Susan Brownmiller, author of the landmark book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, has died at the age of 90. Her death was confirmed by historian Claire Bond Potter, who is writing a biography of Brownmiller.
In 1975, Against Our Will was a groundbreaking text that explored the history of rape and helped debunk the long-held view that victims were partly to blame.
Against Our Will became a bestseller because it was "the first book about sexual assault written for a general audience," Potter wrote in an email to NPR. "The book asked all of its readers to think broadly about sexual assault as not just as a crime, or even the outcome of patriarchal power, but rather a mechanism for enforcing male dominance through pervasive fear."
Brownmiller spent four years researching and writing Against Our Will, often digging deep into library archives. She explored mass rape during wartime, bias against female victims among police and juries, and the persistent cultural attitudes toward rape such as the "she-was-asking-for-it" myth.
"From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function," Brownmiller wrote. "It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear."
Against Our Will has been translated into numerous languages and was named one of The New York Public Library's Books of the Century. Brownmiller was one of Time magazine's Women of the Year for 1975. Though applauded by feminists at the time, the book received pushback from Black Civil Rights activists for the way in which Brownmiller wrote about the role of race in rape history.
Against Our Will's most controversial chapter was "A Question of Race." While noting that the data was likely flawed, Brownmiller cited FBI statistics that claimed rapes were committed by Black men at rates that were much higher than their percentage of the population. In a section about Emmett Till, the teenager who was brutally murdered for whistling at a white woman, Brownmiller writes that Till's whistle "was no small tweet of hubba-hubba or melodious approval for a well-turned ankle… it was a deliberate insult just short of physical assault, a last reminder to Carolyn Bryant that this black boy, Till, had in mind to possess her."
Brownmiller's arguments, wrote human rights activist Angela Davis, were "pervaded with racist ideas."
In her book Women, Race and Class Davis wrote, "While Brownmiller deplores the sadistic punishment inflicted on Emmett Till, the Black youth emerges, nonetheless, as a guilty sexist — almost as guilty as his white racist murderers." Davis continued, "After all, she argues, both Till and his murderers were exclusively concerned about their rights of possession over women."
Feminists also took Brownmiller to task later in life, when she seemed to suggest in an interview with The Cut that young women who drank alcohol or wore provocative clothing were in part responsible if they were raped.
"And 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,'" she told journalist Katie Van Syckle in 2015.
Learning about the Holocaust led to her 'chosen path'
Brownmiller was born in Brooklyn in 1935 to working class, Jewish parents. She pursued a career as an actor before turning to writing full-time, working for such publications as Newsweek and the Village Voice. As an activist, she cofounded New York Radical Feminists and belonged to the group Women Against Pornography.
Her other books include a biography of Shirley Chisholm for children, Femininity, and In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution.
Brownmiller once wrote that her "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."
In 2013, Brownmiller wrote a new preface for an edition of Against Our Will. She applauded "some amazing developments in the effort to combat sexual assault that could not have been anticipated several decades ago."
She took pride that the attention she and her book received played a role "in the groundbreaking effort to reverse the traditional wisdom on assaultive acts against women and children."
Jennifer Vanasco edited this story.
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