Susan Brownmiller

Last updated

Susan Brownmiller
Born
Susan Warhaftig

(1935-02-15) February 15, 1935 (age 89)
Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Occupations
  • Journalist
  • author
  • activist
Notable work Against Our Will (1975)

Susan Brownmiller (born Susan Warhaftig; February 15, 1935) [1] is an American journalist, author and feminist activist best known for her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape , which was selected by The New York Public Library as one of 100 most important books of the 20th century.

Contents

Early life and education

Brownmiller was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Mae and Samuel Warhaftig, a lower-middle-class Jewish couple. She was raised in Brooklyn and was the only child of her parents. [2] Her father emigrated from a Polish shtetl [2] and became a salesman in the Garment Center and later a vendor in Macy's department store, and her mother was a secretary in the Empire State Building. [3] [4] She later took the pen name Brownmiller, legally changing her name in 1961. [3] [4]

As a child Brownmiller was sent to the East Midwood Jewish Center for two afternoons a week to learn Hebrew and Jewish history. She would later comment, "It all got sort of mishmashed in my brain except for one thread: a helluva lot of people over the centuries seemed to want to harm the Jewish people. ... I can argue that my chosen path – to fight against physical harm, specifically the terror of violence against women – had its origins in what I had learned in Hebrew School about the pogroms and The Holocaust." [5]

She had "a stormy adolescence", [6] attending Cornell University for two years (1952 to 1954) on scholarships, but not graduating. She later studied acting in New York City. She appeared in two off-Broadway productions. [7]

Activism

Brownmiller also participated in civil rights activism, joining CORE and SNCC during the sit-in movement in 1964. Brownmiller volunteered for Freedom Summer in 1964, wherein she worked on voter registration in Meridian, Mississippi. According to her own account:

Jan Goodman and I were in the second batch of volunteers for Mississippi Freedom Summer....When no one else at the Memphis orientation session volunteered for Meridian, Jan and I accepted the assignment. Between us, we had a good ten years of organizing experience, hers in Democratic primaries and presidential campaigns, mine in CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, and both of us together in voter registration drives in East Harlem. The night we arrived in Meridian, a field secretary called a meeting, asking to see the new volunteers. Proudly we raised our hands. 'Shit!' he exploded. 'I asked for volunteers and they sent me white women.' [8]

She first became involved in the Women's Liberation Movement in New York City in 1968, by participating in a consciousness-raising group in the newly formed New York Radical Women organization, [9] where she stated 'I've had three illegal abortions'. [2]

Brownmiller went on to coordinate a sit-in against Ladies' Home Journal in 1970. [10] [2] She began work on her book Against Our Will after a New York Radical Feminists speak-out on rape in 1971, and then spent four years researching and writing in the New York Public Library. [9]

In 1972, Brownmiller signed her name to the Ms. campaign “We Have Had Abortions” which called for an end to "archaic laws" limiting reproductive freedom; they encouraged women to share their stories and take action. [11]

In 1977, Brownmiller became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP). [12] WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media. She attended a feminist anti-pornography conference in 1978. [2] She co-founded Women Against Pornography in 1979. [13]

Career

Brownmiller's path into journalism began with an editorial position at a "confession magazine". She went on to work as an assistant to the managing editor at Coronet (1959–60), as an editor of the Albany Report, a weekly review of the New York State legislature (1961–1962), and as a national affairs researcher at Newsweek (1963–1964). In the mid-1960s, Brownmiller continued her career in journalism with positions as a reporter for NBC-TV in Philadelphia (1965), staff writer for The Village Voice (1965), and as a network news writer for ABC-TV in New York City (1966–68).

Beginning in 1968, she worked as a freelance writer; her book reviews, essays, and articles appeared regularly in publications including The New York Times, Newsday, The New York Daily News, Vogue, and The Nation. [3] In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. [14]

In New York, she began writing for The Village Voice and became a network TV newswriter at the American Broadcasting Company, a job she held until 1968. She continues[ when? ] to write and speak on feminist issues, including a memoir and history of Second Wave radical feminism titled In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (1999). Her papers have been archived at Harvard, in the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. [3]

Against Our Will

Against Our Will (1975) [15] is a feminist book in which Brownmiller argues that rape "is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." [15] In order to write the book, after having helped to organize the New York Radical Feminists Speak-Out on Rape on January 24, 1971, and the New York Radical Feminists Conference on Rape on April 17, 1971, she spent four years researching rape. [9] She studied rape throughout history, from the earliest codes of human law up into modern times. She collected clippings to find patterns in the way in which rape is reported in various types of newspapers, analyzed portrayals of rape in literature, films, and popular music, and evaluated crime statistics. [16] [ better source needed ]

Brownmiller's basic premise was contested by some sections of the left wing, who considered it untrue that "all men benefit" from the culture of rape, and who believed rather that it was possible to organize both women and men together to oppose sexual violence.[ citation needed ] The book also received criticism from feminists, including bell hooks and Angela Davis, who wrote Brownmiller's discussion of rape and race became an "unthinking partisanship which borders on racism". [17] [18] [2]

