Susan Brownmiller

Susan Brownmiller was born in Brooklyn on February 15, 1935. She went to Cornell University in 1952 -1955. After she left Cornell she returned to New York to pursue a career as a Broadway actress(4 years). While trying to pursue an acting career she began to take up editorial type jobs which by accident kick started her career as a journalist when she became the assistant to the managing editor for Coronet.  During the 1960s she worked as a freelance writer with feminist leanings, and also as a journalist/news writer for Newsweek, Village Voice, NBC, and ABC. On February 1960 she participated in a Southern sit-in to end lunch counter segregation which in her own words said had an enormous effect on her. Following the sit-in she joined CORE(changing Congress of racial equality) and SNCC (student Nonviolent coordinating committee). In 1964 she participated in the organization of Freedom Summer in Mississippi and was an active volunteer. At this moment she herself admitted that she had become a political activist. In 1968 she first became involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement by co founding the New York Radical Feminists organization. In 1970 she helped organize a Sit-in against Ladies Home Movement. Also in 1970 she wrote her first book Shirley Chisholm which was a biography of the first African American Congresswoman.

In 1971 she helped organize a “Speak-out” on rape with the New York Radical Feminists which was a very dramatic experience for her and those involved because it changed her opinion about the issue of rape and exactly how vulnerable women really are to the act of rape. This realization initially kick started her four year research about rape which eventually became the book AGAINST OUR WILL which was published in 1975.  Against our will became an instant hit as well as a popular topic of conversation for it was a text the broke the silence of a very delegate subject and because as of 1975 no other book or literary work was ever written of this caliber about the study of rapes genealogy and its effects on society and psychology.

Against Our Will explores the history of rape, exploding the myths that, according to Brownmiller, influence one’s perspective on the act of rape. She traces the political use of rape in war from biblical times through the Vietnam War, explains the origins of American rape laws, and examines the subjects of interracial rape, homosexual rape, and child molestation. Brownmiller asserts that rape is a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear. To support her thesis she took facts from her extensive research in history, literature, sociology, law, psychoanalysis, mythology, and criminology.

Brownmiller argues that rape is not a sexual act but an act of power based on an anatomical fact; it is the result of early man’s realization that women could be subjected to a thoroughly vile physical conquest from which there could be no retaliation of any kind. She argues that rape had been hitherto defined by men rather than women and that men use and all men benefit from the use of rape as a means of perpetuating male dominance by keeping all women in a state of fear. She describes rape as a promoted privilege of husbands over wives, father over daughters.

My response to this text is that I do agree with most of Brownmillers points that rape is used a way to re enforce power and dominance. I also agree that the notion of rape in one way or another is also embedded in all cultures whether it be in fairytales or mythology which at a young age installs the concept of rape, dominance, and insecurity. What I did like was the overall result of her book was that many organizations were created to help these victims of rape. Also I do agree with Brownmiller that women do have to start realizing that whatever happens is not their fault  and women need to start fighting back against rape and rapists, even though I don’t think that just mere fighting back will stop rape it will at least decrease the number of rapes. What I don’t agree with is that she in the beginning she states that all men use rape or at least the sexual intimidation aspect to their benefit.

Also the excerpt by Susan Brownmiller well the rhetoric and the type of document that it is reminded me of Margret Sangers piece Women and the New Race because both pieces where original in their own time and were very controversial and eye opening.

An extra excerpt from Against Our Will 

Zoologists for the most part have been reticent on the subject of rape. It has not been, for them, an important scientific question. But we do know that ' human beings are different. Copulation in our species can occur 365 days of the year; it is not controlled bythe female estrous cycle. We females of the human species do not "go pink." The call of estrus and the telltale signs, both visual and olfactory, are absent from our mating procedures, lost perhaps in the evolutionary shuffle. In their place, as a mark of our civilization,we have evolved a complex system of psychological signs and urges,and a complex structure of pleasure. Our call to sex occurs in the head, and the act is not necessarily linked, as it is with animals, to other Nature's pattern of procreation. Without a biologically determined mating season, a human male can evince sexual interest in a human female at any time he pleases, and his psychologic urge is not dependent in the slightest on her biologic readiness or receptivity. What it all boils down to is that the human male can rape.

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. Had it not been for this accident of biology, an accommodation requiring the locking together of two separate parts, penis into vagina, there would be neither copulation nor rape as we know it. Anatomically one might want to improve on the design of nature, but such speculation appears to my mind as unrealistic. The human sex act accomplishes its historic purpose of generation of the species and it also affords some intimacy and pleasure. I have no basic quarrel with the procedure. But, nevertheless, we cannot work around the fact that in terms of human anatomy the possibility of forcible intercourse incontrovertibly exists. This single factor may have been sufficient to have caused the creation of a male ideology of rape. When men discovered that they could rape, they proceeded to do it. Later, much later, under certain circumstances they even came to consider rape a crime.

In the violent landscape inhabited by primitive woman and man, some woman somewhere had a prescient vision of her right to her own physical integrity, and in my mind's eye I can picture her fighting like hell to preserve it. After a thunderbolt of recognition that this particular incarnation of hairy, two legged hominid was not the Homo sapiens with whom she would like to freely join parts, it might have been she, and not some man, who picked up the first stone and hurled it. How surprised he must have been, and what an unexpected battle must have taken place. Fleet of foot and spirited, she would have kicked, bitten, pushed and run, but she could not retaliate in kind.

The dim perception that had entered prehistoric woman's consciousness must have had an equal but opposite reaction in the mind of her male assailant. For if the first rape was an unexpected battle founded on the first woman's refusal, the second rape was indubitably planned. Indeed, one of the earliest forms of male bonding must have been the gang rape of one woman by a band of marauding men. This accomplished, rape became not only a male prerogative, but man's basic weapon of force against woman, the principal agent of his will and her fear. His forcible entry into her body, despite her physical protestations and struggle, became the vehicle of his victorious conquest over her being, the ultimate test of his superior strength, the triumph of his manhood.

Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.