Susan Brownmiller, a prominent feminist and author of the 1960s and '70s whose “Against Our Will” was a landmark and intensely debated bestseller about sexual assault, has died. She was 90.
Brownmiller, who had been ill, died Saturday at a New York hospital, according to Emily Jane Goodman, a retired New York State Supreme Court justice and practicing attorney who serves as the executor of Brownmiller’s will.
A journalist, anti-war protester and civil rights activist before joining the “second wave” feminist movement in its formative years, Brownmiller was among many women who were radicalized in the ’60s and ’70s and part of the smaller circle that included Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Kate Millett who radicalized others.
While activists of the early 20th century focused on voting rights, the second wave feminism transformed conversations about sex, marriage reproductive rights, workplace harassment and domestic violence. Brownmiller, as much as anyone, opened up the discussion of rape.
“Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape,” published in 1975 and widely read and taught for decades after, documented the roots, prevalence and politics of rape — in war and in prison, against children and spouses. She denounced the glorification of rape in popular culture, contended that rape was an act of violence, not lust, and traced rape to the very foundations of human history.
“Man’s structural capacity to rape and woman’s corresponding structural vulnerability are as basic to the physiology of both our sexes as the primal act of sex itself,” she wrote.
In her 1999 memoir “In Our Time,” Brownmiller likened the writing of “Against Our Will” to “shooting an arrow into a bulls-eye in very slow motion.” Brownmiller started the book in the early 1970s after hearing stories from friends that made her shriek “with dismay.” It was chosen as a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and considered newsworthy enough for Brownmiller to be interviewed on the TODAY show by Barbara Walters. In 1976, Time magazine placed her picture on its cover, along with Billie Jean King, Betty Ford and nine others as “Women of the Year.”
Brownmiller’s book inspired survivors to tell their stories, women to organize rape crisis centers, and helped lead to the passage of marital rape laws. It was also received with fear, confusion and anger. Brownmiller remembered a newspaper reporter shouting at her, “You have no right to disturb my mind like this!”
Brownmiller was also faulted for writing that rape was an assertion of power that helped all men and was strongly criticized for a chapter titled “A Question of Race,” in which she revisited the 1955 murder in Mississippi of Black teen Emmett Till. Brownmiller condemned his gruesome death at the hands of a white mob but also blamed Till for the alleged incident that led to his death: whistling at Bryant’s wife, Carolyn Bryant.
The chapter reflected ongoing tensions between feminists and civil rights leaders, with activist Angela Davis writing that Brownmiller’s views were “pervaded with racist ideas.” In 2017, New Yorker editor David Remnick would call her writing about Till’s murder “morally oblivious.” Asked by Time magazine in 2015 about the passages on Till, she replied that she stood by “every word.”
Steinem would criticize Brownmiller for comments she made during a 2015 interview with New York magazine, when Brownmiller said that one way for women to avoid being assaulted was not to get drunk, suggesting that women themselves were to blame.
Brownmiller’s other books included “Femininity,” “Seeing Vietnam” and the novel “Waverly Place,” based on the highly publicized trial of lawyer Joel Steinberg, convicted in 1987 of manslaughter for the death of his 6-year-old daughter, Lisa. In recent years, Brownmiller taught at Pace University.
“She was an active feminist, she was not one to just agree with the popular issue of the day,” said Goodman, whose friendship with Brownmiller spanned decades.
She recalled remarkable gatherings, including poker nights, at Brownmiller’s longtime Greenwich Village apartment, which was the subject of her 2017 book, “My City Highrise Garden.”
Another longtime close friend, 92-year-old Alix Kates Shulman, a fellow writer and feminist, lived within walking distance.
“We were women's liberation comrades,” she said.
Brownmiller was born in New York City in 1935, and would note proudly that her birthday, Feb. 15, was the same as Susan B. Anthony’s. Her father was a sales clerk, her mother a secretary and both were so devoted to Franklin Roosevelt and so knowledgeable of current events that Brownmiller “became very intense about these things too.” She was a Cornell University scholarship student at and had a brief “very mistaken ambition” to be a Broadway star, working as a file clerk and waitress as she hoped for roles that never materialized.
The civil rights movement changed her life.
She joined the Congress of Racial Equality in 1960 and four years later was among the “Freedom Summer” volunteers who went to Mississippi to help register Black people to vote. During the ‘60s, she also wrote for the Village Voice and for ABC television and was a researcher at Newsweek.
In the late 1970s, Brownmiller helped found the New York chapter of “Women Against Pornography,” with other members, including Steinem and Adrienne Rich. Organizers agreed that porn degraded and abused women, but differed over how to respond. Brownmiller wrote an influential essay, “Let’s Put Pornography Back in the Closet,” disputing arguments that pornography was protected by the First Amendment. But she opposed anti-porn leader Catherine MacKinnon’s push for legislation, believing that pornography was best confronted through education and protests.
In the 1980s, Brownmiller stepped back from activism and in her memoir noted her despair over the “slow seepage, symbolic defeats and petty divisions” that were both causes and symptoms of the movement’s decline. But she still remembered her earlier years as a rare and precious chapter.
“When such a coming-together takes place, when the vision is clear and the sisterhood is powerful, mountains are moved and the human landscape is changed forever,” Brownmiller wrote. “Of course it is wildly unrealistic to speak in one voice for half the human race, yet that is what feminism always attempts to do, and must do, and that is what Women’s Liberation did do, with astounding success, in our time.”
