Biography of Susan Brownmiller

Name: Susan Brownmiller
Bith Date: February 15, 1935
Death Date:
Place of Birth: Brooklyn, New York, United States
Nationality: American
Gender: Female
Occupations: novelist, activist, journalist, scholar

Susan Brownmiller

A career feminist whose work spans the distance from political activism to historical research and novel writing, Susan Brownmiller (born 1935) is most recognized for raising public awareness of violent crimes against women and children.

Brownmiller was born in Brooklyn on February 15, 1935. She returned to New York City twenty years later, after graduating from Cornell University. She worked for four years as an actress before beginning her journalistic career as assistant to the managing editor of Coronet. During the 1960s she worked as a freelance writer with feminist leanings, and also in various capacities for Newsweek, Village Voice, NBC, and ABC. Especially relevant to the themes of her later writing, in 1968 Brownmiller cofounded the New York Radical Feminists among whose political actions was a sit-in at the offices of Ladies Home Journal. Her first book, Shirley Chisholm (1970), a biography of the first African-American Congresswoman, was expanded from a cover story for The New York Times Magazine into a book aimed at adolescent audiences. During her work for a 1971 "Speak-Out," Brownmiller so radically revised her own opinions on rape that she began drafting the book which would eventually become Against Our Will. Her next book, Femininity (1984), was written against the "fear of not being feminine," a fear she feels has been historically imposed upon women. She was inspired to write her first novel, Waverly Place (1989), while covering the trial of Joel Steinman for Ms. magazine. As she told Publisher's Weekly in an interview, "I wrote the novel in a white heat because I was possessed. I had never given myself permission to invent before. It was very liberating." Her most recent work, Seeing Vietnam: Encounters of the Road and Heart (1994), also was born from a reporting assignment, this time for Travel and Leisure.

Against Our Will is perhaps most remarkable for its absolute lack of precedent, for as of 1975 such a comprehensive study of rape's genealogy had yet to be written. Indeed, the book created a clamor against this vast silence. Dredging up facts from the Trojan War to the Vietnam War, Brownmiller uncovered rape as a traditional military strategy. Pouring over centuries of legal history, she described rape as an openly or quietly advocated privilege of husbands over wives, fathers over daughters. The book is broadly and meticulously researched, presenting facts that are indispensable to fields of psychoanalysis, sociology, criminology, and law. Its rhetoric does not shy from its controversial claim 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." Behind her commitment to expose rape as a pervasive quality within all cultures stands Brownmiller's interest in empowering an immense society historically paralyzed and atomized by fear. Her third book, Femininity, also addresses the societal confinement of women, but the subject matter is considerably more subtle. Femininity, Brownmiller writes, "in essence, is a romantic sentiment, a nostalgic tradition of imposed limitations." According to this book, these limitations have taken the forms of clothing, games, manners, and popular metaphors for the "feminine" body, all of which debilitate women in their efforts to succeed.

Following the calm reception of Shirley Chisholm, which Booklist reviewed as a "chatty, narrative account," came the critical torrent surrounding Against Our Will. Although some reviews praised its "informed" and "compelling" "vision," as does Mary Ellen Gates for The New York Times Book Review, many more have left Brownmiller's work with more mixed responses. Amanda Heller of The Atlantic Monthly declared it to be "intelligent" and "ambitious" but in places given to "a kind of feminist pornography that overwhelms the book's more thoughtful passages." Diane Johnson, writing for The New York Review of Books, looked more seriously at the risk of these latter passages, suggesting Brownmiller's rhetoric effectively divides her audience between discouraged women and alienated men. Coming from a radically different perspective, M. J. Sobran, writing for National Review, rejected Brownmiller's very premises: "What she is engaged in, really, is not scholarship but henpecking--that conscious process of intimidation by which all women keep all men in terror."

The critical reception of Femininity was likewise divided. Anne Collins believed it to be "neither self-deprecating enough to be funny nor winsome enough to evoke rueful empathy." Laura Shapiro agreed, stating, "Brownmiller skips along with a great armful of cliches and truisms and scatters them like rose petals until they're all gone." In stark contrast to such comments, Elizabeth Wheeler announced "Brownmiller has written an important book." Carol Gilligan agreed, writing, "The critical questions are of perspective, power, and judgment."

