, glamorous, intellectual and stylish, Germaine Greer took on American novelist Norman Mailer head-to-head in 1971, challenging his domineering stance over women. Dressed in a fur stole, her ten-minute opening statement disparaging ‘genius’ male artists in combination with her razor-sharp retorts elicited adulation from much of the gathered literati audience. The publishing of her book, The Female Eunuch, just a year before had helped to turn the Australian author and academic into a household name, with Life magazine famously putting her on its front cover and billing her, with unreserved sexism, as ‘the saucy feminist that even men like.’ Greer’s book had a spirit of adventure that helped her to become one of the major feminist voices of the mid-20th century. 

A respected essayist, critic and member of the literary circle that came to be known as the New York intellectuals, Diana Trilling made a commanding and didactic contribution to proceedings in 1971 with her speech. She thought of feminism ‘as both firmer and gentler, less competitive than women’s liberation’ and, through her marriage to Lionel Trilling, was one half of America’s most famous intellectual couples at the time. Trilling fearlessly expressed controversial and moral views throughout her career, writing about profound social and cultural change in her country. She believed that women’s career ambitions should be on equal footing with responsibilities to their families and homes and, on balance, that the women’s liberation movement created unnecessary friction with men.