“Write Like a Man”
The New York Intellectuals v. Women’s Liberation
A new take on mid-century writing dissects the influence and power of a posse of writers—not all Jewish, or all men—who encompassed “secular Jewish machismo,” a unique combination of American protestant competitiveness, a touch of outsider’s pique and a Jewish emphasis on book-learning.
And when this brand of machismo—starring writers like Norman Mailer and Philip Roth—butted heads with the nascent, powerful feminist movement? Here’s one infamous encounter.
A FEW WEEKS AFTER the publication of his controversial Harper’s magazine piece “The Prisoner of Sex’’ in March 1971, Diana Trilling and Norman Mailer found themselves on stage with feminists at Town Hall in New York City. Mailer had been tapped by Shirley Broughton, the director of the Theater of Ideas, to “moderate” “A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation.” Founded in 1961, the Theater of Ideas was a consortium of some “one hundred heterogeneous intellectuals—writers, artists, [and] scholars” who gathered periodically to discuss “the arts, culture, and politics.” Many New York intellectuals participated in its programming; Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Silvers, cofounders of the New York Review of Books, sat on its board of directors. The intrigue at Harper’s only fueled the hype for the whole affair. Three feminists—Jacqui Ceballos, president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW); Jill Johnston, a radical lesbian and the Village Voice dance critic; and Germaine Greer, an Australian author of the recent bestseller, The Female Eunuch (1970), agreed to participate. Trilling rounded out the panel.
Most Theater of Ideas events were by invitation only. “A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation,” however, was a fundraiser, so tickets were sold to the general public. They were expensive: twenty-five dollars for floor seats and ten dollars for the balcony. But all 1,500 tickets sold out quickly. “I don’t know how many seats there are in Town Hall,” Diana later told Mailer biographer Peter Manso. “But all week people had been calling me to ask if I could get them in. God what an evening.” As NOW’s Ceballos said that night: “It looks like Shirley Broughton’s Theater of Ideas had the best idea of the year. It’s too bad that we didn’t think of it so we could have made some money for women’s liberation too.”
Recruiting feminists for the event had not been easy. Many refused to share a stage with Mailer. Millett turned down several requests from Broughton. She had no interest in debating the premise of women’s rights, let alone with Mailer. The whole event struck her as “sensationalism, making a kind of pugilism out of the whole issue of feminism.” Ti-Grace Atkinson, Gloria Steinem, and Robin Morgan also declined invitations. Martha Shelley of the Radicalesbians and Gay Liberation Front, and Village Voice contributor Ellen Willis, one of the founders of the women’s liberation group Redstockings, dropped out at the last minute.
Greer agreed to take part despite the misgivings of American feminists. Several prominent feminists had asked her to “boycott the whole shindig. They said, she recalled, “But why … should we give an account of ourselves to Norman Mailer? Why should he run the show, he adjudicate?” For Greer, however, the spectacle of Mailer refereeing a debate on feminism was an event she could hardly resist. She relished public clashes and could also bend this one to her own purposes, which were never narrowly ideological. She arrived at Town Hall “dressed for the party in a long slinky black gown with a dead fox slung over one shoulder,” as one journalist quipped. Trilling later described it as “a floozy kind of fox fur that trailed over her shoulder to the floor. It was mangy. I expected moths to fly out of it.” Greer claimed that “the humorless New York press” had assumed her outfit was expensive. In reality, her “fox fur” “cost a pound” and was worn “for fun and satire.” There was no shortage of fun or satire that night. It was the “most lurid” and “extraordinary of evenings,” Trilling later recalled, “the last gasp of the sixties really.”
“A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation” combined the feel of a 1960s New York “happening” with that of a Hollywood premiere. Mailer had arranged for the entire evening to be filmed by documentarian Donn Pennebaker. He didn’t bother, though, to tell any of his co-panelists in advance. “Everywhere, all around—tape recorders, movie cameras, flashbulbs, press pencils scribble,” one reporter wrote of the scene. Pennebaker’s film, Town Bloody Hall, was not released until 1979. But Mailer had signed a book contract for a longer version of his article. Little, Brown and Company released The Prisoner of Sex a month later. “The Mailer-Women’s liberation title fight,” Greer later quipped, “was being set up for maximum exploitation.”
