A Feminist Author Recalls Movement by Falling Back on Gossip

Few books have affected me as viscerally as Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 treatise on rape, “Against Our Will,” which I read as a college student. Brownmiller’s unflinching description of actual rapes was terrifying, but it was her lucid, indeed irrefutable, analysis of how sexual violence by some men served to control all women, not just its direct victims, that really shook me up. Rape could no longer be seen as an obscene, anomalous crime that affected a few unlucky women but, rather, as an obscene but basic link in the structure of male domination that thwarted the lives of all women.

Brownmiller’s new work, “In Our Time,” is an entirely different sort of book, though it is not entirely clear what sort of book it was intended to be. It is not a memoir in any conventional sense; we are offered little about the personal ways in which the women’s liberation movement transformed the author. But “In Our Time” is not a history of the women’s liberation movement, either. In fact, Brownmiller’s book harks back to that most stereotypically feminine form of communication: gossip.

Brownmiller was a reluctant feminist. In 1968, she was 33 years old, a veteran of the civil rights movement, “hoping that my activist days were behind me.” Brownmiller was pouring her energies into her career as a journalist and considered herself a “loophole” woman, one of the few “that men let in to prove they weren’t barring everyone else.” But all that changed when she happened upon a New York consciousness-raising group and heard herself talking aloud about her three illegal abortions. This was, she writes, “my feminist baptism”; she realized that “my solitary efforts to forge my own destiny were . . . pieces of the puzzle called sexual oppression.”

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Brownmiller’s book is an excellent antidote for those of us who suffer from short memories, which I suspect means all of us. In the very late 1960s, a New York state panel of “experts” on abortion consisted of 14 men and a nun; virtually all professions were caste systems that condemned women to the lowest-paid, least prestigious jobs; and the concepts of sexual harassment, domestic violence and “sexism” itself were nonexistent. Brownmiller charts the transformation of the abortion-rights debate from its focus on health reform (defined by doctors) to the constitutional rights of women; the rise of the gay liberation movement; and the emergence of sexual violence as a political issue. She reminds us of how swiftly feminist ideas swept through the country in the early 1970s: “Heated arguments were erupting in the bedroom and on the street . . . in public bars and bowling alleys. Liberation battles were being fought on the home front, . . . at the workplace, . . . inside the legal system up to the Supreme Court.”

Mainly, though, this is a book about personalities. We learn who came out as a lesbian and left her husband; who felt burned by the movement’s infighting and retired from politics; who “trashed” whom. Surely this is a perversion of the feminist insight that “the personal is political.” Most of the meaty issues that the movement was forced to grapple with--such as the relationship between sexism and capitalism--are explored in only the most superficial ways.

When Brownmiller does turn her attention to theoretical issues--such as the battered women’s movement’s apologetic defense of women who stay in abusive relationships--we see flashes of what made “Against Our Will” a seminal work. But for the most part, “In Our Time” fails to adequately explicate modern feminism’s many real victories and its many wrong turns. A real history--far more political and far less personal--remains to be written.