Susan Brownmiller was among the first of the politically active feminists in New York City during the 1960s. In 1968 she helped found the New York Radical Feminists, and as a member of that group she took part in a number of protest demonstrations, including a sit-in at the offices of the Ladies' Home Journal opposing the magazine's "demeaning" attitude toward women. Her interest in women's rights surfaced in much of her work as a free-lance journalist, and one article she wrote, about Shirley Chisholm, the first black U.S. congresswoman, developed into a biography for young readers. In 1971 Brownmiller helped to organize a "Speak-Out on Rape," and in the process she realized that once again she had the material for a book. She submitted an outline of her idea to Simon & Schuster, they contracted for the book, and Brownmiller began researching the subject of rape. After four years of research and writing, she published Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape.

Against Our Will explores the history of rape, exploding the myths that, the author says, influence our modern perspective. She traces the political use of rape in war from biblical times through Vietnam, explains the origins of American rape laws, and examines the subjects of interracial rape, homosexual rape, and child molestation. Brownmiller asserts 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." Supporting her thesis with facts taken from her extensive research in history, literature, sociology, law, psychoanalysis, mythology, and criminology, Brownmiller argues that rape is not a sexual act but an act of power based on an "anatomical fiat"; it is the result of early man's realization that women could be subjected to "a thoroughly detestable physical conquest from which there could be no retaliation in kind."

Against Our Will was serialized in four magazines and became a best-seller and Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and its nationwide tour made Brownmiller a celebrity. Her appearance on the cover of Time as one of the twelve Women of the Year and on television talk shows as a frequent guest confirmed the timeliness of her book. Brownmiller herself remarked, "I saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime subject that had somehow crossed my path," and she expressed gratitude to the women's movement for having given her "a constructive way" to use her rage.

Since Brownmiller's analysis of rape presented a new and controversial viewpoint to an already provocative subject, Against Our Will was received with mixed and at times passionate reviews. Editor Carol Eisen Rinzler expressed her regret that Simon & Schuster, and not she, had published Against Our Will. "It is one of the two books I lay awake nights lusting after," she said. Mary Ellen Gale, reviewing for the New York Times Book Review, said Brownmiller's book "deserves a place on the shelf next to those rare books about social problems which force us to make connections we have too long evaded, and change the way we feel about what we know." And reviewer Helen E. Schwartz, writing in the Nation, indicated the significance Against Our Will held for women by relating, "One friend told me that the book was `so politically important that any criticism you might have of it is secondary.'" Schwartz was also told that if she said anything bad about the book she would be regarded "as an Aunt Thomasina, or whatever the women's movement equivalent is of Uncle Tom."

Described in Time as "a kind of Whole Earth Catalog of man's inhumanity to women," Against Our Will won the applause of male as well as female critics. Village Voice critic Eliot Fremont-Smith praised it as "a landmark work in the literature of awareness.... Whatever its distorted premises and internal contradictions ... [it] is a most important, eye-and-mind-opening book." Michael F. McCauley concurred when he said in Commonweal:"Against Our Will is a poignant, candid, and long overdue analysis of a subject that concerns all. As long as present legal outlooks and cultural mythologies prevail, we are, each one of us, victims of this unspeakable attack on our humanity."

In a review for Village Voice, Rinzler said, "It seems evident that `Against Our Will' will stand up as a major work of history, a classic, if you will," but she also noted that "Brownmiller expects criticism." Indeed, because as Diane Johnson of the New York Review of Books observed, "no other subject, it seems, is experienced so differently by men and women as rape.... There are really two audiences for [ Against Our Will], one which will know much of what [Brownmiller] has to say already, and another which is ill-equipped by training or sympathy to understand it at all."

The National Review's M. J. Sobran, Jr., criticized Brownmiller, her book, and her supporters. He excoriated favorable Village Voice reviews by Fremont-Smith and Rinzler, labeling Rinzler as "some dizzy feminist," and he ridiculed Brownmiller's scholarship and work as intellectually and stylistically sloppy. "The whole point of her book is the tendentiousness of her research," Sobran declared. "What she is engaged in, really, is not scholarship but henpecking--that conscious process of intimidation by which all women keep all men in terror."

