Rough Transcript

Season 2: Episode 6

Against Our Will

Hosts: Gillian Frank & Lauren Gutterman

Guests and Additional Audio: Susan Brownmiller, Police Detective 1, Police Detective 2, Show Host, Male Salesperson, Moral Maturity Woman, NBC Interviewer, Rape Survivor, NBC News Anchor, Maxine Madler, Male Harasser, Nobody’s Victim Narrator, Member of NY Radical Feminists 1, Member of NY Radical Feminists 2, Interviewer, Woman 1, Woman 2, Woman 3

Show Host: And now, a word from our sponsor.

Male Salesperson: When were two people ever so sure they were just born to live with each other? We can’t fail to find happiness together in this wonderful world of today and tomorrow.

[Melancholy Piano Plays in the Background]

Woman 1: At six months after college I got married and a year and a half, two years later, I had children and lived a very married life. And when my children got into school and into public school, I became active in the public schools. I got active in the PTA and ran the book sale, became the president, and all that and then met a woman and her family and we became very close. We would spend weekends out at Fire Isle and then we’d come out weekends and then we’d spend the week together. And in the course of the week when the husbands weren’t there, I kind of came on to her. And she said no, she’d been married, she’d done that and didn’t want to jeopardize her marriage. And I just tucked it back under, and I tucked it back under for probably another ten years.

Gillian Frank: It’s easy to imagine the 1950s and 1960s as a closeted era. A lonely era. An era when women who desired other women suffered silently in heterosexual marriages.

Woman 2: You know, my whole family had always been very traditional, it was a long marriage too, and I felt that I owed that to my husband and we did have two children. My mother had soldiered on through difficult times, her mother had soldiered on. I thought that was how one carried the flag for womanhood, you had to do these things, but it was bewildering. 

Gillian Frank: In the decades after World War II, some married women had passionate sexual and romantic relationships with other women. They found each other in suburban neighborhoods, in urban apartment buildings, at church retreats, and at PTA meetings. Some of these women rightly feared that their husbands would discover their relationship, yet far more often husbands turned a blind eye to their wife’s affairs, choosing to keep up appearances rather than face the stigma of divorce. In her groundbreaking new book, Her Neighbors Wife, sexing history co-host Lauren Gutterman uncovers this hidden history of lesbian desire within marriage. Her Neighbors Wife shares the stories of hundreds of women who balanced marriage and same-sex desire in the decades following World War II. Each chapter offers a fascinating look at a world in which traditional marriage allowed for lesbian desire to exist and sometimes to thrive.

Woman 3: She touched my shoulder with her tongue, lying next to me, remembering the move in, laughing [inaudible], she touched me so gently along my leg. Kissed me. It was wonderful.

Gillian Frank: Published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, Her Neighbors Wife is available for pre-order on www.sexinghistory.com.

Her Neighbors Wife by Lauren Gutterman order your copy today!

Show Host: Now back to our program!

Police Detective 1: It can happen anywhere. It doesn’t necessarily have to be this kind of neighborhood, it could be downtown, it could be in the financial district, it could be out in strictly a residential area. Anyone, anywhere, they could be the target of a rapist. What you must do is be aware of where you are, be aware of who you’re with, the whole circumstances, your whole environment, just totally be aware.

Police Detective 2: A sex offender today has a greater number of available women to choose from. There are more working women, single women living alone not with their families or with men, she has the means and ability to go anywhere any time. Because of the mobility and the visibility of today’s women, she must learn to understand the rapist, most of the cases that come across our desk are textbook in its nature. The type of assault is consistent with those assaults we’ve seen in the past, for today’s woman to learn to understand the rapist, she’s got to learn to understand the man.

Lauren Gutterman: The audio you just heard came from a 1973 documentary film about rape, in which police detectives and sexual assault survivors talked about how women could learn to protect themselves from violent predators. This film reflects how, in the 1960s and early 1970s, many Americans portrayed rape as a rare and violent act perpetrated by outsiders and sociopaths.

During these same years, popular culture—from Hollywood movies to dating advice literature—taught men that women needed to be tricked or coerced into sex. Many men learned that overcoming or ignoring women’s objections was part and parcel of virile, healthy masculinity.

