Not all feminists have been revolutionaries. After the radicalism of the suffragettes, the women’s movement became respectable and mainstream — its proponents were married, and its goals were palatable. Many of the feminists of the 1960s and ’70s were much the same. After the publication of The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan set up the organised front of the women’s movement with the foundation of the National Organisation for Women (NOW). It advocated equal pay and participation, and represented the mainstream of bourgeois feminism. Their goals were ambitious. But in the drug fumes of the 60s, some began longing for a radical edge. By the end of the 70s, the factions of American feminism were fully embroiled in the Sex War. But in 1970, it still looked like feminists were fighting on the same front, despite their varying degrees of radicalism. In 1970 Kate Millett published Sexual Politics which took the fight to the culture by defining the ego of the male artist as the root of the patriarchy — featuring the works of Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer.
Mailer was not the obvious face of the patriarchy politically. He was anti-war and anti-establishment, and a critic of the role of the church and religion in American politics. He reaped the benefits of sexual liberation both in his writing and personal life, and he was not best pleased with Millett’s reading of his novels through the lens of Women’s Lib. In a 90,000 word article in Harper’s Magazine he called “the land of Millett” a “barren and mediocre terrain, its flora reminiscent of a Ph.D. tract, its roads a narrow argument and its horizons low.” In The Prisoner of Sex, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist attempts to come to terms with the new women’s movement, and defend himself and his fellow targets. Despite his obvious contempt for Millett, he did not want to see himself as an outright opponent of Women’s Liberation — even then, the worst thing a New York intellectual could be was a crusty conservative. Harper’s advertised the piece by promising it would have “Women’s Lib picketing the news-stands” which made Mailer wince, but this gloss was not wholly to blame for their reactions.