Product Description

When two young women students claimed they had been indecently assaulted at a party by the Master of Ormond at Melbourne University, the shock not only split the college and university communities but focused sharply the larger social debate about sexuality and power.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #452679 in Books
• Published on: 1997-08-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 216 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The First Stone is at once an account of one of Australia's most explosive sexual harassment cases and an investigation into the soul of sexual politics. To provide the framework for her inquiry, Helen Garner takes the very public case of a University of Melbourne college master accused of sexual harassment by two of his students. After reading about the charge in the newspaper, Garner, a longtime feminist, impulsively wrote a letter of support to the accused man. The letter was made public and in the wake of much criticism over her support of the man, Garner set out to explore the women's claims. Along the way she uncovers issues that challenge her notions of feminism, political activism, gender relations, and power dynamics. With a journalist's eye for detail, Garner leads the reader into a riveting examination of the nature of sex and power in contemporary society.

Review
A circuitous, speculative essay about an infamous sexual harassment case at an Australian university. Garner, a novelist, essayist, screenwriter of films directed by Jane Campion and Gillian Armstrong, and occasional journalist for Time Australia, was drawn into her obsession with this case by a 1992 newspaper report: A woman law student filed an indecent assault complaint with local police against the master of Ormond College at Melbourne Univesity. The student alleged that the man had put his hand on her breast while they danced at an end-of-the-school-year social. Garner, a self-described "feminist pushing fifty," impulsively writes to the accused academic, deploring that "our ideals of so many years [should be] distorted into this ghastly punitiveness." She seems surprised that these words come back to haunt her later attempts to probe the case as a journalist and effectively block her constructing a straightforward investigative account. Indeed, her unsuccessful efforts to arrange a single conversation with either of two women students who bring charges against the master is the slender thread on which she hangs her narrative. We follow Garner through a series of awkward interviews, from the hapless master (who is forced from his job, though Garner comes to believe he is innocent) to many others peripherally involved in the case. None of the informants speak to Garner on the record, and her own reliability as an observer is far from clear. She comes across as a self-absorbed woman who is admittedly overinvested in her identity as a rebel and a seeker during the '70s. The mother of a grown daughter, she remains both skeptical of men's ability to negotiate subtle sexual currents and vaguely contemptuous of young women in denial about the power of their own beauty and sexual magnetism. Though not without occasional insights about the inadequacies of the adversarial processes of law in resolving conflicts about sex and power, this is ultimately more frustrating than illuminating to read. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

More Questions Than Answers
Definitely worth reading.

Although the book seems, at first glance, to be simply riding on the scandal it revolves around, it is much more than that. Rather than a sordid description of what happened to who and who said what to whom and why and when...and so on, the author uses the frame of her investigation to ask questions that all women have to ask themselves at some point. Questions like "what should I do about this unwanted advance?" usually strike when one is already off balance, disarmed by the required politeness of society, and usually embarrassed about making a fuss. The author also explores the role that power plays in such circumstances, both within the case in question and in other, wider contexts. Although the book doesn't leave you with any concrete answers, it is very thought provoking, for those on both sides of the divide.