5 days ago
Susan Brownmiller obituary
When she published Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape in 1975, Susan Brownmiller, who has died aged 90, could not have imagined how controversial her book would be across the political spectrum. Against Our Will revolutionised attitudes to rape, and was also the catalyst for change in laws on sex crime.
In it, Brownmiller described rapists as 'frontline masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known', and stated: 'Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe.'
Against Our Will, which has never since been out of print, analyses the history of rape and its regulation, from pre-history to the present day, covering ancient Greece and Palestine, medieval Europe, through to the American revolutionary war, to the 1970s. Rape as a weapon of war, rape of children in the family home, and rape within male prisons were examined. Brownmiller understood rape as a political act that benefits all men, and keeps all women in a state of fear and subjugation.
Prior to researching Against Our Will, Brownmiller had subscribed to the notion that rape was a crime committed by 'deviants'. It was after meeting survivors such as Sarah Pines, who had been raped while hitchhiking, that she changed her mind, writing 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'.
Before feminists began speaking out about rape, in the late 1960s, there was a widespread notion that unbridled male sexual desire was to blame. Brownmiller argued against this; she saw rape as a product of how men view women and girls in a society that commodifies and objectifies them. This was the first book to frame rape as a political, rather than individual, act.
Brownmiller's work, inspired by and alongside that of other feminists, was pivotal in the introduction of the first laws that criminalised rape in marriage in the US, passed in the late 1970s. She is credited for the inspiration of the campaign to introduce 'rape shield laws', which outlawed the use of the previous sexual history of complainants as a defence tactic in court. The abuse of children within families, and the concept of 'date rape' can also be attributed, in significant part, to Brownmiller.
Nevertheless, she was accused by some of biological essentialism. Others, including Angela Davis, who said that Brownmiller's views were 'pervaded with racist ideas', suggested racism, referring to the sections on Emmett Till, the black teenager accused of the rape of a white woman and lynched in 1955. Brownmiller appeared partially to blame Till for the incident that led to his death, because he had whistled at the woman he was accused of raping. Meanwhile, rightwing commentators accused Brownmiller of claiming that all men were rapists.
An only child, she was born in Brooklyn, New York, to white-collar Jewish parents, Samuel Warhaftig, a sales clerk, and Mae, a secretary. She won a scholarship to study at Cornell University, and joined her first leftist group, Students for Peace, which campaigned against McCarthyism and nuclear weapons. She aspired to become an actor on Broadway, but by the mid-1950s she was working in publishing in Manhattan, and becoming more allied to Marxism, joining the Fairplay for Cuba committee and the Congress of Racial Equality. She began freelancing for the Village Voice, and took a job as a researcher at Newsweek. In 1969 she joined New York Radical Women. Not long after that, she first delved into the topic – rape – that would define her as a vital voice within second wave feminism.
In 1978, she joined Women Against Pornography (WAP) alongside Robin Morgan and Andrea Dworkin, pouring hours of unpaid time into the movement – as well as significant profits from her book.
Brownmiller's previous and subsequent books were overshadowed by Against Our Will. Her first was a biography of Shirley Chisholm (1970) who, in 1968, was the first black woman elected to the US Congress. Against Our Will was followed by Femininity (1984), Waverly Place (1989), Seeing Vietnam (1994) and In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (1999).
In 2015, Brownmiller gave an interview with the Cut website in which she took issue with the turn taken by the conversation around sexual assault. When asked if this could be seen as victim blaming, she responded: 'My feeling about young women trapped in sex situations that they don't want is: 'Didn't you see the warning signs? Who do you expect to do your fighting for you?' … It is a little late, after you are both undressed, to say: 'I don't want this'.'
These comments offended other second wave feminists, including Gloria Steinem, but Brownmiller was no stranger to disagreements within the movement. She opposed the feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon who, alongside Dworkin, lobbied for a legal definition of pornography as a violation of women's civil rights, believing it was best confronted through education and protests.
Stepping back from active feminism in the 1980s, citing 'petty divisions' and 'movement crazies', she nevertheless remained committed to the women's liberation movement, which she described as one of the most 'astounding successes' of our time.
Her final book was My City High Rise Garden (2017), on her 35-year cultivation of a garden on the 20th-floor terrace of her Greenwich Village apartment. She was clear she never wanted children or to marry, saying she believed in 'romance and partnership' and lived with three different men over the years.
Susan Brownmiller, activist and writer, born 15 February 1935; died 24 May 2025
