"Woman Is the Nigger of the World" is a song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono with Elephant's Memory from their 1972 album Some Time in New York City. Released as the only single from the album in the United States, the song sparked controversy at the time due to the use of the word "nigger" in the title. Composition The phrase "woman is the nigger of the world" was coined by Yoko Ono in an interview with Nova magazine in 1969 and quoted on the magazine's cover. Literary analysts note that the phrase owes much to Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which the protagonist Janie Crawford's grandmother says "De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see." The song describes women's subservience to men and misogyny across all cultures. In a 1972 interview on The Dick Cavett Show, Lennon said that Irish revolutionary James Connolly was an inspiration for the song. Lennon cited Connolly's statement that "the female worker is the slave of the slave" in explaining the pro-feminist inspiration behind the song. Release and reception Due to its use of the racial epithet "nigger" and what was criticized as an inappropriate comparison of sexism to racism against Black Americans, most radio stations in the United States declined to play the record. It was released in the U.S. on 24 April 1972 and peaked at number 57 on the Billboard Hot 100, based primarily on sales, making it Lennon's lowest-charting U.S. single in his lifetime. The song also charted at number 93 on the Cash Box Top 100. The National Organization for Women (NOW) awarded Lennon and Ono a "Positive Image of Women" citation for the song's "strong pro-feminist statement" in August 1972. Cash Box described the song as the "most powerful epic to come out of the women's movement so far." In the 1 June 1972 issue of Jet magazine, Apple Records ran an ad for the song with a purported quote from Congressman Ron Dellums, a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, claiming that he "agreed" with Lennon and Ono that "women are the niggers of the world." In the 15 June issue, Dellums wrote a letter in response rejecting that he had "agreed" with Lennon and Ono. He clarified that "In a white male-dominated society that sees the role of women as bed-partners, broom