One journalist characterized the evening as a “commedia dell’arte,” complete with eccentric cast and attention-grabbing histrionics. Mailer cast himself as the lead, as the “punk, genius, proctologist, Brooklynite, multiple divorcee, dressed in a nice-looking business suit.” Greer disagreed, characterizing Mailer instead as the “carnival barker who had drawn in a crowd of diamond-studded radical chic New Yorkers.”
The audience was part of the show. “The hecklers—oh the hecklers! They were the best,” one reporter noted. The many literary “celebrities” in attendance included Susan Sontag, Jules Feiffer, Jack Newfield, Stephen Spender, Elizabeth Hardwick, Betty Friedan, Robert Brustein, Philip Roth, Richard Gilman, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Anatole Broyard, and John Hollander, among others. “America’s intelligentsia,” another reporter wrote, had gathered “for a festival as gorgeous as any glamour industries.” Town Hall was filled with an “elite of a thousand intellectual battles,” according to another. Mailer began the debate with the story of his own article and how Harper’s fired its editor over it. “The Prisoner of Sex” had tried “to pull the tail feathers of women’s lib,” he said, since women’s liberation was “the most important single intellectual event of the last few years.” Mailer was met with loud laughs from the audience—either because they didn’t agree with his assessment of women’s liberation as an intellectual force or because they thought Mailer was being disingenuous.
Either way, secular Jewish masculinity collided that evening with a younger generation of feminists who challenged the basic axiom of New York intellectual life: that the intellectual vocation was by definition masculine. Greer began her remarks by stating: “I do not represent any organization in this country, and I daresay the most powerful representation I can make is of myself as a writer for better or worse. I’m also a feminist,” she continued, “and for me the significance of this moment is that I am having to confront one of the most powerful figures in my own imagination … that being, I think, most privileged in male elitist society, namely, the masculine artist.” Later that night, during a raucous question-and-answer session, the novelist Cynthia Ozick chided Mailer as an especially conspicuous example of literary masculinity. Referring to his 1959 collection of essays, Advertisements of Myself, she asked Mailer: “you said, quote, ‘a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.’ For years and years, I’ve been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color is it?”
It was not the first time that night that Mailer’s genitalia came up. “The whole question of how much liberty men and women can find with each other, and how much sharing of those dishes that they can do, goes into the center of everything,” Mailer said at the start of the question-and- answer session. Women’s liberation, he argued, would come at the expense of masculinity. Changes in women’s roles would only encroach on men and chip away at masculinity, he implied. Mailer thus implored the audience to take the discussion seriously. But Mailer was as interested in stoking the entertainment value of the evening. He added: “I’m perfectly willing, if you wish me to act the clown, I will take out my modest Jewish dick and put it on the table. You can all spit at it and laugh at it, and then I’ll walk away and you’ll find it was just a dildo I left there. I hadn’t shown the real one,” he continued. “But if we’re going to have a decent discussion, we all got here tonight at great, various efforts to ourselves, let’s have it at the highest level we can.”
The Jewish phallus was an apt metaphor for the evening. Gender and Jewishness joined at the hip at that evening’s Town Hall. Three of the five panelists were Jews: Mailer, Trilling, and Greer. Greer later revealed that Mailer told her backstage that evening that she was better looking than the author photo for The Female Eunuch, which in his view “looked like any other uppity Jewish girl.” When they met, he seemed “relieved to see that I was a shiksa (except that was wrong too—I am like God in his last despairing suspicion, half Jewish).” The audience, meanwhile, was made up of a cross section of feminists and New York literary people, two groups with disproportionate numbers of Jews. Jewish women were so visible in second-wave feminism that historian David Hollinger has wondered, “In what sense is Women’s Liberation, as it was called at the time, a Jewish story?”
At Town Hall, Jewish women dominated the question- and-answer session. Sontag, Ozick, Betty Friedan, Lucy Komisar, and Ruth Mandel all spoke. Mailer called Friedan a “lady,” eliciting boos from the audience. At one point he was exasperated: “You know I’m not going to sit here and listen to harridans harangue me.” Mailer might as well have said Jewish mothers. The writer Ann Birstein, married then to Alfred Kazin, wrote to Greer later that month, “I hope you didn’t feel you were drowning in chicken soup,” referencing the undercurrent of Jewishness that night. She later described Mailer at Town Hall as “a Jewish mama’s boy, who longed to be taken for a tough Irishman.”
