The Town Hall Affair

A long-time critic for culture-focused, alternative American newspaper The Village Voice, Jill Johnston was known as one of the country’s finest free-associative writers when she joined the panel debate in 1971. She had established herself during the 1960s among a bohemian set of poets, performers, authors and composers in New York City, and had a vision of a revolutionary future for women modelled around radical lesbian ideas. Her book Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution, published in 1973, included an account of the debate at New York Town Hall. Determined to disrupt proceedings, Johnston narrated a lesbian prose poem, engaged in an impromptu physical display of affection, but was unable to finish her speech, ‘On a Clear Day You Can See Your Mother’, when moderator Norman Mailer interrupted her. Reflecting on the cacophonous debate, she admitted to having questioned appearing at all since the panel’s very existence suggested that women’s liberation was a debatable issue. Describing it as ‘a disaster for women’ simply because it had occurred, Johnston also declared it the ‘social event of the season’.

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.