New York – Susan Brownmiller, an outstanding feminist and author of the sixties and seventies, whose “against our testament” was a Best-Seller Landmark and intensely debated about sexual aggression, has died. She was 90 years old.
Brownmiller, who had been sick, died on Saturday at a hospital in New York, according to Emily Jane Goodman, a justice withdrawn from the Supreme Court of the State of New York and the exercise lawyer who serves as an executor of Brownmiller’s will.
A journalist, manifestor against the war and civil rights activist before joining the feminist movement of the “second wave” in his years of training, Brownmiller was among many women who were radicalized in the 60s and 70s and part of the smallest circle that included Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Kate Millet who radicalized others.
While the activists of the early twentieth century focused on voting rights, the feminism of the second wave transformed conversations about sex, the reproductive rights of marriage, harassment in the workplace and domestic violence. Brownmiller, as much as anyone, opened the discussion of rape. “Against our will: men, women and rape”, published in 1975 and widely read and taught for decades later, documented the roots, prevalence and policy of rape, in war and prison, against children and spouses. She denounced the glorification of violation in popular culture, said that violation was an act of violence, not lust, and drew the violation of the foundations of human history.
“The structural capacity of the man to violate and the corresponding structural vulnerability of women is as basic for the physiology of our sexes as the primitive act of sex itself,” he wrote.
In his 1999 memories “in our time,” Brownmiller compared the writing of “against our will” to “shoot an arrow in an ox in slow chamber.” Brownmiller began the book in the early 1970s after listening to stories of friends who made her scream “with dismay.” He was chosen as a main selection of the Book Club of the month and considered journalistic enough to make Brownmiller interviewed in the “Today” program of Barbara Walters. In 1976, Time magazine placed his photo on his cover, along with Billie Jean King, Betty Ford and another nine 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 matrimonial rape laws. He was also received with fear, confusion and anger. Brownmiller remembered a journalist who shouted at him: “You have no right to disturb my mind like that!”
Brownmiller was also blamed for writing that the violation was an affirmation of power that helped all men and was strongly criticized for a chapter entitled “A matter of race”, in which he reviewed the murder of 1955 in Mississippi of black adolescent Emmett a. Brownmiller condemned his horrible death at the hands of a white mafia, but also blamed the alleged incident that led to his death: whistling Bryant’s wife, Carolyn Bryant.
The chapter reflected ongoing tensions between feminist and civil rights leaders, with activist Angela Davis Writing that Brownmiller’s opinions were “impregnated with racist ideas.” In 2017, New York editor David Remnick would call her writing about the murder of Till “morally alien.” Asked by Time magazine in 2015 about the passages in Till, she replied that she was standing for “every word.”
Steinem would criticize Brownmiller for the comments he made during a 2015 interview with New York magazine, when Brownmiller said that a way for women to avoid being attacked not to get drunk, suggesting that women themselves were to blame.
Brownmiller’s other books included “Femininity”, “See Vietnam” and the novel “Waverly Place”, based on the very publicized trial of lawyer Joel Steinberg, sentenced in 1987 for involuntary homicide for the death of her 6 -year -old daughter, Lisa. In recent years, Brownmiller taught at Pace University.
“It was an active feminist, it was not the one who only agreed with the popular problem of the day,” said Goodman, whose friendship with Brownmiller covered decades.
He remembered notable meetings, including Poker nights, in the old Village Village apartment in Brownmiller, which was the subject of his 2017 book, “My City Highrise Garden.”
Another close friend for a long time, Alix Kates Shulman, 92, a writer and feminist companion, lived a short distance.
“We were women’s liberation comrades,” he said.
Brownmiller was born in New York City in 1935, and proudly noticed that his birthday, on February 15, was the same as that of Susan B. Anthony. His father was a sales employee, his mother secretary and both were so dedicated to Franklin Roosevelt and so well informed of the current events that Brownmiller “also became very intense for these things.” She was a scholarship student at Cornell University and had a brief “very wrong ambition” to be a Broadway star, working as an archive and waitress employee, since I expected roles that never materialized.
The civil rights movement changed his life.
He joined the Racial Equality Congress in 1960 and four years later he was one of the “Freedom Summer” volunteers who went to Mississippi to help register blacks to vote. During the 60s, he also wrote for the voice of the town and for ABC television and was a researcher in Newsweek.
At the end of the 1970s, Brownmiller helped to found the New York chapter of “Women against Pornography”, with other members, including Steinem and Adrienne Rich. The organizers agreed that porn degraded and abused women, but differed on how to respond. Brownmiller wrote an influential essay, “we are going to put pornography in the closet”, disputing arguments that pornography was protected by the first amendment. But he opposed the impulse of the anti-bya leader Catherine Mackinnon for legislation, believing that pornography faced better through education and protests.
In the 1980s, Brownmiller was delayed from activism and in his memoirs he noticed his despair for “slow filtration, symbolic defeats and small divisions” that were causes and symptoms of the decline of the movement. But he still remembered his previous years as a rare and beautiful chapter.
“When it occurs perhaps, when the vision is clear and the brotherhood is powerful, the mountains move and the human landscape changes forever,” Brownmiller wrote. “Of course, it is very unrealistic to speak in one voice for half of the human race, however, that is what feminism always tries to do, and must do, and that is what the liberation of women did, with an amazing success, in our time.”
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Associated Press writer Sophia Tareen contributed to this Chicago report.