It was not the only time that evening that Mailer referred to a woman writer as a “lady,” either. One of the most memorable moments came after Jill Johnston gave her prepared remarks, which the New York Times described as “a free verse, free association, pun-infested, Bible-belting cry for the rites of lesbians.” After she finished, two women jumped on stage and embraced Johnston. The three fell to the floor entwined in an apparent ad hoc make-out session. If they meant to shock, it didn’t work. “It was a miscalculation to have thought that a Lesbian exhibition could break up a meeting like ours—in New York City, 1971,” Trilling later recalled. Mailer responded by yelling: “Come on, Jill, be a lady.” The audience had not paid “25 bucks to see 3 dirty overalls on the floor when you can see lots of cock and cunt for $4 just down the street.”
While Mailer’s profanity barely registered, his use of “lady” reverberated.
After Johnston and her friends left the stage, Mailer introduced the final speaker of the night as: “the lady of much soul and much establishment who has been one of our leading, if not our leading, literary lady critic for many, many, many years, Miss Diana Trilling.” Trilling took little notice of Mailer’s introduction. The two were friends. Trilling did later say she felt a “lack of respect” from Mailer. He was too consumed with the spectacle of the evening and with Greer, who Trilling learned was passing notes under the table with Mailer while she gave her formal remarks, fueling rumors that the two would sleep together. Sexual innuendo defined the evening. “Anything that went on between Greer and Norman had an enormous subtext,” Jules Feiffer later recalled. Trilling later said she felt like “the token straight, the sacrificial lamb of the evening.”
After Trilling sat down the stage was opened to questions and comments from the audience. Susan Sontag asked Mailer about calling Trilling a “lady” critic. Sontag wondered why it was necessary. “If I were Diana, I wouldn’t like to be introduced that way. And I would like to know how Diana feels about it. I don’t like being called a lady writer … It seems like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t … it doesn’t feel right to us. It’s a little better being called a woman writer,” Sontag mused, but that too was problematic. “If you were introducing James Baldwin, you wouldn’t say foremost Negro writer. And we certainly wouldn’t say a man writer.” Sontag then turned to Trilling for her response. “I recognize the point you’re making very well,” Trilling told her. “But sometimes I think it’s a bit like saying lady runner or lady high jumper, something of that kind … and so I permit it on that basis.”
Diana’s comparison of herself to a “lady” runner or high jumper is revealing. She understood writing and criticism as masculine—akin to athletics, where one flexed one’s cerebral muscles and where, like in sports, men were the norm, women the exception. In that respect, she was like other New York intellectuals. Trilling acquiesced to the prefix “lady,” however, because she felt, in the context of the evening, it denoted that she was unique in the field as a woman critic. When Hardwick pressed Trilling on the same issue later that evening, she responded, “I’m not quite sure that I find the word lady as offensive as so many people here do. It doesn’t hit me viscerally.” Trilling wasn’t bothered by the term lady; at least not that night in the spring of 1971 at Town Hall.
That these questions came from two other women New York intellectuals is also interesting. Both Hardwick and Sontag implied that if a woman was a good writer, she should be known as a writer—with no “woman” or “lady” prefix. Neither positioned herself as a feminist, however. Both women accepted the masculinist terms of literary excellence articulated by the New York intellectuals. A good writer wrote like a man. Their views were typical of the women in their milieu.
Hardwick, Sontag, Trilling, as well as Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, were at best ambivalent toward feminism. Perhaps because their generation fell between first-wave feminism (1848–1920) and second- wave feminism (often dated to 1963, the year Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique), and because they had become successful writers, they felt “gender had been no impediment in their own careers.” They concluded they “didn’t need ‘liberation,’” as one chronicler of this group argues. Friedan said as much about McCarthy in the 1980s. “The first-wave of feminism stopped not long after the winning of the vote in 1920 and the second wave began in the sixties. Mary McCarthy was in the generation in between.”
But there was more to it. Part of that generational experience for Trilling, Hardwick, McCarthy, and Arendt, as well as Decter, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and even the younger Sontag, was the thrill of public success as women in the world of secular Jewish masculinity. A successful “writer,” in their experience, was a writer who wrote about serious topics with masculine drive and ruthlessness, and one who could bear rough treatment from critics and rivals. They earned their fame by meeting the highest possible standards. Any hint of a double standard was shameful to the writer and a disservice to the craft. In their view, feminists did not meet this standard. They were, essentially, mere “lady” writers who wrote like women.
Ronnie A. Grinberg is assistant professor of history and a core faculty member of the Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
This history is excerpted from her book Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals. Copyright © 2024 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
