I met Susan Brownmiller, the feminist pioneer, while researching a project about 1960s groups like New York Radical Women and Redstockings. We had both worked at the Village Voice—she two decades before me—and Brownmiller welcomed me into her Greenwich Village aerie like I was a long lost niece, regaling me with tales of yore. There was her time spent in the civil rights movement as a summer volunteer in Mississippi, her illegal abortions and abortion protests, the disruptive occupation of Ladies Home Journal as a throwdown to a male-dominated media, the first rape speakout, which led to her groundbreaking, controversial 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. She talked about how the women’s liberationists faced opposition not just from the establishment but from macho progressive activists who ought to have been their allies. “Radical men didn’t like the idea of women splitting off into their own groups,” she recalled with a sly grin. “Who was going to run the mimeograph machines? Or get the coffee?”
When I heard she had died this week at the age of 90, I immediately pulled up the YouTube video of her 1970 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, in which she and fellow Voice writer Sally Kempton took down Playboy founder Hugh Hefner with a perfect mixture of chutzpah and disdain. Clad in a no-nonsense beige pantsuit, Brownmiller announced, “Hugh Hefner is my enemy.” The 44-year-old publisher sat just a few feet away, suavely puffing on his pipe, doing his best to look unruffled. “The role you have selected for women is degrading,” Brownmiller said coolly of the Playboy bunnies with their cottontail rears and the cheesecake models in the magazine, “because you choose to see women as sex objects, not as full human beings.” Hefner tried to smooth the waters and meet Women’s Lib halfway, while standing up for vive le difference. “I’m more in sympathy than the girls realize,” Hefner assured the audience. “Women,” Brownmiller retorted, correcting Hefner’s use of the word “girls.” “Women. I am 35.” And she turned it right back on the aging swinger, asking sharply: “Do you want to be called a boy?”
At a moment when many gains of the women’s movement are being reversed at warpspeed—when ever more draconian abortion laws means that a braindead woman in Georgia is being kept on life support until her fetus is viable, when the White House is aggressively erasing women’s achievements from the public record and attacking programs to increase workplace equality—the changes that Brownmiller fought for now seem miraculous.
Brownmiller grew up in Flatbush, the child of lower middle class Shetl-born Jews. A college dropout, she changed her name from Warhaftig to Brownmiller because she hoped to break into the theater. When the stage life didn’t pan out, she switched her sights to magazines but realized while working at Newsweek that in the mainstream media, women writers like her wouldn’t be allowed to rise past researcher. So she became a journalist, writing for places like the Voice. In fall 1968, she heard about a New York Radical Women meeting. That was the name of the group behind the disruption of the Miss America Pageant, most famous for a symbolic protest in which the female protesters hurled cosmetics in a trash can and—so the legend goes—burned their bras. That never actually happened, but the myth of the lingerie inferno went viral—a fictitious spark that ignited real outbreaks of women’s liberation across the world, while setting off alarm bells throughout the straight world.
When Brownmiller arrived at the meeting for her first consciousness raising session a few months after the pageant, the room was packed. The topic was having children. As soon as her turn came around, Brownmiller found herself blurting out details of the three illegal abortions she’d had—one just six months before, in Puerto Rico. She had thought she was in control, but tears welled up in her eyes as she told the women she felt lucky to be alive. “I had never said this out loud before,” Brownmiller recalled. “That was the moment that I knew this women’s movement was real.”
She threw herself into the maelstrom and soon was testifying about her abortions as part of a massive class action abortion-related lawsuit —a precursor to Roe V Wade organized by activist lawyer Flo Kennedy. Kennedy saw the suit as not just “a legal action” but “an attempt to educate the public” about the need for abortion to be legalized. Brownmiller did just that. She talked about a doctor who wanted to experiment on her with a new method, asking her to sign blank pieces of paper that would absolve him of guilt in case the abortion went awry.
At the start of 1970, women’s liberation remained a curiosity to most Americans. By the year’s end, the effects of the movement had seeped into every area of modern life. One of the most dramatic uprisings of the year unfolded within the media itself. Spurred by the impact of the Miss America protests, Brownmiller and a group called Media Women decided to stage a sit-in at the Ladies’ Home Journal, a bastion of the counter-revolution since 1891, sedating its 14 million female readers with monthly columns like “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” On the morning of March 18, 1970, dozens of women’s liberation activists, dressed in office-appropriate dresses and heels, swarmed the inner sanctum of editor-in-chief John Mack Carter, laying siege for eleven hours.
