Special: Brownmiller's Back

Past & Present: An Interview with Susan Brownmiller.

Contents

• A Sense of Urgency
• Demystifying a "Movement"
• Controversy over a "Natural, Biological" Theory of Rape
• The Death of Feminism?
• The Rebirth of Feminism?
• Feminist Events of the 1990s
• "Victim Feminism?"
• Brownmiller's Greatest Contribution
• Talkback

Listen to the interview in RealAudio.   [On some systems, buffering of this file before beginning playback may take a minute or so.]

Sungaila: [It is February 21, 2000, Presidents' Day and this is M.C. Sungaila.  I am in Orange County, California, where I am] speaking [by telephone] with Susan Brownmiller, who is in New York City. 

Ms. Brownmiller, welcome and thank you for agreeing to participate in this interview for Books-on-Law.  In particular, thank you for agreeing to have this interview recorded and stored on our website.  It is a delight and an honor to speak with you, and to discuss your latest book, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, a history of the Women's Liberation Movement in America from the 1960s to the early 1980s.

Sungaila: In the book's introduction, you state: "I set out to write this memoir with a sense of urgency because I could see that much of the movement's story had already been lost or distorted."  Distorted by whom?  And why did you feel it was so urgent to set the record straight?

Brownmiller: Well, first of all, people were already dying.  So there was an urgency in getting to the principals.  That was part of the urgency.  I was shocked that, during the course of writing the book, three people I interviewed died a year or so later.  And they were not old.  I mean, we're not talking about people in their 80s.

Who distorted it?  In the heat of a political campaign (and the Women's Liberation Movement was one long political campaign), things are never truly understood.  Not everyone has the full picture.  In New York, I didn't have the full picture on abortion that I have now.  I didn't know about those Chicago women who were actually doing abortions themselves.  I didn't know that.  Back then, they weren't talking about it.  It was a secret thing, you know.  So, even I, who had followed the national movement relatively closely, learned so much in the course of researching my own book.  So the fact that we didn't know what was going on everywhere else led to distortions.

Afterward, the distortions come because the new people who try to write about it don't have all the facts.  Sometimes they have axes to grind, sometimes they just get it wrong.  And then, of course, there is always the tendency for a later generation to feel uncomfortable with the activism of a previous generation and to tend to dismiss it.  That's one of the biggest problems, particularly in America, because we are not an ideological country that respects radical activism.  We just tend to think that all of the benefits we have today were just given to us, or a couple of lawmakers decided to give us social security or give us unemployment insurance compensation, things like that.  They don't know, I believe, that all serious political changes stem from radical movements for social change.

All my answers will not be that long.

Sungaila: That's OK.  Sometimes I see a tendency in young women, in particular, to take for granted some of the achievements of the women's movement and really not to know that life was quite different for women thirty, forty years ago.

Brownmiller: Absolutely.  It's impossible for young people to have any idea what it was like to search for a competent abortion practitioner in times when abortions were illegal.  They cannot know this.  They can never know it on a gut, emotional level.  That's just one example.

Sungaila: One of the things your book does is reveal that change, and in particular that you, even as you were participating in the movement, did not know about these wildfires of activism spreading throughout the country.  And the one thing this [book] does is pull together all of those narratives.  To talk about a "movement" is somewhat intimidating, and to think of replicating a movement, especially one that was so effective, is somewhat intimidating.

Brownmiller: It's daunting, yes.  I don't know how people will start a movement again.  But they will, when they're ready to.  They will.

Sungaila: Yes, one of the things that was striking in the book was to see how it was basically a collection of individual action by women throughout  the country.  And that to me seemed to demystify a "movement," if you put quotes around movement – that it's possible, if you have enough individual action, to have collective action that results in a movement.  That is somewhat inspiring, I think, for the next wave of feminism.

Brownmiller: Well, first of all, I don't think our movement would have accomplished anything if it were just restricted to a few people with some insights writing a book.  I go to great lengths in my chapter on rape to give the movement credit, and to give credit to the national movement.  It wasn't simply that I was sitting in New York and heard some women in a consciousness-raising group talk about rape, and then sat down for five years and wrote Against Our Will.  All over the country, people had arrived at that same insight about rape and were taking steps to change the law.