For example, the psychologist Dr. Albert Ellis advised readers that foreplay should make it impossible for a woman to say no to sex. In his 1963 best-seller, Sex and the Single Man, he told men to dominate women: “Show her that you are determined to have her as nude as possible, even though you are not literally going to rip the clothes off her back and begin to rape her.”

Gillian Frank: Popular advice to women about heterosexual sex, however, was filled with contradictions. Dating advice literature told girls that it was their job to politely set boundaries with sexually aggressive boys. We can see this in a 1951 film made for high schoolers called: “How to say no: Moral Maturity.”

Moral Maturity Woman: What about the problem of boys? Their hands, you know. I’ve run in to problems like this a lot, we get home from a date and it’s still early enough to stay outside for a while to talk. Some talk, it’s a funny thing, this boy is probably being good company on the date, but just give him half the chance alone and there’s no stopping him.

Gillian Frank: A decade and a half later, author Evelyn Bourne had this advice for women in her 1965 advice book, “Anatomy of a Love Affair:”

“If you can’t talk yourself out of his pass, try crying. Only a beast can resist a woman’s tears. And if he’s a beast, relax and enjoy it. All it means is you’ll be seduced a few days or weeks earlier than you had intended. And since you had planned to be anyway, don’t quibble.”

Lauren Gutterman: The combined effect of this advice was to make male sexual aggression seem natural and predetermined. The normalization of male sexual aggressiveness both promoted and obscured the routine sexual violence that men perpetrated against women. What’s more, men seldom faced legal or social consequences for sexual harassment or assault.

Feminists of the 1960s and 1970s made the defense of women from sexual aggression a cornerstone of their activism. As these activists developed a critique of patriarchy, they began to analyze the causes and effects of sexual violence.

Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book, Against Our Will, played an outsized role in popularizing and crystallizing these feminist conversations. In extensive detail, and across 472 pages, Brownmiller underlined that rape was neither the deranged act of a pathological individual nor the natural outcome of men’s biological drives. Rather, Against Our Will showed sexual violence to be a systemic, pervasive, and culturally sanctioned act of power and intimidation. In Brownmiller’s memorable formulation, rape was “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”

Gillian Frank: By contextualizing rape in these ways, Brownmiller offered readers a framework for naming sexual violence as a mechanism of patriarchy, and for challenging the practices and institutions that supported male sexual violence against women. Against Our Will, in other words, became a tool of mass consciousness raising and women’s resistance. The book quickly became a touchstone for how Americans thought and still think about sexual violence.

Importantly, Susan Brownmiller framed Against Our Will as a work of historical scholarship. She traced the importance of rape from the prehistoric era, when men discovered that sexual violence could be used to enforce women’s subordination, to Brownmiller’s present. For Brownmiller, historicizing rape was vital to combatting it. Or, as she put it, “accepting the history of rape is the first step toward denying rape a future.”

Lauren Gutterman: At a moment when #MeToo and #TimesUp have brought about yet another national reckoning with sexual violence and male power, Brownmiller’s book, its legacy, and the contexts that produced the anti-rape movement of the 1970s demand re-examination. The questions she raised about how sexual violence becomes institutionalized and perpetrated are as urgent now as they were over four decades ago. At the same time, new modes of thinking are needed to analyze and challenge what we now call rape culture.

I’m Lauren Gutterman

Gillian Frank: And I’m Gillian Frank. Welcome to Sexing History

Lauren Gutterman: In the decades after WWII, few people openly acknowledged that women could be raped by their friends, family members, boyfriends or spouses. Feminists had not yet coined the term “date rape.” And every state in the union had a “marital rape exception” that prevented husbands from being held criminally responsible for raping their wives.

Judges, lawyers and police routinely dismissed and degraded women who reported being raped. They questioned these women about their sexual histories, the clothes they were wearing at the time of their attack, and their reasons for being alone with their attackers. Here’s a clip from an NBC Evening News report from 1974.

NBC Interviewer: Which was worse for you: being raped or what happened afterwards?

Rape Survivor: What happened afterwards. I just immediately come back to that sergeant asking me if I liked it. And that face he had and screaming and yelling at me and throwing the bible at me and asking me, you know, “Why is it you couldn’t throw off a 189-pound man?”