“Behave like ladies,” pleaded Lenore Hershey, Carter’s genteel deputy and gatekeeper. Instead, the invaders passed around a box of Carter’s cigars and smoked them. They hung a banner out the editor’s window proclaiming it THE WOMEN’S LIBERATED JOURNAL. NBC News captured the scene on tape, as dozens of women confronted Carter. “Do you women recognize one leader?” a magazine staffer asked, hoping for a less chaotic negotiation. “No!” the protesters shouted joyfully.
Prior to the office invasion, Brownmiller and her comrades had compiled a list of demands to present to the magazine. Most major women’s periodical mastheads were still dominated by men, so they called for Carter, along with other top editors and staff writers, to be replaced by women. They also pressed for a daycare center for employees and the hiring of Black women at all levels. (At the time there were precisely zero on the staff). Their most audacious goal was to not just occupy the offices for a day, but to take over an entire issue of the magazine. Article ideas included “How to Get An Abortion” and “How To Have An Orgasm”—both verboten topics in the demure women’s magazines of the era. They even mocked up a magazine cover featuring a pregnant woman holding up a sign that read, “UNPAID LABOR.”
Carter ultimately agreed to give them an 8-page magazine supplement that would be written and edited collectively. Among those working on the special section were Media Women member Nora Ephron, then a writer at the New York Post. “[A]lternatingly fascinating, horrifying, and hilarious,” is how Ephron later described the fractious experience. After the sit-in, however, Ladies Homes Journal instituted significant changes. Carter re-focused the existing “Power of a Woman” section to cover women’s liberation happenings and added a new monthly “Working Woman” column. And a few years later, Hershey took his place as editor in chief. Yet some felt disappointed by how few concessions they’d won from the magazine, and the underground newspaper RAT accused Brownmiller and her fellow journalists of using the action for personal gain, suggesting that they’d turned a guerrilla action into a job interview.
Late in 1970, Brownmiller’s consciousness raising group began discussing the topic of rape. “Rape isn’t a feminist issue,” she insisted. Having never been assaulted herself, Brownmiller initially couldn’t see how any sensible woman could end up in such a situation. But her perspective changed completely as she listened to fellow members’ stories, and she decided to help the group plan a “rape speakout.” On a chilly January afternoon in a Hells Kitchen church, 30 women stood up to testify to an array of ordeals. The perpetrators ranged from trusted intimates (psychiatrists, husbands, boyfriends) to total strangers. The group followed the speakout a few months later with a full-scale “Rape Conference” featuring workshops and talks devoted to the law, social policy, medical issues, incest, and self-defense. Brownmiller attended on crutches: she’d sprained her ankle by kicking a guy on the street who pinched her while she was handing out conference flyers.
Propelled by the momentum of the conference, Brownmiller launched herself into researching what would become the first major feminist study of rape, Against Our Will. “A nuts‐and‐bolts program for dragging rape laws into the 20th century” said The New York Times. It led to Time magazine honoring Brownmiller as one of its twelve Women of the Year in 1975. But the book was also rightly critiqued by scholars like bell hooks and Angela Davis for its blindspots regarding race. While acknowledging Against Our Will as a “pioneering scholarly contribution to the contemporary literature of rape,” Davis condemned it as a text “pervaded with racist ideas.” In a passage on Emmett Till, the Black teenager lynched in 1955 for whistling at a white woman in a Mississippi grocery store, Brownmiller described the boy’s whistle as a “deliberate insult just short of physical assault,” suggesting that black and white men alike see women as the white man’s property. Davis noted that in Brownmiller’s rendering, Till comes off looking “almost as guilty as his white racist murderers.”
An unabashed and imperfect feminist heroine, Brownmiller continued to stir up controversy by making comments late in life that sounded like victim-blaming. “Culture may tell you, ‘You can drink as much as men,’ but you can’t….,” Brownmiller told The Cut in 2015. “The slut marches bothered me, too, when they said you can wear whatever you want. Well sure, but you look like a hooker. They say, ‘That doesn
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