Susan Brownmiller, the feminist author, journalist and activist whose book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975) "helped define the modern view of rape, debunking it as an act of passion and reframing it as a crime of power and violence," died May 24, the New York Times reported. She was 90. Against Our Will was translated into a dozen languages and ranked by the New York Public Library as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century.
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"Chilling and monumental," the lawyer Mary Ellen Gale wrote in the New York Times Book Review. Time magazine called the book "the most rigorous and provocative piece of scholarship that has yet emerged from the feminist movement" and named Brownmiller one of its 12 women of the year.
Noting that the ascendant women's movement was already opening the public's eyes about sexual violence, the Times wrote that "it was the personal feminist ideology suffusing Against Our Will that catapulted the book to the top of bestseller lists and simultaneously infuriated critics, on the left as well as the right, who called it an anti-male polemic.... The early praise soon gave way to outrage over the book's feminist dogma. Even admirers squirmed at Ms. Brownmiller's assertion that 'all men' threatened 'all women' with sexual violence; the statement led to her being harassed on the lecture circuit for years."
In 2015, on the 40th anniversary of the book's publication, Brownmiller, then 80, said she stood by her work "but was highly critical of contemporary young women who, she said, seemed to think they could drink as much alcohol as men and dress provocatively but not take responsibility if they were sexually assaulted," the Times noted, adding that her "views stunned many a budding feminist."
Brownmiller's early writing career included stints as a researcher at Newsweek, a staff writer for the Village Voice, a news writer for ABC-TV, and freelancing for several magazines. She was mainly an activist, writing in the introduction to Against Our Will: "I have always considered myself a strong woman, although I understand that the strength I possess is a matter of style and, secretly, of theatrical bravura.... I am combative, wary and verbally aggressive."
Brownmiller wrote magazine articles and half a dozen books, including a children's book about Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress; followed by Femininity (1984); a novel, Waverly Place (1989); Seeing Vietnam: Encounters of the Road and Heart (1994); and In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (1999).
In Against Our Will, she wrote that "fighting back" would be her ongoing battle cry. "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."