In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution - Hardcover

Brownmiller, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385314868 ISBN 13: 9780385314862

Publisher: The Dial Press, 1999

Synopsis

There once was a time when the concept of equal pay for equal work did not exist, when women of all ages were "girls," when abortion was a back-alley procedure, when there was no such thing as a rape crisis center or a shelter for battered women, when "sexual harassment" had not yet been named and defined.  "If conditions are right," Susan Brownmiller says in this stunning memoir, "if the anger of enough people has reached the boiling point, the exploding passion can ignite a societal transformation."

In Our Time tells the story of that transformation, as only Brownmiller can.  A leading feminist activist and the author of Against Our Will, the book that changed the nation's perception of rape, she now brings the Women's Liberation movement and its passionate history vividly to life.

Here is the colorful cast of characters on whose shoulders we stand--the feminist icons Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, and Gloria Steinem, and the lesser known women whose contributions to change were equally profound.  And here are the landmark events of the era: the consciousness-raising groups that sprung up in people's living rooms, the mimeographed position papers that first articulated the new thinking, the abortion and rape speak-outs, the daring sit-ins, the underground newspaper collectives, and the inventive lawsuits that all played a role in the most wide-reaching revolution of the twentieth century.

Here as well are Brownmiller's reflections on the feminist utopian vision, and her dramatic accounts, rendered with honesty and humor, of the movement's painful internal schisms as it struggled to give voice to the aspirarations of all women.  Finally, Brownmiller addresses that most relevant question: What is the legacy of feminism today?

About this title

About the Author

Susan Brownmiller is the author of Against Our Will: Men, Women And Rape; Femininity; Waverly Place, a novel; Seeing Vietnam, and Shirley Chisholm, a biography for children.  She has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Esquire, Vogue, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and many other publications.  She lives in New York City.

From the Inside Flap

as a time when the concept of equal pay for equal work did not exist, when women of all ages were "girls," when abortion was a back-alley procedure, when there was no such thing as a rape crisis center or a shelter for battered women, when "sexual harassment" had not yet been named and defined. "If conditions are right," Susan Brownmiller says in this stunning memoir, "if the anger of enough people has reached the boiling point, the exploding passion can ignite a societal transformation."

In Our Time tells the story of that transformation, as only Brownmiller can. A leading feminist activist and the author of Against Our Will, the book that changed the nation's perception of rape, she now brings the Women's Liberation movement and its passionate history vividly to life.

Here is the colorful cast of characters on whose shoulders we stand--the feminist icons Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Germ

