Brownmiller, author of the landmark rape book dies

Perth Now

25-05-2025

Susan Brownmiller, a prominent feminist and author whose book, Against Our Will, was a landmark and intensely debated bestseller about sexual assault, has died. She was 90.
Brownmiller, who had been ill, died on Saturday at a New York hospital, according to Emily Jane Goodman, a retired New York State Supreme Court justice.
"She was an active feminist; she was not one to just agree with the popular issue of the day," said Goodman, whose friendship with Brownmiller spanned decades.
A journalist, anti-war protester and civil rights activist before joining the second wave feminist movement in its formative years, Brownmiller was among many women who were radicalised in the '60s and '70s and part of the smaller circle that included Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Kate Millett.
While activists of the early 20th century focused on voting rights, second-wave feminism transformed conversations about sex, marriage, reproductive rights, workplace harassment and domestic violence.
Brownmiller, as much as anyone, opened up the discussion of rape.
Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, published in 1975 and widely read and taught for decades after, documented the roots, prevalence and politics of rape.
She denounced the glorification of rape in popular culture, contended that rape was an act of violence, not lust, and traced rape to the very foundations of human history.
"Man's structural capacity to rape and woman's corresponding structural vulnerability are as basic to the physiology of both our sexes as the primal act of sex itself," she wrote.
In her 1999 memoir In Our Time, Brownmiller likened the writing of Against Our Will to "shooting an arrow into a bull's-eye in very slow motion."
It was a book that Brownmiller started in the early 1970s, after hearing stories from friends that made her shriek with dismay.
The title was chosen as a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and considered newsworthy enough for Brownmiller to be interviewed on the Today show by Barbara Walters.
In 1976, Time magazine placed her picture on its cover, along with Billie Jean King, Betty Ford and nine others as Women of the Year.
Brownmiller's book inspired survivors to tell their stories, women to organise rape crisis centres and helped lead to the passage of marital rape laws.