“The Prisoner of Sex”: The New York Intellectuals and Feminism

The New York intellectuals, a group of mostly male and Jewish writers and critics at midcentury, were highly critical of second wave feminism. This was generally true of both those New York intellectuals who remained on the left of the political spectrum and those who shifted politically rightwards and helped forge neoconservatism in these years. It was also true of both the male and female New York intellectuals.

That the majority of the New York intellectuals were secular Jews as were many second wave feminists is not inconsequential. It was something that members of both groups were cognizant of at the time. Writing in the Village Voice in 1971, feminist writer Vivian Gornick was outraged by Commentary magazine’s coverage of women’s liberation. Commentary, she exclaimed, “[sounds] like a Jewish mother, arms folded across her fat breasts, mouth compressed into her fat face, saying: ‘After everything I’ve done for you, this is what I get back!’” Articles written by Midge Decter, an editor at Harper’s magazine married to Commentary’s editor Norman Podhoretz, particularly irked Gornick. That Decter was a woman only contributed to Gornick’s exasperation.

While Decter was perhaps the fiercest critic of women’s liberation among the New York intellectuals, she was not alone. Norman Mailer, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, Diana Trilling, and Irving Howe also criticized the movement. This paper explores the the ways in which the heated debated between the New York intellectuals and second wave feminists was gendered and Jewish—or gendered Jewish.