Other critics shared Sobran's contention that Brownmiller's research was biased. New Leader critic Ellen Chesler maintained: "While helping to organize a feminist speak-out on rape, Susan Brownmiller made a discovery: Rape could be seen as an extraordinary historical metaphor, a fundamental `way of looking at male-female relations, at sex, at strength, and at power. Now ... she has given us a book that jams the facts--against their will--into the Procrustean bed of her original `moment of revelation.'" In a review for Commentary, Michael Novak also complained that Brownmiller's assertions "are surrounded with much rhetoric, a great smokescreen of `research,' evidence so selective and reasoning so tendentious that to contend against them is to involve oneself in intellectual corruption." Agreeing that "sometimes the book is strident in its tone and one-sided in its presentation," Helene E. Schwartz nevertheless argued that "we should recognize that anger and extremism may be necessary before we can reach the mean of re-education that this book advocates."

In researching and writing Against Our Will, Brownmiller was motivated by "a dual sense of purpose," theorized Rinzler, "a political desire that the book be of value to feminism, and a personal desire to make a lasting contribution to the body of thought." Brownmiller mentions yet another goal in her conclusion to Against Our Will: "Fighting back. On a multiplicity of levels, that is the activity we must engage in, together, if we--women--are to redress the imbalance and rid ourselves and men of the ideology of rape.... My purpose in this book has been to give rape its history. Now we must deny it a future."

Brownmiller's next book, Femininity, is less confrontational in tone than Against Our Will but has still provoked mixed reactions. Femininity examines the ideal qualities--both physical and emotional--that are generally considered feminine and the lengths women go to conform to those ideals. The controversy arises, Brownmiller told Detroit News writer Barbara Hoover, when readers and reviewers "want to know where the blame is--is she blaming men or is she blaming us women? Well," the author explained, "I'm blaming neither. I don't criticize; I just explore the subject."

Brownmiller addresses the subject of child abuse in Waverly Place, her first novel. The book is a fictionalized account of the lives of Hedda Nussbaum and her abusive lover, Joel Steinberg, a New York attorney who was accused during the late 1980s of beating to death their illegally adopted daughter. Explaining why she chose to present the story as fiction instead of nonfiction, Brownmiller wrote in her introduction to Waverly Place: "I wanted the freedom to invent dialogue, motivations, events, and characters based on my own understanding of battery and abuse, a perspective frequently at variance with the scenarios created by the prosecution or the defense in courts of law." "Brownmiller's effort serves a potentially constructive purpose," assessed reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times. "It tries to fill the emotional void created by any incomprehensible human act. It proposes how such a thing could have happened and allows us to participate in the drama of its answer. It offers us an experience of mourning, as well as some reassurance that we ourselves are safe from such disasters.... In all these respects," Lehmann-Haupt concluded, "Ms. Brownmiller's novel succeeds very well."

Associated Works

Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape

Historical Context

The Life and Times of Susan Brownmiller (1935-)
At the time of Brownmiller's birth:
Franklin D. Roosevelt was president of the United States
English inventor A. Edwin Stevens produced the first electronic hearing aid
United Automobile Workers (UAW) held its first convention in Detroit
C. F. Richter developed the Richter scale for measuring earthquakes
Enid Bagnold published National Velvet
The times:
1939-1945: World War II
1950-1953: Korean War
1957-1975: Vietnam War
1960-: Postmodernist Period of American literature
1983: American invasion of Grenada
1991: Persian Gulf War
Brownmiller's contemporaries
Elvis Presley (1935-1977) American rock singer
Geraldine Ferraro (1935-) American first female vice-presidential candidate
Ken Kesey (1935-) American writer
E. Annie Proulx (1935-) Canadian writer
Mary Tyler Moore (1936-) American actress
Barbara Mikulski (1936-) U.S. congresswoman
Joyce Carol Oates (1938-) American writer
Selected world events:
1942: Congress of Racial Equality founded
1945: Women's suffrage enacted in France
1955: Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on bus in Montgomery, Alabama
1963: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring published
1966: National Organization of Women (NOW) founded
1973: Erica Jong's Fear of Flying: A Novel published
1978: Louise Brown, the first "test tube baby" was born
1983: Alice Walker's The Color Purple published
1990: Antonia Novello appointed surgeon general of the United States