Reviews

Here is a gossipy account of women's liberation by a New York journalist who was in the thick of many movement controversiesAfrom the pornography wars to accusations of elitism. A freelance magazine and TV news writer, Brownmiller went to her first women's liberation meeting in the fall of 1968. After her feminist "click," she almost single-handedly redefined Americans' views of rape when she wrote Against Our Will in 1975. Brownmiller chronicles the movement's rise out of civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activism; the heady days of demonstrating at the Miss America pageant, in the offices of Ladies' Home Journal and on the streets; the struggle for abortion rights and to define rape, domestic violence and sexual harassment as discrimination against women; and the rise of feminist newspapers, magazines and publications such as Our Bodies, Ourselves. She also covers writers Marilyn French, Shere Hite and a host of other feminist theorists then on the edge and now part of the mainstream. Her memoir concludes with what she views as the final demise of the radical feminist movement, when feminists started to shred one another in the porn wars of the 1980s. For those seeking a narrative rather than analytical history, Brownmiller offers an enthralling mix of lively stories about her own activities (although she doesn't delve into her own background as much as some readers might wish) and interviews with other participants in one of the most influential social movements of our time. Agent, Frances Goldin.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A cogent, vivid view that conveys the drama and urgency of the women's liberation movement, from a writer who was both a committed activist and a critical observer, sometimes simultaneously. Although Brownmiller has written books on other subjects (e.g., Seeing Vietnam, 1994), she is still best known for her 1975 exploration of rape, Against Our Will. This new history/memoir explores the revolutionary decades that began in 1963 with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, a book that ``changed my life, says Brownmiller. She was attracted to the radical side of women's liberation and recalls with pride and occasional bemusement the women who struggled to formulate new social theories, mine history, introduce consciousness-raising groups, and meld socialism and anticapitalism with the feminist revolution. The usual suspectsFriedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greerreceive a share of attention, but the focus is on lesser-known activists, many already committed to the political left, active in the civil-rights and antiVietnam War movements and burgeoning New Left politics. Experienced in confrontation, these low-profile women organized meetings and demonstrations, wrote papers, published newsletters, and shared the dark corners of their lives with one another in consciousness-raising sessions. A collectivist bent led to the ``trashing'' of individuals who attracted the limelight (including Brownmiller herself, who as a successful writer had a higher profile). There was infighting, and splinter groups formed. Some, like the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, hung together and succeeded; others fragmented and disappeared. By 1975, according to Brownmiller, the early theorists and organizers were too inflexible and impractical ``to triumph on the larger stage they had brought into creation.'' But on that stage were core issues of rape, abortion, domestic violence, and sexual harassment around which all women could rally, although clashes continue over pornography, and abortion is once again under siege. Meetings, debates, demonstrations, church speak-outs, living-room confessionsall come passionately to life in this memoir; close to how it really was for women's libbers. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Brownmiller shares her insider knowledge of the trenchant early years of the women's liberation movement with candor and verve. An ambitious reporter, she had worked as a civil rights volunteer in the South and had no intention of joining another movement, but after she attended her first meeting of the New York Radical Women in 1968 and experienced her "feminist baptism," she soon found herself on the front lines. She organized a successful sit-in at Ladies' Home Journal, appeared as a guest on The Dick Cavett Show, and wrote about the nascent women's movement for mainstream publications. She also discovered that, like all crusades, the movement was a plexus of intense, competitive personalities focused on different facets of a common goal. There were rifts between lesbians and heterosexuals, and between women of different economic and educational backgrounds, and a troubling absence of women of color. But as Brownmiller describes the movement's fissures and faults, her no-holds-barred approach serves not as criticism but rather as a celebration of the tremendous passion of the diverse women involved. Brownmiller sensitively portrays Kate Millett, Gloria Steinem, Rita Mae Brown, Alix Kates Shulman, and many others responsible for this world-changing, life-enhancing movement. She also tracks the progression of the battle for legal abortions and protection against sexual harassment, as well as the subjects she was most involved with--the recognition of rape and domestic violence as serious crimes. A riveting blend of eyewitness accounts and keen analysis, this is history at its most vital and a stirring testament to our ability to come together to combat social injustice, no matter how deeply entrenched it has become. Donna Seaman

Based largely on interviews and her own experiences, Brownmiller, the author of Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, reflects on the history of the women's movement from the 1960s to the present. Topics include the founding of the Women's Liberation Movement, the explosion in women's publishing, and changing attitudes and laws on abortion, rape, battering, pornography, and sexual harassment. Brownmiller records the triumphs and occasional euphoria as well as the rifts and philosophical divisions within the movement while sketching portraits of its well-known and less-familiar leaders. For other perspectives and reflections on the period, see The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation (LJ 10/15/98). Appropriate for large public and academic libraries.APatricia A. Beaber, Coll. of New Jersey Lib., Ewing
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Founders

Of the thousand or so white volunteers who joined the southern civil rights struggle during the mid-sixties, at least half, including myself, were women. Many of us went on to found--or to play a major role in--the Women's Liberation Movement a few years later. History seldom offers parallels this tidy, but as it happened, many of the female abolitionists of the nineteenth century had gone on to organize for women's suffrage. These two vivid epochs were separated by more than a century, yet nearly identical forces applied. After fighting alongside men in a radical movement to correct a grievous wrong, the women then woke up and wondered, "What about us?''

Political organizers understand that the important thing about action is reaction. There you are, taking a stand, struggling to express a new idea, and the response is so powerful--positive or negative--that it reverberates into new responses and reactions, especially in you.

Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were part of the American delegation that traveled to London in 1840 for a World Anti-Slavery Convention. As the high-minded congress got under way, the male abolitionists voted not to accredit and seat the women. For ten days Mott and Stanton watched the proceedings from the visitors' gallery, where in mortification and anger they hatched the idea for a women's rights congress that became the historic Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.

White women in the civil rights movement during the 1960s were also consumed by a vision of equality, one that seemed important enough to risk our lives for. (And one white woman, Viola Liuzzo, did in fact lose her life to a sniper on the Selma-to-Montgomery March.) Although Martin Luther King, Jr., came to embody the stoic heroism of those hopeful years, to kids on the college campuses, and to many older radicals like me, SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was the true cutting edge of the movement.