NBC News Anchor: In the court room, the girl was questioned by the district attorney. Then the public defender tried to refute her story. The judge kept telling the girl that she had to tell everything, so in a small voice she did, about how she was grabbed only a few feet away from her apartment, about how she was too frightened to scream, and about what the defendant, who stood nearby in the courtroom, did to her.

After a first hearing, a trial date is set and the girl, like other victims of rape, will have to tell her story again and again.

Lauren Gutterman: Psychiatrists also said that women secretly wanted to be raped and they often accused rape victims of inviting their assaults. Many Americans readily believed that women who accused men of rape were lying, either to cover up consensual relationships or to get back at their boyfriends. Here’s Maxine Madler, who was a District Attorney in San Francisco in the early 1970s:

Maxine Madler: I do think that the victim in a rape case often does feel like she is the defendant instead of the defendant himself. One of the reasons for this is that the law historically has allowed the woman to be examined, sometimes in great detail, as to her prior sexual, psychological, and social history. Now there are not any other crimes, where such an examination is generally allowed. Whereas in rape prosecution, the woman is almost considered to be untruthful from the start unless and must prove her truthfulness in her testimony. In a charge of rape, the judge is required under the law to instruct the jury that this is an easy charge to bring and hard to disprove even if the defendant is innocent, and therefore he instructs the jurors to regard the victim’s testimony with caution. It’s almost like saying, “Be careful of what she’s saying, she may not be telling the truth, because this is a rape case.” Now this does not occur in any other type of crime.

Gillian Frank: American racism produced a devastating exception to the widespread disbelief of women who reported being raped. When white women accused black men of sexual assault, local police forces and white community members often quickly retaliated. Racist stereotypes likewise made black women particularly vulnerable to assault and less likely to receive sympathy or justice from police or attorneys. Faced with this pervasive opposition, few women at the time pressed charges against their attackers.

It was against these oppressive contexts that Susan Brownmiller came to write Against Our Will. Brownmiller published Against Our Will in the midst of a capacious conversation among feminists about the politics of sexual violence. And she wrote her opus in the wake of widespread organizing by women of color, who had long identified sexual violence as integral to maintaining white supremacy.

Brownmiller, like other second wave feminists believed that she was among the first cohort to collectively organize against rape. Few popular publications had chronicled women’s longstanding activism against sexual violence. White feminists had rarely heard about or even remembered black women's important battles against sexual violence and white supremacy during the civil rights era.

Instead, second wave feminists drew from their immediate and collective experiences to think systemically about sexual violence. Their perspective on rape emerged from their commitment to examining and politicizing aspects of women’s everyday experiences that had previously seemed normal, natural, and apolitical.

Lauren Gutterman: In small consciousness-raising groups, women discussed once-shameful topics. They explored the violence and disrespect that they encountered from boyfriends and husbands and family members. They thought about the reasons they were dissatisfied with many heterosexual experiences. They also talked about the daily sexual aggression they encountered on the streets and in the workplace, from catcalls, to unwanted touching, to indecent exposure. And feminists began to recognize that these experiences were not individual or isolated but part of pervasive and broader cultural patterns. The 1972 documentary, Nobody’s Victim showed the prevalence of these experiences:

Male Harasser: I’m not going to hurt you, don’t be unfriendly!

[Man Continues in Background]

Nobody’s Victim Narrator: If somebody bothers you in a public place, ignore him. If he persists, tell him to leave him along and tell him in a good loud voice. If you show anger, he’ll probably stop bothering you. If this doesn’t work, walk towards other people and away from places where you might get cornered.

[Road Ambience Plays] If you have to walk alone at night, stay out in the open, near light and people. Avoid areas where assailants might hide, like shrubbery, dark doorways, and between parked cars. If someone harasses you from a moving car, simply turn and walk the other way [Tire Screech]. If the person is consistent or obscene, write down the license number and report it to the police.

Lauren Gutterman: Women also began to reckon with sexual violence in the pages of feminist publications. Feminist newspapers published a series of path-setting articles in the early 1970s, in which women analyzed their sexual assaults alongside their treatment from police, medical providers, and their partners. They revealed the traumatic long-term consequences that sexual assault had on many aspects of their lives.

