Susan Brownmiller, the outstanding feminist who died last Saturday at 90 in a New York hospital. Brownmiller became famous after publishing his book in 1975 Against our will, A treaty on the violation that journalist, activist against war and in favor of civil rights, was part of the feminist circle to which the journalist and writer Gloria Steinem, also the author and professor Kate Millett and the psychologist Betty Friedan belonged.
Born in New York on February 15, 1935, the only child of a department -warehouse dependent and a secretary, as a young man, wanted to be an actress, but only achieved minor roles in a couple of secondary productions and worked as Archivera and waitress. He decided to participate in the Civil Rights Movement. He joined the Racial Equality Congress in 1960 and four years later he was part of the volunteers of the so -called Summer de la Libertad, who went to Mississippi to help register the blacks in the electoral census. During the 60s, he worked as a journalist for the Village Voice, NBC and ABC television chains and the weekly Newsweekin addition to collaborating with other media.
He joined the women’s release movement in New York and participated in the second feminist wave, which addressed matters such as domestic violence, abortion, salary equality and sexual liberation. In 1971, he organized the New York Feminist Radical Conference on rape, followed by a weekend seminar on the subject. He found that the story of women about what had happened to them was diametrically opposite to the usual narratives of the time, who talked about tacit consent and false accusations. His conclusion was that “the violation was a deliberate act of power, domination and humiliation committed by men without morals, and that most of the victims feared that their aggressors would be killed,” he said later in the preface to a reissue of his book.
Brownmiller decided to document in his work what later analyzed the roots, prevalence and policy of rape, both in war and in prisons, against women, including spouses, and minors. He denounced the glorification of violation in popular culture, said it was an act of violence, not lust, and investigated the history of violations.
In that preface, written in 2013, he pointed out that until his work of 1975, public attitudes on the violation and sexual abuse of minors in psychoanalytic theories, in police investigations and courts of justice, in popular novels and films, in programs of television interviews, in jokes and jokes.
“Women had never dared to speak openly of a crime against their physical integrity that was often received with disbelief and that led to a heavy load of shame. The rape was something that women feared to mention. Great surprise: the unconfessable themes, for women, revolved around the autonomy of the female body. Using the awareness process that a few years before had helped to put in the foregoing Abortion, feminists began to face sexual aggressions speaking from their own experience, ”he said then.
She was especially proud of a chapter on the war in which she had documented massive violations in Vietnam and Bangladesh. And surprised that another chapter on the brutal murder of Emmett Till would have unleashed so much controversy. In him, he condemned at the hands of a White mob, but he also blamed Till for the alleged incident that led to his death: whistling Carolyn Bryant, Roy Bryant’s wife, in a grocery store.
After the publication of his work, centers for helping victims of violations throughout the United States were opened, the probative norms in the courts were modified to reduce obstacles in the prosecution of the rapists and laws were developed to typify as a crime the violation within the marriage.
After the publication of the book, Brownmiller was appointed one of the people of the year by the magazine Time. In 1995, the New York Public Library selected Against our will as
Steinem would criticize Brownmiller for the comments he made during an interview in 2015 with the magazine New York, When Brownmiller said that a way that women avoid being attacked was not to get drunk, with it blaming the victims themselves.
At the end of the 1970s, Brownmiller helped to found the New York section of women against pornography, along with other women, including Gloria Steinem and the poet Adrienne Rich. But they disagreed on how to answer. Brownmiller wrote an influential essay, Let’s put pornography again in the closet, in which he refuted the arguments that pornography was protected by freedom of expression enshrined in the first amendment. However, he opposed his prohibition, since he believed that the best way to fight it was through education and protests.
In the 1980s, Brownmiller moved away from activism and focused on her role as a writer and teaching at the Pace University of New York. Among his works stands out in which he analyzed the ways in which women were expected to conform to the canons of appearance and behavior. He also published a novel, based on the media trial of lawyer Joel Steinberg, sentenced in 1987 for involuntary homicide for the death of his six -year -old daughter Lisa, who had been illegally adopted. Brownmiller also published a book about Vietnam and, in 1999, an autobiography entitled (In our time: memory of a revolution), focused on the boom of the feminist movement of which he was the protagonist.
