Susan Brownmiller

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Susan Brown Miller (born 15 February 1935 as Susan Warhaftig in Brooklyn , New York City ) is an American journalist, writer, civil rights - and radikalfemistische activist. Her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape ( Against Our Will , 1978) is a feminist classic. It is considered groundbreaking because it was the first to define rape as a social problem and as violence against women. The New York Public Library named it one of the One Hundred Most Influential Books of the Twentieth Century in 1995.

Life

Susan Brownmiller grew up in a Jewish family in Brooklyn. She is the only child of Mae and Samuel Warhaftig. As a girl, two afternoons a week she attended the East Midwood Jewish Center , a Conservative synagogue founded in 1924, where she received instruction in Hebrew and the history of Judaism . After the experience of the Second World War and the Holocaust, "Jewish Brooklyn" was shaped by a passion for Zionism , she writes in her contribution to the online exhibition Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution of the Jewish Women's Archive . When the independent state of Israel was founded in 1948 , she was enthusiastic about building this new country. Her parents were alarmed by her sudden intensity; her aunts jokingly called her “Rebbetzin” (wife of a rabbi ). In her book Against Our Will , she mentions that she is Jewish from Brooklyn.

"Yet the heritage is still with me, and I can argue that my chosen path - to fight against physical harm, specifically the terror of violence against women - had its origins in what I had learned in Hebrew School about the pogroms and the Holocaust. "

“The legacy is still within me, and I can argue that the path I have chosen - fighting physical suffering, especially the terror of violence against women - has its origins in what I learned about in the Hebrew school learned the pogroms and the Holocaust. "

- Susan Brownmiller

Act

From 1952 to 1954 she studied at Cornell University , which she left without a degree to take acting classes in New York City. During this time she adopted the stage name Brownmiller , which became her legal surname from 1961. Her interest in journalism began when she was assistant to the editor-in-chief of the popular magazine Coronet in Chicago in 1959 . From 1961 to 1962 she worked as an editor for the Albany Report , then until 1964 as a domestic policy journalist for Newsweek . She continued her journalistic career as a reporter for the NBC television station in Philadelphia, as an editor for Village Voice and news writer for ABC TV in New York. From 1968 she worked as a freelance author and writer. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times , The Nation, and Vogue , among others .

In the 1960s she became active in the civil rights movement; Influenced by the Southern sit-in movement , she joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organization in 1960 . In 1964 she was one of a thousand volunteers for the Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi . (See: Civil Rights Act of 1957; Subsequent Civil Rights Acts ) She made her debut as a writer with a biography of the first African-American Congressman Shirley Chisholm .

In 1968, Susan Brownmiller was 33 and was working for ABC TV in New York , attending a meeting of the New York Radical Women , a group that Robin Morgan and Shulamith Firestone founded in 1967. She took part in a consciousness-raising session, which was organized as a public speak-out : women spoke for the first time about their own experiences with abortion, rape, abuse, marriage, motherhood in order to uncover their “collective truths”. In these self-awareness groups, the awareness arose that rape and sexual abuse are not rare and extraordinary, but actually common experiences in the lives of girls and women. In her personal memory book Our Time. In Memoir of a Revolution , which is also a story of radical feminism, Susan Brownmiller describes these sessions as her “feminist baptism”.

After organizing a convention on rape with the New York Radical Women in 1971 , she began work on her historical study on the subject, for which she received grants from the Alicia Patterson Foundation and the Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation . Against Our Will aroused recognition and criticism. The Washington Post dedicated four lengthy articles to the book in its November 2, 1975 issue. Brownmiller's analysis that rape is not sexuality but violence and a tool for social control over women, and its claim that rape benefits all men, because the omnipresent threat kept women in submission, proved revolutionary. Her study brought rape into the American public consciousness and influenced international legal definitions of rape. Brownmiller also noted in her study that while historians examined the effects of war on women, they did not include rape. She came back to this topic in an essay on the Bosnian War entitled Making Female Bodies the Battlefield , first published in Newsweek in 1993 and in 1994 in the book Mass Rape edited by Alexandra Stiglmayer . The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina was published.

In 1978, Susan Brownmiller was a co-founder of Women Against Pornography . She wrote four other books, including the factual novel Waverly Place, about a high-profile case of sexual abuse that occurred in her Greenwich Village neighborhood . She has taught women and gender studies at the private Pace University in New York City since the late 1990s .

Publications

  • Shirley Chisholm. A biography. (Children's book), Doubleday, New York 1970.
  • Against our will. Men, women and rape. Simon and Schuster, New York 1975.
    • Against our will. Rape and male domination. (Translated by Ivonne Carroux), Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1978, ISBN 3-596-23712-2 .
  • Femininity. Linden Press / Simon & Schuster, New York 1984.
    • Femininity. (Translated by Manfred Ohl and Hans Sartorius), Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-10-008202-8 .
  • Seeing Vietnam. Encounters of the road and heart. Harper Collins Publishers, New York 1994.
  • In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. The Dial Press, New York 1999, ISBN 0-385-31486-8 .

Fiction

  • Waverly Place. Grove Press, New York 1989.
    • It happened with the neighbors. Factual novel (translated by Christoph Plate), Heyne, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-453-05691-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Elizabeth Diefendorf (Ed.): The New York Public Library's Books of the Century. New York 1996, p. 134 f.
  2. ↑ a b c The Feminist Revolution. Susan Brownmiller. Jewish Womens' Archives.
  3. ↑ Own translation from English
  4. ↑ a b c Brownmiller, Susan. Papers, 1935-2000. ( Memento of the original from July 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, February 2006. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / oasis.lib.harvard.edu
  5. ^ Hannah Mudge on Susan Brownmiller: The backlash against the Second Wave. In: The New Statesman. May 16, 2014.
  6. ^ Jewish Women's Archive: Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape conquers the Washington Post. ( jwa.org Retrieved July 16, 2014).
  7. ^ Jewish Women's Archive: Against Our Will. Author Susan Brownmiller is born. ( jwa.org Retrieved July 16, 2014).
  8. ↑ Jan Jordan: Susan Brownmiller. In: Keith Hayward et al. (Ed.): Fifty Key Thinkers in Criminology. Routledge 2009, ISBN 978-0-415-42910-8 , p. 214 f.
  9. ^ Genocide , in: Bonnie G. Smith (Ed.): The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History. Oxford University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-514890-9 , p. 364.
personal data
SURNAME Brownmiller, Susan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Warhaftig, Susan (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist, writer, and feminist
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York City