Feminist authors such as Barbara Merhof, Pamela Kearon, and Susan Griffin contributed to this burgeoning conversation. They framed rape as a learned behavior that maintained gender inequality by terrorizing women into subordination.

These authors also drew attention to the pervasive messages that told women it was their job to anticipate and adapt to men’s sexually predatory behavior. Such insights circulated widely among feminist activists and would later appear in Brownmiller’s book.

Gillian Frank: By the time Against Our Will came out in 1975, Susan Brownmiller was a well-established journalist and a member of the New York Radical Feminists, a consciousness-raising group in Greenwich Village. Members of the group introduced Brownmiller to feminist writing about rape and shared their own experiences of sexual assault with her.

Brownmiller, who had previously subscribed to mainstream ideas about rape victims as weak, if not mentally ill, recalled these conversations as transformative:

Susan Brownmiller: I was in a tremendously wonderful consciousness raising group and it was in Greenwich Village and we met every week to do consciousness raising. At one meeting, one of our members, Diane Crothers, came in late and threw down a copy of, It Ain’t Me Babe, which was at that time, an alternate publication from California. What they ran was a transcript by a young woman who’d survived a hitchhike rape, and she called the women’s liberation center in Berkeley and was crying and they said, “Well, we would like you to tell us about it and we’ll print your transcript.” And that’s what they did, they printed a transcript.

So there is Diane Crothers who saw the transcript in It Ain’t Me Babe and came to our meeting and threw the paper down and said, “This is our next issue.” And, so typical of me, I said, “What are you talking about?” She said, “I’m talking about rape!” And I said, “You’re saying rape is a political crime against women?” So then the other women in the consciousness raising group started to talk, so we had a speak out on rape and to my astonishment there were about 15-20 women who were willing to speak out about their rape and how the police had been so scoffing, they had been so scoffing about Sarah Pines. She said, and I’ll never forget it, but she said the cops said, “Oh come on, who’d want to rape a nice girl like you?” So it was revelation to me and to everybody else in that room.

Lauren Gutterman: The speak out and subsequent conference on sexual violence organized by New York Radical Feminists was transformative. At both the conference and the speak out, women shared their stories of sexual assault by strangers, friends, boyfriends, and authority figures, as well as traumatizing interactions with psychiatrists, police officers, lawyers, and family members.

These events led attendees to collectively redefine what rape meant. The speak out and conference underlined how feminists were redefining rape: as a patriarchal tool, as a form of social control, and as a collective act of violence that kept women subordinated. New York Radical Feminists began using the slogan “rape is a political crime against women.” Here are members of New York Radical Feminists being interviewed in 1971:

Member of NY Radical Feminists 1: You say that rape is a political crime against women. I think that most people at this time would think of rape as a deviant act committed by a crazy person against an innocent victim. I think the victim is usually assumed to be innocent, but we can get into what you said later.

Interviewer: Why do you think rape is a political crime?

Member of NY Radical Feminists 2: I don’t think that rape is the act of, the crazy act of some crazy deviant, just like the war in Vietnam is not some crazy thing but is part of a system and expresses that system in its, at its most rapacious and most disgusting. Rape is the same type of thing in the sense that it expresses the political relationship of power between men and women in our society. And the fact that it is men who rape women is an expression of who holds the power in our society and that’s why it is a political crime as well as a moral and human crime.

Gillian Frank: Even as Brownmiller and the New York Radical Feminists were organizing anti-rape activism in New York City, a broader feminist anti-rape movement was taking hold across the country. In the early 1970s feminists formed anti-rape consciousness-raising groups, counseling collectives, crisis centers, and rape hotlines in cities including Boston, Chicago, Iowa City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington, DC.

By the mid-1970s, feminist lawyers had begun arguing that rape laws were based on fundamental misconceptions of rape victims as liars and of rape perpetrators as sociopaths.  They began working to reform the legal system to better support survivors and prosecute offenders.

This activism and the broader discussion from which it emerged set the stage for the success of Against Our Will.

Lauren Gutterman: Following the New York Radical Feminists’ anti-rape actions in 1971, Brownmiller decided to write a broader history of rape. As a successful journalist and author, she easily secured a book contract from Simon and Schuster. She spent the next four years writing and researching Against Our Will at the New York Public Library.

