Susan Brownmiller, author of Landmark Book on Sexual Aggression, dies at 90

New York – Susan Brownmiller, an eminent feminist and author of the 1960s and the 1970s, of which “Against Our Will” was a best-seller monument and intensely debated of sexual assault, died. She was 90 years old.

Brownmiller, who was sick, died on Saturday in a New York hospital, according to Emily Jane Goodman, retired judge of the Supreme Court of New York State and Lawyer who is the testamentary executor of the will of Brownmiller.

Journalist, anti-war demonstrator and civil rights activist before joining the feminist movement of the “second wave” during his years of training, Brownmiller was part of many women who were radicalized in the 60s and 70s and part of the small circle which included Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Kate Millett who radicalized others.

While activists from the beginning of the 20th century focused on voting rights, the feminism of the second wave transformed conversations on sex, reproductive rights of marriage, harassment in workplace and domestic violence. Brownmiller, as much as anyone, opened the discussion of rape. “Against our will: men, women and rape”, published in 1975 and widely read and taught for decades afterwards, documented by the roots, prevalence and the policy of rape – at war and in prison, against children and spouses. She denounced the glorification of rape in popular culture, argued that rape was an act of violence, no lust and traced rape to the very foundations of human history.

“The structural capacity of man to violate and the corresponding structural vulnerability of women is as fundamental to the physiology of our two sexes as the primary act of sex itself,” she wrote.

In his 1999 memories “in our time”, Brownmiller compared the writing of “Against Our Will” to “shoot an arrow in an eye of Bulls in idle”. Brownmiller started the book in the early 1970s after hearing stories of friends who had “dismay”. He was chosen as the main selection of the book of the book of the month and considered worthy of interest enough for Brownmiller to be interviewed on the show “Today” by Barbara Walters. In 1976, Time Magazine placed her photo on her cover, with Billie Jean King, Betty Ford and nine others as “women of the year”.

Brownmiller’s book inspired the survivors to tell their stories, their women to organize rape crisis centers and helped lead to the adoption of marital rape laws. He was also received with fear, confusion and anger. Brownmiller remembered a newspaper journalist who shouted to him: “You are not allowed to disturb my mind like that!”

Brownmiller was also blamed for having written that rape was an affirmation of power that helped all men and was strongly criticized for a chapter entitled “A question of race”, in which she saw the murder of 1955 at the Mississippi of the Black Adolet Till. Brownmiller condemned his horrible death to the hands of a white crowd, but also blamed Till for the alleged incident who led to his death: whistling to the wife of Bryant, Carolyn Bryant.

The chapter reflects in progress tensions between feminists and leaders of civil rights, activist Angela Davis writing that Brownmiller’s opinions were “imbued with racist ideas”. In 2017, the editor -in -chief of New York, David Remnick, would call him to write about the murder of Till “morally unconscious”. Questioned by Time magazine in 2015 on the passages on Till, she replied that she was standing near “each word”.

Steinem would criticize Brownmiller for comments she made in a 2015 interview with New York magazine, when Brownmiller said that a way for women to avoid being attacked was not to get drunk, suggesting that the women themselves were to blame.

Brownmiller’s other books included “femininity”, “Seeing Vietnam” and the novel “Waverly Place”, based on the highly publicized trial of lawyer Joel Steinberg, found in 1987 of manslaughter guilty for the death of her 6 -year -old daughter, Lisa. In recent years, Brownmiller has taught at Pace University.

“She was an active feminist, she was not one of agreeing with the popular number of the day,” said Goodman, whose friendship with Brownmiller lasted decades.

She recalled remarkable rallies, including poker evenings, in the longtime apartment in Brownmiller, Greenwich Village, which was the subject of her 2017 book, “My City Highrise Garden”.

Another long -standing close friend, Alix Kates Shulman, 92, a writer and feminist colleague, lived at a distance from walking.

“We were female liberation comrades,” she said.

Brownmiller was born in New York in 1935 and would proudly note that his birthday, on February 15, was the same as that of Susan B. Anthony. His father was committed to sales, his mother secretary and the two were so dedicated to Franklin Roosevelt and so well informed of the current events that Brownmiller “became very intense about these things too”. She was a student at the Cornell University Stock Exchange and had a brief “very erroneous ambition” to be a Broadway star, working as a file clerk and a waitress that she hoped for roles that never materialized.

The civil rights movement has changed its life.

She joined the racial equality congress in 1960 and four years later, he was one of the volunteers “Freedom Summer” who went to Mississippi to help record the blacks to vote. During the 1960s, she also wrote for The Village Voice and for ABC Television and was a researcher at Newsweek.

In the late 1970s, Brownmiller helped found the New York section of “Women Against Pornography”, with other members, including Steinem and Adrienne Rich. The organizers have agreed that porn has degraded and mistreated women, but differs how to react. Brownmiller wrote an influential test, “let’s put pornography in the closet”, contesting the arguments that pornography was protected by the first amendment. But she opposed the thrust of the chief of the pornorne chief Catherine Mackinnon, believing that pornography was better confronted with education and demonstrations.

In the 1980s, Brownmiller fell from activism and in his memories noted his despair in the face of “slow oozing, symbolic defeats and small divisions” which were both causes and symptoms of the decline of movement. But she still remembered her previous years as a rare and precious chapter.

“When such an extent takes place, when the vision is clear and the fraternity is powerful, the mountains are moved and the human landscape has changed forever,” wrote Brownmiller. “Of course, it is extremely unrealistic to speak with a single voice for half the human race, but that is what feminism always tries to do, and must do, and that is what the liberation of women has made, with surprising success, in our time.”

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The writer Associated Press Sophia Tareen contributed to this Chicago report.