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NEW YORK -- Susan Brownmiller, a salient feminist and writer of the 1960s and '70s whose "Against Our Will" was a landmark and intensely debated best-seller astir intersexual assault, has died. She was 90.
Brownmiller, who had been ill, died Saturday astatine a New York hospital, according to Emily Jane Goodman, a retired New York State Supreme Court justness and practicing lawyer who serves arsenic the executor of Brownmiller's will.
A journalist, anti-war protester and civilian rights activistic earlier joining the “second wave” feminist question successful its formative years, Brownmiller was among galore women who were radicalized successful the ’60s and ’70s and portion of the smaller ellipse that included Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Kate Millett who radicalized others.
While activists of the aboriginal 20th period focused connected voting rights, 2nd question feminism transformed conversations astir sex, matrimony reproductive rights, workplace harassment and home violence. Brownmiller, arsenic overmuch arsenic anyone, opened up the treatment of rape. "Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape," published successful 1975 and wide work and taught for decades after, documented the roots, prevalence and authorities of rape — successful warfare and successful prison, against children and spouses. She denounced the glorification of rape successful fashionable culture, contended that rape was an enactment of violence, not lust, and traced rape to the precise foundations of quality history.
"Man's structural capableness to rape and woman's corresponding structural vulnerability are arsenic basal to the physiology of some our sexes arsenic the primal enactment of enactment itself," she wrote.
In her 1999 memoir "In Our Time," Brownmiller likened the penning of "Against Our Will" to "shooting an arrow into a bulls-eye successful precise dilatory motion." Brownmiller started the publication successful the aboriginal 1970s aft proceeding stories from friends that made her shriek “with dismay.” It was chosen arsenic a main enactment of the Book-of-the-Month Club and considered newsworthy capable for Brownmiller to beryllium interviewed connected the "Today" amusement by Barbara Walters. In 1976, Time mag placed her representation connected its cover, on with Billie Jean King, Betty Ford and 9 others arsenic "Women of the Year."
Brownmiller's publication inspired survivors to archer their stories, women to signifier rape situation centers and helped pb to the transition of marital rape laws. It was besides received with fear, disorder and anger. Brownmiller remembered a paper newsman shouting astatine her, "You person nary close to disturb my caput similar this!"
Brownmiller was besides faulted for penning that rape was an assertion of powerfulness that helped each men and was powerfully criticized for a section titled "A Question of Race," successful which she revisited the 1955 execution successful Mississippi of Black teen Emmett Till. Brownmiller condemned his gruesome decease astatine the hands of a achromatic mob but besides blamed Till for the alleged incidental that led to his death: whistling astatine Bryant's wife, Carolyn Bryant.
The section reflected ongoing tensions betwixt feminists and civilian rights leaders, with activistic Angela Davis penning that Brownmiller's views were "pervaded with racist ideas." In 2017, New Yorker exertion David Remnick would telephone her penning astir Till's execution “morally oblivious.” Asked by Time mag successful 2015 astir the passages connected Till, she replied that she stood by “every word.”
Steinem would knock Brownmiller for comments she made during a 2015 interrogation with New York magazine, erstwhile Brownmiller said that 1 mode for women to debar being assaulted was not to get drunk, suggesting that women themselves were to blame.
Brownmiller's different books included "Femininity," "Seeing Vietnam" and the caller "Waverly Place," based connected the highly publicized proceedings of lawyer Joel Steinberg, convicted successful 1987 of manslaughter for the decease of his 6-year-old daughter, Lisa. In caller years, Brownmiller taught astatine Pace University.
“She was an progressive feminist, she was not 1 to conscionable hold with the fashionable contented of the day," said Goodman, whose relationship with Brownmiller spanned decades.
She recalled singular gatherings, including poker nights, astatine Brownmiller's longtime Greenwich Village apartment, which was the taxable of her 2017 book, “My City Highrise Garden.”
Another longtime adjacent friend, 92-year-old Alix Kates Shulman, a chap writer and feminist, lived wrong walking distance.
“We were womens’ liberation comrades,” she said.
Brownmiller was calved successful New York City successful 1935, and would enactment proudly that her birthday, Feb. 15, was the aforesaid arsenic Susan B. Anthony's. Her begetter was a income clerk, her parent a caput and some were truthful devoted to Franklin Roosevelt and truthful knowledgeable of existent events that Brownmiller "became precise aggravated astir these things too." She was a Cornell University assistance pupil astatine and had a little "very mistaken ambition" to beryllium a Broadway star, moving arsenic a record clerk and waitress arsenic she hoped for roles that ne'er materialized.
The civilian rights question changed her life.
She joined the Congress of Racial Equality successful 1960 and 4 years aboriginal was among the "Freedom Summer" volunteers who went to Mississippi to assistance registry Blacks to vote. During the ‘60s, she besides wrote for the Village Voice and for ABC tv and was a researcher astatine Newsweek.
In the precocious 1970s, Brownmiller helped recovered the New York section of "Women Against Pornography," with different members, including Steinem and Adrienne Rich. Organizers agreed that porn degraded and abused women, but differed implicit however to respond. Brownmiller wrote an influential essay, "Let's Put Pornography Back successful the Closet," disputing arguments that pornography was protected by the First Amendment. But she opposed anti-porn person Catherine MacKinnon's propulsion for legislation, believing that pornography was champion confronted done acquisition and protests.
In the 1980s, Brownmiller stepped backmost from activism and successful her memoir noted her despair implicit the "slow seepage, symbolic defeats and petty divisions" that were some causes and symptoms of the movement's decline. But she inactive remembered her earlier years arsenic a uncommon and precious chapter.
"When specified a coming-together takes place, erstwhile the imaginativeness is wide and the sisterhood is powerful, mountains are moved and the quality scenery is changed forever," Brownmiller wrote. "Of people it is wildly unrealistic to talk successful 1 dependable for fractional the quality race, yet that is what feminism ever attempts to do, and indispensable do, and that is what Women's Liberation did do, with astounding success, successful our time."
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Associated Press writer Sophia Tareen contributed to this study from Chicago.
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