In our interview with her, Susan Brownmiller described the process of uncovering the archives of sexual violence.

Susan Brownmiller: But the main thing about the library was, that they had so much archival material on rape, but it was not under their Dewey Decimal System, it was not filed as rape. It was not part of the Dewey Decimal System then, but the librarians knew where I could find things, and they became extremely helpful, you know. I’d say, “I’d like to find out, was there rape in World War I?” And a librarian would say, “Yes, look up under where WWW World War I (I don’t know if it was WWW) but it was about, in their Dewey Decimal System, it was World War I atrocities, that’s where you’ll find rape. And indeed, I searched up World War I atrocities, there was an extraordinary amount of material on rape.

Lauren Gutterman: The publication of Brownmiller’s book and its release was a major media event. Four national magazines serialized excerpts of Against Our Will. Hundreds of newspaper articles spotlighted Brownmiller’s argument. And Brownmiller herself appeared at public venues across the country and on television and radio talk shows as part of a nation-wide publicity tour.

In her media appearances, Brownmiller repeatedly underlined her thesis: rape has a history, and its meaning and practice have changed over time.

In tracing how the meaning and practice of rape had changed over time, Brownmiller also inventoried the various social and political functions that rape has served: as an instrument of war, a means of subordinating marginalized populations, and a form of male bonding and camaraderie.

Gillian Frank: Rape, Brownmiller showed, was not unusual or socially abnormal. It was rather a central component of oppression and domination, and an integral part of human history.

Brownmiller invited readers to see sexual violence as part of what they already understood to be political even as she showed how intimate forms of sexual violence also had political and global implications.

Brownmiller also reframed the very terms Americans used to think about what constituted rape.  She rejected the idea that violence or physical coercion was a necessary component of sexual assault. Instead, all that was needed was an imbalance of power. Male therapists, community leaders, sports players, celebrities, and others with money, fame, power, and social respect, she argued, could use their influence and authority to coerce women into sexual acts without the threat of physical harm being present. Against Our Will showed that rape produced and sustained the longstanding and profound power imbalances between men and women.

Lauren Gutterman: For readers and commentators who encountered feminist analyses of rape through Against Our Will, it was not the anti-rape movement as a whole, but Brownmiller herself who made rape visible as a political act and a mechanism of women’s subordination.

From the beginning, media outlets portrayed Brownmiller as a singularly important thinker. The Chicago Tribune declared that “Against Our Will offers an entire world view, one that no one has presented before...” Her book skyrocketed to popularity. The New York Times put Against Our Will on its list of the best books of 1975. After the Book-of-the-Month Club made Against Our Will its selection for November of that year, Brownmiller’s ideas circulated well beyond the feminist movement and into the homes of women across the United States. In 1976, Time magazine named Brownmiller one of its women of the year.

Gillian Frank: It was on the issue of race, however, that Brownmiller’s work faced the most sustained criticism. Brownmiller was committed to elevating women’s voices and to dignifying their experiences and stories. Because she understood women as a uniformly oppressed group, and because she understood all men to be oppressors, Brownmiller minimized the importance of race and denied that sexual violence also oppressed men of color. Here’s a clip from our recent interview with Susan Brownmiller:

Susan Brownmiller: Then of course, when I, went on the college lecture circuit, I ran into something that I talked a lot about in my book. About how left wingers and so-called progressives didn’t believe rape was a political crime against women, they believed that, the communist party in particular always wrote rape in quotation marks, that rape was a white woman falsely accusing a black man. Now I dealt with this at length in Against Our Will, but for people when I was on the lecture circuit for two years. There were people for whom that was still the relevant point, that white women falsely accuse black men and black men are lynched for that. Which is a terrible exaggeration.

Gillian Frank: Brownmiller’s came to this analysis despite a consistent commitment to the civil rights movement. In the 1960s, Brownmiller covered the civil rights movement as a journalist. She joined the Congress of Racial Equality. And she registered black voters in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer. Activists and historians taught Brownmiller that rape allegations against black men worked to uphold white supremacy by justifying their criminalization, incarceration, and murder. None of these experiences impacted her conclusions.