Sungaila: I noticed what appears to be a trend in the publishing world, at least right now.  There have been a number of biographies of movement leaders like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and other feminist memoirs, in addition to yours that have been published. (I'm thinking of the Feminist Memoir Project and Ruth Rosen's history that just came out this month.)  Is that a trend?

Brownmiller: I hope so!

Sungaila: And why is feminism sort of "hot" in the publishing world again?

Brownmiller: It isn't, it isn't.  It isn't hot at all.  It's so cute.  I haven't read Ruth's book yet, I'm dying to read it, I am sure I will love it.  But she and I both feel that the movement story is far more important than a biography of one individual.  And we both feel (I think I can speak for her) that we really wished that the people who wrote biographies of the individuals had had the benefit of reading our books first, because without that they fall into the quite understandable mistake of attributing too much to an individual instead of attributing it to the mass movement.

But I will tell you that Ruth told me that her editor said to her that there's no point in being competitive with Susan, so two books will come out, neither of your books will get on the Bestseller List, this isn't the time, people don't want to revisit this issue.  My editor said, too, there's no interest out there in a history of the women's movement.  That's what the salesman said to her.  Of course, the salesman, being male (still, right, after all these years, the salesmen in the big publishing houses are still predominately male), that might've been their opinion.  But it would certainly influence how hard they pitched the book or books (including Ruth's here) to the stores.

Sungaila: But your book has gotten a lot of attention.  It's been reviewed in several papers, Book-of-the-Month Club. [See, e.g., Laura Miller, Book Review, New York Times, December 19, 1999, sec. 7, p. 24; Susie Linfield, Book Review, Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1999, Pt. E, p. 3]

Brownmiller: Well, I had the reputation of Against Our Will preceding me.  So I  think a lot of reviewers did want to see what I'd make of the history of women's liberation, you know, so that was an advantage for me.  But I'm still burning because I didn't get a New York Times daily review.  How could the daily reviewers not think that this was an important book?  But someone, you know, all three of them must have made the decision.

Sungaila: Speaking of controversy surrounding rape theory and the like, and Against Our Will (Simon & Schuster, 1975), there was actually a story in the L.A. Times this Sunday [Martin Miller, "Rape," Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2000, Pt. E, p. 1].  I'm referring to this debate over Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer's new book, A Natural History of Rape. Now, how did that book gain so much attention?

Brownmiller: That's an awfully interesting question.  I ask myself that every day as I participate in the media coverage, in this little media frenzy. [See, e.g., Dan Vergano, "'Natural, biological' theory of rape creates instant storm," USA Today, January 18, 2000, sec. D, p. 8.] I asked the guy from USA Today (he called after the first two or three stories had appeared) and he seemed to be laughing about the book and the Thornhill hypothesis.  I said, "Then why are you doing it?  If it doesn't make sense to you, it doesn't make sense to all these other journalists who are calling, why are you giving it so much attention."  He said that, well, it's the state of the newspaper and magazine business today.  And the combination of rape, sex, and science, and arguments with feminists is just too intriguing not to do as a news story.  I've gotten calls from The Guardian in London, BBC World News service, and the Zeit in Berlin (of course the reporter is based in New York), so it's an international story.  But it's sort of silly season in the media.  That's what I think.

Sungaila: That's really amazing.  Now, their theory is that rape is natural and it's primarily about sex and propagation, not about violence and humiliation as you documented in Against Our Will.  Scientists, as well as feminists and lawyers, have primarily come out against this particular book, both on the theoretical bases as well as the danger it poses to current rape theory.  So, it seems to have gotten a lot of attention; but, on the other hand, is it encouraging that most people have criticized it?

Brownmiller: Oh, definitely.  I think we've destroyed Thornhill [and his theories].  I really do.  I have made so many new friends in the course of this, with some evolutionary biologists who certainly don't buy his theory.  And we've been e-mailing like crazy, and it's been a lot of fun. (Laughs heartily)  I've been talking to Sarah Heardy, Patty Gowaty, on e-mail, and Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago, who has taken on most of the arguments against Thornhill from an evolutionary biological perspective.  And it's been very stimulating and invigorating for all of us to meet each other online – you know, the power of the Internet!  Its great!  And then Mary Koss, who was quoted in the original story by Erica Goode [New York Times, January 15, 2000, sec. B, p. 9], she turns out to be probably the leading expert in rape prevention today.  And here I am in New York; she's in Tucson, and I didn't even know of her work, which is my failure.  But she put a long rebuttal online.  It's going to appear in an academic journal ultimately, but she wants to get that information out online as soon as possible.  So, I think the effect has been very positive all around for us.