After the book was published, she was named as one of the Time magazine people of the year. [9] In 1995, the New York Public Library selected Against Our Will as one of 100 most important books of the 20th century. [19]

Books

Honors

Brownmiller won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship [25] in 1973 to research and write about the crime of rape. She was named as one of 12 Women of the Year by Time magazine in 1975. [17]

She is featured in the feminist history film She's Beautiful When She's Angry (2014). [26] [27]

Personal life

She has described herself as "a single woman", even though "I was always a great believer in romance and partnership." [28] "I would like to be in close association with a man whose work I respect," she told an interviewer in 1976, attributing her unmarried status to the fact that she was "not willing to compromise." [29] As of 2018, she has not married. [2]

Notes

  1. ↑ "Susan Brownmiller". Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved December 1, 2020.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Cooke, Rachel (February 18, 2018). "US feminist Susan Brownmiller on why her groundbreaking book on rape is still relevant". The Guardian . Retrieved August 28, 2022.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Susan Brownmiller Papers, Harvard Library catalog listing (accessed June 3, 2010).
  4. 1 2 Susan Brownmiller, "An Informal Bio", susanbrownmiller.com; accessed June 4, 2010.
  5. ↑ Susan Brownmiller, statement recorded by the Jewish Women's Archive, "Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution", jwa.org; accessed June 4, 2010.
  6. ↑ Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (1975).
  7. ↑ Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs (2005), chapter 2.
  8. ↑ "In Our Time". www.nytimes.com. Retrieved September 9, 2017.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Gordon, Claire (March 20, 2015). "When America started caring about rape". Al-Jazeera . Retrieved August 28, 2022.
  10. ↑ Dow, Bonnie J. (October 2014). "Magazines and the Marketing of the Movement: The March 1970 Ladies' Home Journal Protest". Watching Women's Liberation, 1970: Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News. University of Illinois Press. pp. 95–119. ISBN   9780252096488 . Retrieved August 28, 2022.
  11. ↑ "We Have Had Abortions" (PDF).
  12. ↑ "Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press". www.wifp.org. Retrieved June 21, 2017.
  13. ↑ "Records of Women Against Pornography, 1979-1989". hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu. Women Against Pornography . Retrieved August 27, 2021.
  14. ↑ "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest", New York Post, January 30, 1968.
  15. 1 2 Pedone, Monica Ann. "Against Our Will". www.susanbrownmiller.com. Retrieved September 9, 2017.
  16. ↑ "Against Our Will Summary - eNotes.com". eNotes. Retrieved September 9, 2017.
  17. 1 2 Cohen, Sascha (October 7, 2015). "How a Book Changed the Way We Talk About Rape". Time . Retrieved August 28, 2022.
  18. ↑ Davis, Angela Y. (1981). Women, Race & Class. Random House, Vintage Books. pp. 195, 198. ISBN   0-394-71351-6.
  19. ↑ "The New York Public Library's Books of the Century". The New York Public Library. Retrieved September 9, 2017.
  20. ↑ Petersen, Clarence (March 2, 1985). "Femininity, by Susan Brownmiller". Chicago Tribune . Retrieved August 28, 2022.
  21. ↑ Roberts, Yvonne (August 28, 2022). "Fab abs, Nicole Kidman. But this frantic effort to look half your age is frankly demeaning". The Guardian . Retrieved August 28, 2022. Brownmiller described attempting to acquire femininity as "bafflingly inconsistent at the same time [as]… minutely demanding… Femininity always demands more". And she warned that "an unending absorption in the drive for a perfect appearance… is the ultimate restriction on freedom of mind".
  22. ↑ "In Our Time - Excerpt". The New York Times . 1999. Retrieved August 28, 2022.
  23. ↑ Miller, Laura (December 19, 1999). "It Never Did Run Smooth". The New York Times . Retrieved August 28, 2022.
  24. ↑ "My City Highrise Garden". rutgersuniversitypress.org. Retrieved September 9, 2017.
  25. ↑ "Alicia Patterson Foundation". www.aliciapatterson.org. Retrieved September 9, 2017.
  26. ↑ "The Women".
  27. ↑ "The Film – She's Beautiful When She's Angry". Shesbeautifulwhenshesangry.com. Retrieved April 28, 2017.
  28. ↑ Author bio, bookreporter.com (accessed June 3, 2010).
  29. ↑ Mary Cantwell, "The American Woman", Mademoiselle, June 1976.

Related Research Articles

Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical re-ordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts, while recognizing that women's experiences are also affected by other social divisions such as in race, class, and sexual orientation. The ideology and movement emerged in the 1960s.

Susan Griffin is a radical feminist philosopher, essayist and playwright particularly known for her innovative, hybrid-form ecofeminist works.

Consciousness raising is a form of activism popularized by United States feminists in the late 1960s. It often takes the form of a group of people attempting to focus the attention of a wider group on some cause or condition. Common issues include diseases, conflicts, movements and political parties or politicians. Since informing the populace of a public concern is often regarded as the first step to changing how the institutions handle it, raising awareness is often the first activity in which any advocacy group engages.