Lauren Gutterman: In her attempt to expose the ubiquity of rape and the pervasive silencing of all women by all men, Brownmiller rejected these insights. She believed that patriarchy crossed racial boundaries and that white and black men alike used rape as an act of terror against women of all races. For these reasons, Brownmiller insisted that it was a mistake to discount white women’s rape accusations against black men. She wanted to show how men, whatever their race or political sympathies, participated in a system that silenced women.

But Brownmiller went much further than asking for a reconsideration of women’s experiences with sexual violence. She argued that the American Left was mistaken in making black men falsely accused of rape the central symbols of American racial injustice. To make this point, Brownmiller’s book revisited famed cases such as the falsely accused Scottsboro Nine from the 1930s and the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. And she even perpetuated the myth of the black male rapist. Here’s Brownmiller being interviewed in the 1970s:

Susan Brownmiller: And also in increasing numbers, white women are raped by black men as part and parcel of hostility between the races today.

Gillian Frank: This troubling framing is most apparent in Brownmiller’s discussion of the brutal murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 by J. W. Milam and his half-brother Roy Bryant. Milam and Bryant abducted and lynched Till after he supposedly wolf whistled at Roy Bryant’s wife, Carolyn. An all-white, all male jury failed to convict the two men who publicly admitted to their crime in the pages of Look magazine only a few months later.

Brownmiller was unconvinced by this clear case of injustice, and she wrote that what Till had allegedly done, was “a deliberate insult just short of physical assault.” She implied that he and his murderers, because they were all men, shared an equal position of power over Carolyn Bryant. Brownmiller even conceded to feeling a “fleeting but murderous rage” herself, when men whistled at or propositioned her on the street, whatever their race.

Many readers were justifiably critical of Brownmiller’s depiction of race and rape. Author Angela Davis was among Brownmiller’s most passionate and outspoken critics. In Women, Race & Class, Davis wrote:

It cannot be denied that Brownmiller’s book is a pioneering scholarly contribution to the contemporary literature on rape. Yet many of her arguments are unfortunately pervaded with racist ideas… [she continued]

Brownmiller’s provocative distortion of such historical cases as the Scottsboro Nine…. and Emmett Till are designed to dissipate any sympathy for Black men who are victims of fraudulent rape charges. As for Emmett Till, she clearly invites us to infer that if this fourteen-year-old boy had not been shot in the head and dumped into the Tallahatchie River after he whistled at one white woman, he would probably have succeeded in raping another white woman.

Lauren Gutterman: When we interviewed Brownmiller earlier this year, we invited her to discuss whether her thinking on race and rape had changed since she published Against Our Will 45 years ago. Brownmiller stood by her analysis and insisted that she had been unfairly attacked:

Susan Brownmiller: Well I developed strong enemies and none stronger than Angela Davis. I felt like she’s the terrier who keeps nipping at my ankles. She was a communist, okay she was a communist and she bought the the old list of theories that rape is political only when a white woman falsely accuses a black man, you know. She started by attacking Shulamith Firestone and me for not paying sufficient evidence to the role that white women play, that leads up to a black man getting arrested or lynched. And she’s never let go of that to this day, but she was very harmful to me.

Gillian Frank: Against Our Will leaves us with an uneven albeit powerful legacy. The book has obvious limitations, including: Brownmiller’s blindness to racial dynamics, her near erasure of same-sex sexual violence, and her inability to grasp the ways that women too have been perpetrators of sexual assault. But even deeply flawed social commentary can help us understand our past and appreciate its political legacy.

Brownmiller helped a mass audience think differently about what rape is and how rape works within American culture. Against Our Will and the broader anti-rape movement of which it was a part also produced real changes in the ways that police, lawyers, and judges responded to rape accusations and treated survivors. It transformed how many of us still talk about rape and respond to sexual violence and revelations about it.

Lauren Gutterman: In the decades since Brownmiller’s book was published, new voices and new analyses have built upon her work and brought intersectional questions of race, gender, and same-sex sexuality to the fore. Today, activists against sexual violence and harassment are much more attuned to the vulnerability of women of color, the victimization of men and boys, and the targeting of transgender women. Informed by the prison abolition movement, critiques of mass incarceration, and ongoing police violence against people of color, many of those struggling against sexual violence today are more critical of the criminal justice system even as they weave in analyses drawn from the anti-rape movement of the 1970s.