Sungaila: Both in terms of getting to know each other and to work further and discuss theories amongst yourselves?

Brownmiller: Oh absolutely.  It's just thrilling.  I mean, Patty Gowaty e-mailed me this morning with her new hypothesis on forced copulation in ducks.  It's very nice to hear about that, and what strategies female ducks take to avoid these aggressive males.

Now this is really complicated, but I've been chewing on this for a couple of days.  FAIR, which is one of these media watchdog groups online, wrote a little something saying [essentially] "what a pity that the debate has pitted scientists against feminists; surely it should be scientists against scientists."  And I resent that interpretation a lot.  You don't have to be a scientist to understand what a tautology is, this is a concept in logic.  The Thornhill book is simply filled with tautologies.  He says, "If A is true, then B must be true.  Ah, but A is true, so B must be true."  I can think of a thousand reasons why A is true, and it has nothing to do with why B may or may not be true.

Sungaila: Its logic, a lesson in logic.

Brownmiller: Yes, its logic.  It's a lesson in logic.  Now scientists, of course, talk of it in terms of hypotheses, not tautologies, but they come to the same conclusion: that a hypothesis, to stand up, must be airtight; there can't be alternative possibilities.  So, we're all arriving at the same conclusion.  And also, . . .[in this area Thornhill is a] so-called scientist.  I mean, he got his tenure studying scorpion flies, not studying rape.  I wouldn't question his observation on scorpion flies, because I've never seen a scorpion fly mate, consensually or in a forced situation.  But, he gets into the human studies on rape, particularly Chapter 4 where he talks about the victims of rape and uses an old study, a 1974 study that was reprinted in 1979, and he gathers the data from this study, throws it through his computer again and again to try to come up with results that support his hypothesis that victims of rape who are of reproductive age suffer more keenly than child victims or post-reproductive women.  This, to him, proves his whole hypothesis.  And it's not true.  He seems to have fudged the results to get this conclusion.  There is no evidence that women of reproductive age suffer more emotional trauma from rape.  None. It's not there.  You don't have to be a scientist to see the holes.

Sungaila: As we mentioned earlier, at least one of the salutary effects of this incendiary book is that it has gotten various theorists on the other side talking again. Now, that leads to another question. It has become quite popular in recent years for the press to declare feminism dead (I'm thinking of the Time magazine cover), and to assert that we proudly live in a post-feminist age, the implication being that feminism is irrelevant now.  Is feminism dead, and how are the movement theories and ideals still relevant today?

Brownmiller: Organized feminism as a very popular movement is certainly on hold.  It certainly is not what it [was] in the 70s.  Of course, the ideas and the values continue.  But, so many of our ideals are non-controversial, received information for younger women, so that I can almost forgive them for not getting excited about it anymore.  I mean, you had to have been there, in the 70s, in a consciousness-raising group, when we were coming upon our own original insights, to just know what that excitement was all about.  And it's sort of "ho-hum" to the young people, because they just accept our insights; they don't know how, for us, it was revelation thirty years ago.

Also, there was a review in Mirabella of my book that put something in perspective for me.  [The reviewer] said, "Oh, for those juicy targets of the 70s."  And its true, we had a lot of juicy targets that now everyone has targeted – like rape, like battery, like the sexual abuse of children, like sexual harassment.  We made them into issues, and once that job has been done they're no longer such juicy targets, even though the problem remains.

Sungaila: It seems that as discrimination becomes more subtle, and gender inequality is not as clear, without the juicy targets as you mentioned, the job of a movement is much more difficult.  And it's also more difficult to get people exercised.

Brownmiller: Yes.  Yes it is.  How many times can you point to the disparity between the income of males and females doing the same work?  And radical feminists are not going to fight hard to break the glass ceiling, because that is a very rarified concern on the part of a handful of female executives; and, while we sympathize with them, they can't expect too much help from us.  We're more concerned, as we always were, with the disparity of income between the rich and the poor.

