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Pioneering Feminist Author and Activist Dies at 90

Susan Brownmiller’s book “Against Our Will” helped define rape as a crime.

American feminist journalist, activist, and author Susan Brownmiller passed away on Saturday at 90. Author Alix Kates Shulman, a close friend of Brownmiller’s, said that she died in a hospital in the Bronx due to complications from a long-standing illness. Born in Brooklyn and educated at Cornell, Brownmiller returned to New York City with what she once described as a “very mistaken ambition” to become a Broadway actor before redirecting her focus toward activism. She was best known for her controversial 1975 book Against Our Will, which helped define rape as a crime and not an act of passion. At the time, in a New York Times Book Review, lawyer Mary Ellen Gale called the book “the most rigorous and provocative piece of scholarship that has yet emerged from the feminist movement.” Yet Brownmiller’s tome was also criticized by people both on the left and the right, with many calling it “anti-man.” Prominent academic and activist Angela Davis said that Brownmiller’s book was “pervaded with racist ideas,” in particular a chapter in which she condemned Emmett Till’s death, while also claiming he was at fault. Emily Jane Goodman, a retired New York State Supreme Court justice and friend of Brownmiller’s, said that she “was an active feminist, she was not one to just agree with the popular issue of the day.”