Susan Brownmiller

Susan Brownmiller (born Susan Warhaftig; February 15, 1935 – May 24, 2025) was an American journalist, author and feminist activist, best known for her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, which was selected by The New York Public Library as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century.

Early life and education Susan Brownmiller was born in Brooklyn, New York City, on February 15, 1935, to Mae and Samuel Warhaftig, a lower-middle-class Jewish couple. She was raised in Brooklyn and was the only child of her parents. and became a salesman in the Garment Center and later a vendor in Macy's department store, and her mother was a secretary in the Empire State Building. She later took the pen name Brownmiller, legally changing her name in 1961.

She had "a stormy adolescence", attending Cornell University for two years (1952 to 1954) on scholarships, but not graduating. She later studied acting in New York City. She appeared in two off-Broadway productions.

Activism Brownmiller was a worker in progressive Democrat Mark Lane's successful 1960 campaign for the New York Assembly and his unsuccessful 1962 congressional campaign. They began a relationship which lasted for three years. Brownmiller said of Lane after his death in 2016 that "Mark was a crucial person in my life for a few years. This was before feminism. My ambition was to latch myself to Mark's career and be the Evita of Gracie Mansion".

Brownmiller also participated in civil rights activism, joining CORE and SNCC during the sit-in movement in 1964. Brownmiller volunteered for Freedom Summer in 1964, wherein she worked on voter registration in Meridian, Mississippi. According to her own account:

Jan Goodman and I were in the second batch of volunteers for Mississippi Freedom Summer....When no one else at the Memphis orientation session volunteered for Meridian, Jan and I accepted the assignment. Between us, we had a good ten years of organizing experience, hers in Democratic primaries and presidential campaigns, mine in CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, and both of us together in voter registration drives in East Harlem. The night we arrived in Meridian, a field secretary called a meeting, asking to see the new volunteers. Proudly we raised our hands. 'Shit!' he exploded. 'I asked for volunteers and they sent me white women.'

She first became involved in the Women's Liberation Movement in New York City in 1968, by participating in a consciousness-raising group in the newly formed New York Radical Women organization,

She began work on her book Against Our Will after a New York Radical Feminists speak-out on rape in 1971, and then spent four years researching and writing in the New York Public Library.

In 1972, Brownmiller signed her name to the Ms. campaign “We Have Had Abortions” which called for an end to "archaic laws" limiting reproductive freedom; they encouraged women to share their stories and take action.

In 1977, Brownmiller became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP). WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media. She attended a feminist anti-pornography conference in 1978.

Career Brownmiller's path into journalism began with an editorial position at a "confession magazine". She went on to work as an assistant to the managing editor at Coronet (1959–60), as an editor of the Albany Report, a weekly review of the New York State legislature (1961–1962), and as a national affairs researcher at Newsweek. In the mid-1960s, Brownmiller continued her career in journalism with positions as a reporter for NBC-TV in Philadelphia, staff writer for The Village Voice, and as a network news writer for ABC-TV in New York City.

Beginning in 1968, she worked as a freelance writer; her book reviews, essays, and articles appeared regularly in publications including The New York Times, Newsday, The New York Daily News, Vogue, and The Nation.

In New York, she began writing for The Village Voice and became a network TV newswriter at the American Broadcasting Company, a job she held until 1968. In her later years, she continued to write and speak on feminist issues, including a memoir and history of Second Wave radical feminism titled In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (1999). is a feminist book in which Brownmiller argues 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."

Brownmiller's book received criticism from feminists, including bell hooks and Angela Davis, who wrote that Brownmiller's discussion of rape and race became an "unthinking partisanship which borders on racism".

Personal life and death Brownmiller described herself as "a single woman", even though "I was always a great believer in romance and partnership." "I would like to be in close association with a man whose work I respect," she told an interviewer in 1976, attributing her unmarried status to the fact that she was "not willing to compromise." She never married. Her papers have been archived at Harvard, in the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (Simon and Schuster, 1975/Fawcett Columbine 1993) Waverly Place (Grove Press, 1989) My City High Rise Garden (Rutgers University Press, 2017)

Honors Brownmiller won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship in 1973 to research and write about the crime of rape. She was named as one of 12 Women of the Year by Time magazine in 1975.

She is featured in the feminist history film She's Beautiful When She's Angry (2014).