Sungaila: Right. The feminization of poverty.

Brownmiller: And it's getting worse.

Sungaila: One of the things you mention in your book is the media's anointment of "famous feminists" to speak for the entire movement.  It seems that recently the media has crowned so-called "conservative feminists," like Katie Roiphe and Christina Hoff Summers and Cathy Young, as the "new voice" for feminism.

Brownmiller: Also, they're trying to do the same thing with Arianna Huffington and Laura Ingraham.

Sungaila: There always seems to be another one coming [along].

Brownmiller: And Naomi Wolf, because she's got great hair.

Sungaila: In this ornamental culture, which is Susan Faludi's term, that is an important thing: to look good on television.

Brownmiller: Yes. But I understood it.  I mean, I hope I made it clear in my book that I understand the media's need to have one icon, because that's how the instant media tells stories: through one iconographic figure.  And they always like to go to the expert or the most famous person for a quote.  But, as I do say in the book, it had a very dispiriting effect on others who were doing the original work.

Sungaila: Right. It takes a village to make change like that, not just one person.

Brownmiller: I remember one particular time.  I was on the road, still talking about rape.  It must have been around 1977, and a radio reporter, a young woman who had gotten her job through our movement, right, shoved a microphone at me and said, "Alright, you're talking about rape, and now Gloria Steinem has raised the issue of battery, what do you have to say about that?"  I thought, I could say lots of things about that.  I could say there's a whole movement that has raised this whole issue of battery, I know Gloria is speaking up now, but she was not an originator of it, but I'm so happy she is speaking up and why are you pitting rape against battery anyway.  But I couldn't say all that, it was a radio reporter who wanted a sound-bite, so I said, "battery is an important issue too."  End of quote.

Sungaila: Yes, sound-bites are important.  Now, around which issues do you think feminism has the best chance of being reborn?  Abortion?  Violence against women?  The Violence Against Women Act and abortion are both significant issues before the U.S. Supreme Court this Term.

Brownmiller: I think those are the issues.  There was an amazing mobilization by people in NOW and other end-violence groups against Thornhill.  It gave them a fresh incentive.  Now, people in the gay movement also say that their movement had gone into stasis until Anita Bryant stepped forward, and rising up against her was a great impetus for them.

Sungaila: So Thornhill might be of great assistance, then?

Brownmiller: Well, it's possible.  He certainly got a lot of people heated-up.

Sungaila: And put it in the popular press, too.

Brownmiller: And then, these women who are struggling at the rape crisis centers and struggling to remind people that we still don't get enough convictions on rape when the cases come to trial, it made them realize that there was still something very vital to talk about.

Sungaila: Yes, you always have to be very vigilant about not letting your gains slip as well.

Brownmiller: Yup.

Sungaila: And sometimes we take for granted, as you said, theories like yours in very influential books that people just come to accept as gospel now, and when someone questions that, you start to get concerned and not be as complacent.

Borwnmiller: Particularly when some men who were hostile to feminist theory to begin with start saying, as they said to me . . . I got three e-mails after I was on a National Public Radio program, three e-mails from men unknown to me, saying, "Ms. Brownmiller, you're too emotional, you should respect the words of science."  There will always be people who say "Science, this is undebatable," without even questioning the science.  So I worry, or I began to worry.  I'm not so worried anymore, I was worried last month when the Thornhill story first broke, that this would be the chance for men to reclaim the rape dialogue for themselves in the name of science, and shut women out of it.  "Women, you're just emotional feminists; we need to talk and listen to the scientists."

Sungaila: When, in fact, it's been the opposite.

Brownmiller: Yes, it seems to . . . well, that's because it's a lousy science.  And rape is a social science.  I mean, you can study a scorpion fly and call that science, but when you get into human beings and their many variables you can't, really, not that way.

