By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
To celebrate the history of Women’s Studies at Bowling Green State University, the program invited a woman who made history. Susan Brownmiller, author of the landmark best seller “Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape,” delivered the keynote address Thursday night.
Now known as Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies the program is marking 40 years of existence. Brownmiller was part of the second wave feminists who help usher in the era when women’s studies blossomed on college campuses.
As much as she would have liked to say differently, Brownmiller said years have not been marked by steady progress for women’s rights.
“The pendulum always shifts,” the author and activist said. “And when the pendulum shifts you can lose a lot of the gains you thought you had forever just a decade before. I’ve seen that.”
While praising the emergence of the #metoo movement, the 83-year-old feminist said she feels young activists lack a sense of history. Not surprising, she said. Her generation didn’t appreciate what the suffragettes went through to earn the vote.
While her generation expected those women coming behind them to pick up the cause, they were disappointed. “When we did consciousness raising we found these truths for the first time. For the next generations, it’s received wisdom, not something they discovered. Received wisdom doesn’t have the power.”
Not that the male radicals of the 1960s necessarily recognized the importance of these early consciousness raising sessions. The women who gathered in living rooms to discuss their lives were dismissed for “navel gazing” by those they had struggled with in the anti-war and Civil Rights movement.
Brownmiller has worked in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964.
With all the energy in the air, women began asking “what about us?” In these sessions, “we were on the verge of discovering new truths. It was like spontaneous combustion.”
As they talked, the issue of abortion came up. One woman talked about being blindfolded to be taken to a Mafia-protected abortion doctor. Another received a therapeutic abortion in a hospital. That meant that two doctors had to sign a statement saying she was too mentally unsound to have a child. She feared this would follow her throughout her life. And Brownmiller revealed she received three illegal abortions, one in Cuba and two in Puerto Rico. She said she cried as she realized she could have died.
This talk led to class action suits in 30 states. In Massachusetts alone, there were 1,000 plaintiffs, women who had to go overseas to get an abortion, or women who carried their pregnancies to term and put their newborns up for adoption. But the courts remanded these cases back to lower courts, contending the women had no standing.
It was only when a woman who was pregnant who wanted an abortion stepped forward in Texas that the suit got traction, and because she was pregnant it moved quickly up through the system to the Supreme Court where the justices voted 7-2 in favor of the woman in Roe vs. Wade.
The right to have an abortion was won, and the backlash started immediately and hasn’t stopped.
Rape as a political issue also emerged from a consciousness raising discussion.
Accepting rape as a political issue was difficult for many on the left, Brownmiller said, because false charges of rape by white women against black men had been a key element in enforcing a system of racial oppression.
One woman brought in a copy of the feminist underground paper It Ain’t Me, Babe, with an article about a woman who had been raped while hitchhiking by two men. Another woman in the group related a similar experience. Another talked about going out with a medical student. The date had been set up by her aunt and his mother. He raped her, then asked if she wanted to go out to dinner.
These revelations led to speak out on rape, which uncovered more stories.
And that led to Brownmiller making a book proposal that was quickly accepted. It took Brownmiller four years of research before the manuscript was ready.
She discovered that it wasn’t until the 13th century that rape was recognized as a crime against a women’s body. Before that it was a property crime against the woman’s father or husband.
When she wanted to research rape in war she couldn’t find it. She had been granted a desk and workspace at the New York Public Library, and it was a librarian who showed her how to find the information. Look under World War I/atrocities. She found more information from the New York University law library, which was open later than the public library.
“Against Our Will” was a best seller, a book of the month club main selection. It was translated into many languages, and has never been out of print.
The book contended that rape was a crime against women that was intended to always keep women in fear, and buttresses male superiority.
What Brownmiller never said, though she was accused of it, is all men are rapists.
One outcome of the greater attention about rape was the creation of rape crisis centers. The idea spread, she said, when a center in Washington D.C. opened, and a Washington Post reporter decided to see if a call in the middle of the night would be answered. It was, and he was so impressed by the intrepid work of the women, all rape victims, that he wrote a story. That article was picked up around the country helping, to spread the idea of rape crisis centers. Now, though, the original idea of survivors helping others has been replaced by requirements that staff have master’s degrees in social work. And on many campuses, efforts to address rape hit roadblocks when the accused rapists were athletes, who big donors wanted protected.
Brownmiller spoke out against the idea that young women can go out and act like men, especially drink like men. Women need to be aware of predators, who will take advantage of their weakness. Alcohol lowers a person’s ability to react and read the warning signs.
The key is not to “act like men” but to “change the way boys and men think.”
She welcomes the #metoo movement, though she said, as with other movements, there have been overreactions, especially in the case of Sen. Al Franken.
The fight against workplace sexual harassment also got started with women sharing their stories. A professor at Cornell started talking to students about their summer jobs. Many of the women had worked in the food industry, and they talked about being “hit on” by the men they worked with. About this time the professor was approached by a woman who had quit her job at the university because the faculty member she worked for constantly propositioned her to the point it became too stressful for her to work there. But she could not get unemployment insurance. From that case came the concept of a hostile work environment.
Brownmiller said she hoped those behind the #metoo movement would make sure this extends to women who work in the hospitality sector and in factories who are the most frequent victims of sexual harassment.
Eve Crandall, an academic advisor in the College of Arts and Sciences, thanked Brownmiller for her years of activism.
Because of the model established by the activists and her peers, Crandall said she had heard of and taken a self-defense course, and then had to use it when she was assaulted by a man with gun. She got away. She now has an egalitarian marriage and has raised two sons who consider themselves feminists.
