Glory Days

Gloria Steinem was 65 last month; Germaine Greer was 60; Jill Johnston was 70. There are some who will not understand the resonance of this roll-call of veterans—they are doubtless too busy poring over the latest edict of the Catholic Church, which holds that masturbation is not always a sin. Ho-hum. Listen up, wankers, while I tell you how it was when real women strode the earth.

The year was 1971, the venue City Hall in New York, the topic of debate was Women's Liberation and the chair was, incredibly, Norman Mailer. Ah, innocent days, when a man was allowed to crack the whip. On the other hand, America likes a fight and the prospect of Mailer in the ring with broads was enough to make an audience . . . well, tingle, as Jon Snow would say. Ever perceptive, Steinem refused to take part, defining debate as a male construct which she eschewed in favour of discussion.

Steinem and Greer were icons of feminism. Such is life that they were blessed with incandescent, sexy good looks as well as formidable brains. Johnston, a writer with Village Voice, looked plain but her lesbian sexuality ignited the imagination of a heterosexually strait-jacketed world. Mailer was male sex on wheels. Those who were there that night—le tout New York—report that the atmosphere was electric.

Johnston took the meeting by the scruff of the neck after the statutory speeches, when she declined her allocation of some few minutes to answer questions from the floor in favour of time out with a woman who wished to make love with her. Onstage. They were joined in what turned out to be an all-woman threesome by an excited member of the audience. "Ladies . . . ladies . . ." interjected Mailer, who was then set upon roundly by every woman present. Whatever he wished to call them, he must not call them "ladies". Afterwards, Greer took a taxi alone back to her hotel, disappointing those who had predicted that she and Mailer would become the twosome of the century. Steinem later reported that she, too, had a thing going with Mailer around that time, which collapsed in ignominy when he became detumescent.

All water under the bridge now, but such water, such bridges, there were in those heady days. It is difficult to think of Jill being 70. She conjured up the immortal picture of many a mother banishing her from the front door with the words "Never darken my daughter again". Steinem worked as a Bunny Girl in Hefner's empire for an investigative report on pornography. Greer posed naked with head between her legs in a send-up of page-three pin-ups. They also wrote a series of serious feminist books. They changed the world of women. "She wanted to create an earthquake, the only thing that would shift women from out of their domestic prisons," Greer said at the time. And she did.

Now the Pope says it's alright to wank. And men are taking pills to help them get it up. There is an air of desperation about the place. When women and men talk to each other at all, it is about the rising prices of houses and the exorbitant rental of apartments. Happy birthday, I murmured sadly to myself as I turned 55 last week and dug into the garden a bag of home-made compost which a friend had presented to me as a birthday gift. There was a time when he pressed bottles of champagne and brandy into my arms . . . truth to tell, I was delighted with the compost as it is impossible to get fresh horse manure these days.

Ah well, there's always politics. This time tomorrow, Good Friday, we might have Sinn Féin backsides in ministerial cars and David Trimble will be our leader. Oh glorious, brave new world. I can hardly contain myself. I remember so well when Johnston came to Ireland, asked me out to lunch and I replied prissily that I had to go North to testify at an enquiry into the death of Seamus Cusack, a lovely Derryman whose killing I had witnessed. No soldier was ever prosecuted for that, anyway. How I wish I'd gone with her for a long day's lunch into night.

Hey, wankers, wake up.