Sungaila: It's interesting that you note you really can get quite a rise out of people when you either espouse feminist theory or mention that dirty little word "Feminism."  It's interesting also that feminism can still be a dirty word, even for those who have benefited from it. I'm thinking of one example: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is one of the biggest pop-culture feminist shows on television.  The creator of that show actually admitted in Ms magazine that his vision of a petite blonde teen vanquisher of demons was influenced by feminist film theory.  That's what he meant, he meant to create a role model for young girls.  But the actress who plays Buffy the Vampire Slayer said in an interview that she's not a feminist, and in fact I think she [was quoted as saying]: "I hate the word feminist.  It has a bad connotation of women who don't shave their legs or under their arms.  I prefer girl power to feminism because girl power still has an ounce of femininity to it."  How do you react to comments like that, and do you think your book will change perceptions like that?

Brownmiller: Probably not.  I think women are so terrified of being considered unfeminine.  I did write a book called Femininity (1985) just to address this question.  There's nothing more scary than to be called unfeminine, and certainly some of the very serious issues that feminists were raising in the 60s and 70s, like not shaving under our arms and legs, frightened a lot of women who had invested their femininity in such actions as shaving away this hair that the feminine aesthetic said shouldn't be there.  So, I guess this actress is particularly affected by that; maybe she has particularly hairy legs and has to wipe away that offending hair every day.

Sungaila: I think it's interesting when someone who has benefited from [feminism], almost unconsciously, can feel that way.  In your book, some of the most recent events that you cover include the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings and the US Supreme Court's 1998 decision in Oncale, extending sexual protections to same-sex harassment.  But, there are a lot of events in the 1990s that aren't included, like the work of Susan Faludi and the Supreme Court's expansion of sexual harassment protections, including student-on-student harassment, and even really explicitly the Violence Against Women Act.  Is there a reason those aren't included or mentioned?

Brownmiller: I felt that a canvass of thirty years was sufficient.  That was one reason.  Another reason is I really disagree with Faludi's theory in Backlash (1991), because I don't think it was the media that turned against feminism.  I think the media reflected a popular turn-off in society against feminism.

Sungaila: So it's a chicken-or-egg theory, which one came first, and you disagree over which one came first.

Brownmiller: I happen to disagree with Faludi.  I don't think it was a conscious media backlash.  I just think that everyone was saying: "Enough already, I can't bear this, the male-female hostility anymore, let's just go back to our lives, try to make our relationships better."  The Violence Against Women Act certainly does provide the funds for the battered women's shelters.  Well, I'm not so sure what effect it's had, except that it does fund the battered women's shelters.  So that's important.  And, as you say, it's currently under debate again.

Sungaila: Yes, at least the civil rights provision with the damages remedy certainly is.  The components you mention about the funding and the criminal law aspects of it have been affirmed; so there are portions of it that are not questioned anymore.  But the civil rights remedy, the remedy that is most symbolic, that gives women the power to confront their attacker in court without having to rely on the state to bring a prosecution, that's the one that's currently at issue.

Brownmiller: And has it been used?

Sungaila: Yes, it's been used, I would say primarily in test cases.  But it's been used across the country.  It takes a lot of courage to use that, as well [especially while the constitutionality of the statute is in question], and some people aren't willing to do that.  But it's still an option, it's another option for someone to take control of a horrific event.

Sungaila: In fact, that raises something else.  One of the criticisms of feminism (and it's a point you mention in the book) is [that we have] "victim feminism," that feminism paints women as victims who are helpless.  How did that perception come about, and is that true?

Brownmiller: Well, I blame that on the media.  That's not what we were doing at all.  We were trying to train the spotlight on male aggression.  But that's harder, that's much harder, to keep in the public mind.  I remember once, waiting in the wings to come out on a daytime television show, and the host said, " Now lets give her a warm welcome, Susan Brownmiller and her new book: Against Our Will: Women and Rape."  I said, "Hold on: 'Men, Women and Rape."

I think the media found the angle of the victim easier to cope with than the angle of the male aggressor.  And it fit in, of course, with all of these daytime television shows; and people appearing on these shows to tell their awful stories in every area of their lives became the staple.  But that's not what we were doing.  We were analyzing male behavior.  The creation of the rape crisis centers, which was the first big victim-focused phenomenon in the women's movement, was a brilliant strategy, but the idea was not simply to offer counseling services to victims, it was to tell the world and tell the people in every city we need a crisis center because of that male aggression out there.

Sungaila: And that point got lost.