Still, at a moment when two Supreme Court Justices and the President of the United States have had multiple sexual assault and misconduct allegations leveled against them, Brownmiller’s work remains painfully relevant. On a daily basis, news headlines confirm many of her insights about power, systemic abuse and the widespread discounting of women’s voices.

It still takes multiple accusations against a single powerful perpetrator for sexual assault charges to be deemed credible. We need only think of Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, and Donald Trump to see this dynamic play out. These renowned cases are of course the tip of a terrible iceberg in which women, men, trans and non-binary people continue to confront sexual assault and harassment in the workplace, in the streets, and in their own homes.

Gillian Frank: That these allegations against some of the most powerful members of society can be spoken at all, that acts of sexual violence can be named as rape, that assault and harassment inspire rage and social activism, also demonstrate the entrenched and powerful legacy of the anti-rape movement in the 1970s and of Brownmiller’s book. Activists today from Tarana Burke to Chanel Miller are part of an ongoing commitment to challenging sexual violence and what we now term toxic masculinity. 

Brownmiller’s book of course did not bring about an end to sexual violence as she had hoped. But by making the gender politics of rape legible, Against Our Will shaped activism against sexual violence in enduring ways. Brownmiller’s work is still cited regularly in media coverage of the #Me Too movement, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and the frequency of rape on college campuses. Her analysis of rape as an outcome and means of enforcing gender inequality is crucial to analyses of sexual violence to this day.

In the end, Brownmiller wanted us to understand that sexual violence profoundly impacts all our lives. Far from individual and idiosyncratic, sexual violence, she showed is part of a broader edifice of how power works. We have yet to fully reckon with this realization.

Susan Brownmiller: Whether women know it or not, they gear their lives under the fear of rape. In other words you send your children to certain schools, why? You take the car into the center of city, why? Rather than use the subway. You take night classes at a certain college rather than at another college, or you don’t take night classes at all, you go to school during the day. All these things, the way women dress, have to do with the way they live their lives in fear of rape, and all women do.

Lauren Gutterman: Sexing History is written and produced by Gillian Frank and me, Lauren Gutterman. Our senior producer is Saniya Lee Ghanoui. Rebecca Davis is our story editor and producer (and they’re presenting tomorrow!). Our assistant producers are Chris Babits, Isabel Machado and Mallory Szymanski. Our intern is Julian Harbaugh.  

Gillian Frank: Thank you to Susan Brownmiller for sharing her story with us.

We are indebted to scholarship by Catherine Jacquet, Maria Bevelaqua and Danielle McGuire, which informed this episode. To learn more about their research and to see our liner notes for this episode, and all our previous episodes, please visit our website at www.sexinghistory.com

Lauren Gutterman: Sexing History is made possible with generous funding from Allen Zwickler of the Phil Zwickler Charitable and Memorial Foundation. Created in honor of the journalist, filmmaker, poet and gay activist Phil Zwickler, the Foundation "seeks to promote human rights, education, health and the arts, specifically with respect to the gay and lesbian community, and generally with regard to those individuals and groups who need assistance to survive and be heard." Visit them at pzfoundation.org

We are also grateful for the support of the University of Delaware College of Arts and Sciences program for undergraduate summer research.

Gillian Frank: Sexing History is also supported by funding from the Humanities Media Project in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, Austin. The Humanities Media Project aims “to tell human stories and invite critical conversations that educate, inspire, and connect communities. They believe that the humanities play a crucial role in maintaining a healthy, democratic society.”

Lauren Gutterman: Sexing History is grateful for a grant from the Program in American Studies and the Americas Center/Centro de las Americas at University of Virginia. The Americas Center promotes the interdisciplinary study of the arts, cultures, histories, and societies of the Americas.

Gillian Frank: If you’re enjoying our show, you can help new listeners find us. Please review us on Apple Music and share links to our episodes on social media. To stay up to date on all things Sexing History or to send us a note, visit us on our website and www.sexinghistory.com. From all of us at Sexing History, thanks for listening.

[End of Audio]

Transcription by Ian McCabe, University of Delaware