Diana E. H. Russell was a feminist writer and activist. Born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, she moved to England in 1957, and then to the United States in 1961. For the past 45 years she was engaged in research on sexual violence against women and girls. She wrote numerous books and articles on rape, including marital rape, femicide, incest, misogynist murders of women, and pornography. For The Secret Trauma, she was co-recipient of the 1986 C. Wright Mills Award. She was also the recipient of the 2001 Humanist Heroine Award from the American Humanist Association. She was also an organizer of the First International Tribunal on Crimes against Women, in Brussels in March 1976.

Women Against Pornography (WAP) was a radical feminist activist group based out of New York City that was influential in the anti-pornography movement of the late 1970s and the 1980s.

The Anti-pornography Civil Rights Ordinance is a name for several proposed local ordinances in the United States and that was closely associated with the anti-pornography radical feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon. It proposed to treat pornography as a violation of women's civil rights and to allow women harmed by pornography to seek damages through lawsuits in civil courts. The approach was distinguished from traditional obscenity law, which attempts to suppress pornography through the use of prior restraint and criminal penalties.

Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM) was a feminist anti-pornography activist group based in San Francisco and an influential force in the larger feminist anti-pornography movement of the late 1970s and 1980s.

Dorchen A. Leidholdt is an activist and leader in the feminist movement against violence against women. Since the mid-1970s, she has counseled and advocated for rape victims, organized against "the media's promotion of violence against women", served on the legal team for the plaintiff in a precedent-setting sexual harassment case, founded an international non-governmental organization fighting prostitution and trafficking in women and children, directed the nation's largest legal services program for victims of domestic violence, advocated for the enactment and implementation of laws that further the rights of abused women, and represented hundreds of women victimized by intimate partner violence, human trafficking, sexual assault, the threat of honor killing, female genital mutilation, forced and child marriage, and the internet bride trade.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alix Kates Shulman</span> American novelist

Alix Kates Shulman is an American writer of fiction, memoirs, and essays, and a prominent early radical activist of second-wave feminism. She is best-known for her bestselling debut adult novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, hailed by the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing as "the first important novel to emerge from the Women's Liberation Movement."

Anne Koedt is an American radical feminist activist and author of "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm", a 1970 classic feminist work on women's sexuality. She was connected to the group New York Radical Women and was a founding member of New York Radical Feminists.

Florence Rush was an American certified social worker, feminist theorist and organizer best known for introducing The Freudian Coverup in her presentation "The Sexual Abuse of Children: A Feminist Point of View", about childhood sexual abuse and incest, at the April 1971 New York Radical Feminists (NYRF) Rape Conference. Rush's paper at the time was the first challenge to Freudian theories of children as the seducers of adults rather than the victims of adults' sexual/power exploitation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrea Dworkin</span> American feminist writer and activist (1946–2005)

Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist writer and activist best known for her analysis of pornography. Her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 30 years. They are found in a dozen solo works: nine books of non-fiction, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Another three volumes were co-written or co-edited with US constitutional law professor and feminist activist, Catharine A. MacKinnon.

Feminist views on pornography range from total condemnation of the medium as an inherent form of violence against women to an embracing of some forms as a medium of feminist expression. This debate reflects larger concerns surrounding feminist views on sexuality, and is closely related to those on prostitution, BDSM, and other issues. Pornography has been one of the most divisive issues in feminism, particularly in Anglophone (English-speaking) countries. This division was exemplified in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s, which pitted anti-pornography activists against pro-pornography ones.

Feminism has affected culture in many ways, and has famously been theorized in relation to culture by Angela McRobbie, Laura Mulvey and others. Timothy Laurie and Jessica Kean have argued that "one of [feminism's] most important innovations has been to seriously examine the ways women receive popular culture, given that so much pop culture is made by and for men." This is reflected in a variety of forms, including literature, music, film and other screen cultures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gail Dines</span> Anti-pornography campaigner

Gail Dines is professor emerita of sociology and women's studies at Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martha Shelley</span> American lesbian feminist activist

Martha Shelley is an American activist, writer, and poet best known for her involvement in lesbian feminist activism.

<i>Against Our Will</i> 1975 book by Susan Brownmiller

Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape is a 1975 book about rape by Susan Brownmiller, in which the author argues that rape is "a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear."

Feminist views on sexuality widely vary. Many feminists, particularly radical feminists, are highly critical of what they see as sexual objectification and sexual exploitation in the media and society. Radical feminists are often opposed to the sex industry, including opposition to prostitution and pornography. Other feminists define themselves as sex-positive feminists and believe that a wide variety of expressions of female sexuality can be empowering to women when they are freely chosen. Some feminists support efforts to reform the sex industry to become less sexist, such as the feminist pornography movement.

Alexandra Rutherford is a professor of psychology at York University's History and Theory of Psychology Graduate Program and author of Beyond the Box: B. F. Skinner's Technology of Behavior from Laboratory to Life, 1950s-1970s and Pioneers of Psychology.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.