Brownmiller: It certainly did.  And the same thing happened with the battered women [movement].  I guess victim services is just a lot easier to grab hold of than countering criminal acts by men.

I really should say that certainly [occurred] on the college campuses where the victim idea, I think, got out of hand; because if they're talking about rape, they are talking mostly about date rape, and of course that's what Katie Roiphe latched on to.  But date rape should never be the tail that's wagging the dog.  The main problem in rape is violent forceful rape by strangers and also perhaps by acquaintances, and acquaintances are people that you've met five minutes before in a bar, or marital rape, things like that.  It's always a little less clear if it's two people on a date on a college campus.  And I think that probably there were some women on college campuses who were more eager to make date rape, which was their personal experience, the main focus.

Sungaila: There was an article in the Dayton, Ohio paper at the end of January all about the increase in false reports of rape.[Lou Grieco, "False Rape Claims Trouble Investigators," Dayton Daily News, January 30, 2000, sec. A, p. 1] They had interviews with police talking about some of the reasons why these false reports would occur, and some people said, "Well, some girls don't want their parents to know they were out late with their boyfriends, so they fake this rape claim."  It's inconceivable that this is a widespread trend, and yet it's news, to highlight these false rape reports.

Brownmiller: Yes. I know.  I have been dogged again, by very young men on the Net.  I've gotten e-mails from young men who've said, "You don't deal with these false reports."  Yes, it's very comforting for men to think that rape is really a whole lot of false reports.

Sungaila: Things like that, those kind of stories, the Thornhill book, are dangerous.

Brownmiller: Yes.

Sungaila: It shocked me that there was this whole article spent on this particular angle.

Brownmiller: Which was, of course, the angle before feminism.

Sungaila: Right, exactly.  So, it's very discomforting.

Sungaila: Now, between Against Our Will and the current book [and other works], in your view what is your greatest contribution, the contribution of which you are most proud, to the women's movement and to gender equality?

Brownmiller: Of course, Against Our Will.  I had this moment of, "What do I do with the rest of my life?," after it was published. It wasn't a moment, it lasted for a few years.  Because I felt that I was so lucky in being in on this great movement discovery that rape was a crime of violence, not a crime of male lust and false reports and fantasies, which was what the dominant Freudian theory had held just before the women's movement.  I knew I was perfectly positioned to write the book on rape because I had been a journalist for ten years, so I had the writing and research skills.  But, I also know that opportunities like this don't come up twice in a lifetime. The women's movement discovered something about rape, and I was there to enlarge that discovery, but that kind of lightning, that kind of combination of circumstances, just doesn't come up twice in one person's lifetime.

So, I had to say to myself, "Well, alright, now I have done it, but the mind goes on, the writing life goes on, the need to earn a living goes on, everything else goes on.  So, I have to continue to find things that I have opinions about, and insights about, and write about them."  But, at least two reviewers of In Our Time said, and I'm quoting just one of them: "This book doesn't pack that kind of wallop" of Against Our Will.  Well, how could it possibly?  So, it has a negative effect on the way my work is perceived afterward, you know, since.

Sungaila: After you've hit a home run.

Brownmiller: Right. Every time you step up to the plate.

Sungaila: On the other hand, In Our Time could be viewed as an extended consciousness-raising for the next generation, and it has components that could jump-start the next wave of feminism.  Would you like that?

Brownmiller: I'd love it.  I'd love it.  Because I believe what Santayana said, that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.  I want the new generation of feminists not to make some of the same mistakes in terms of organization and jealousy and competition that we made.

Sungaila: Feminism has had a history of coming forth, going into a time of stasis, and then coming back with a vengeance, so it's highly possible.  And this really could be a catalyst in that [way.]  So, we shall see.

Brownmiller: We shall hope so, and keep our fingers crossed.

Sungaila: Well, thank you so much for this interview, and taking the time to discuss all of your theories.  We really appreciate it.

Brownmiller: And thank you, M.C., it was a really wonderful hour for me.

Sungaila: Thank you.

Editors' Note: Susan Brownmiller recently published a critical review of Randy Thornhill & Craig T. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (MIT Press, 2000), the book that she discusses in her interview.

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© Ronald K.L. Collins and David Skover, 2000.