SNCC had been formed after the lunch-counter sit-ins in February 1960. And it was SNCC that sent out the call for an army of northern volunteers to help register black voters in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, the call to which so many white women responded. SNCC was cast in the image of a young, fearless black male, a concept that may have been necessary for its time, but its corollary was that women of both races were expected to occupy a lesser role.

Jan Goodman and I were in the second batch of volunteers for Mississippi Freedom Summer. No longer part of the student community from which SNCC drew most of its volunteers, I was by then a researcher at Newsweek, stuck in a dead-end job, and Jan was directing inner-city programs for the Girl Scouts. During our orientation session in Memphis, we were told that Meridian needed emergency workers. Michael Schwerner, the project director, James Chaney, a local organizer, and Andrew Goodman, a summer volunteer who hadn't had time to unpack his duffel, had just been murdered in nearby Neshoba County, although their bodies would not be found for another forty days. When no one else at the Memphis orientation session volunteered for Meridian, Jan and I accepted the assignment. Between us, we had a good ten years of organizing experience, hers in Democratic primaries and presidential campaigns, mine in CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, and both of us together in voter registration drives in East Harlem. The night we arrived in Meridian, a field secretary called a meeting, asking to see the new volunteers. Proudly we raised our hands.

"Shit!'' he exploded. "I asked for volunteers and they sent me white women.''

On other projects in other Mississippi towns that summer, white women were reminded of their second-class status as movement workers through a variety of slights. Because of the southern white male's phobia about mixing the races, our presence in the volunteer army of integrationists was construed as an added danger to the movement's black men. I do not wish to underestimate this danger, but there will always be a germ of a reason, sound or unsound, behind the perpetuation of sexist practice. When antiwar activism got under way a year or so after Mississippi Freedom Summer, there was also a logical reason why women in that movement were relegated to second-class status: the draft for the war in Vietnam directly affected young men.

Women the world over are required to modify their behavior because of things that men fear and do.

SNCC was a "beloved community'' to Mary King and Casey Hayden, an encompassing lifestyle dedicated to the perfection of moral virtue. They were among the first white women to have staff jobs in the Atlanta headquarters. Mary was the product of six generations of Virginia ministers on her father's side. Casey, from East Texas, entered student politics through the Christian ecumenical movement and helped to found Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the primary force on the white New Left. She had married Tom Hayden but they were living apart.

The two women studied the French existentialists in their evening hours to broaden their understanding of theory and practice. When they'd exhausted Camus, they turned to Simone de Beauvoir. Certain passages in The Second Sex spoke to them so directly that they began pressing the book on others. Some people in the movement started grumbling that Mary and Casey were undisciplined sentimentalists "on a Freedom high.''

In the fall of 1964, Mary and Casey wrote a position paper on women in SNCC that owed its inspiration partly to Beauvoir and partly to their experience in their movement work. "The average white person doesn't realize that he assumes he is superior,'' they wrote. "So too the average SNCC worker finds it difficult to discuss the woman problem because of the assumption of male superiority. Assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep-rooted and as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro.''

Expecting ridicule, the two white women did not sign the paper they passed around that November at a staff retreat on the Mississippi coast. Thirty-seven manifestos and proposals had been prepared for the retreat at Waveland, and most were being ignored. A wrenching split within the organization was consuming everyone's energy.

One evening Stokely Carmichael and a few others took a welcome break down at the dock. Camping it up, he joked, "What is the position of women in SNCC? The position of women in SNCC is prone.''

Alas for Stokely, his riff became nearly as famous as his later calls for Black Power. While language purists wondered if Carmichael had really meant "supine," his jest came to symbolize the collection of slights suffered by women in SNCC.

One year later Mary King and Casey Hayden gathered the courage to sign their names to an expanded version of their paper and mailed it to forty women activists against the Vietnam War. The second broadside recounted a list of movement grievances--who gets named project director? who sweeps the office floor? who takes the minutes? who speaks to the press?--before it concluded "Objectively, the chances seem nil that we could start a movement based on anything as distant to general American thought as a sex-caste system. Therefore, most of us will probably want to work full-time on problems such as war, poverty, race.'' King and Hayden titled their paper "A Kind of Memo.''

Another year passed and "A Kind of Memo'' found its way to a national SDS conference that convened at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana two days after Christmas in 1966. Fifty women, a lot for that time, caucused in the school cafeteria to discuss it.

"Heather Booth and I were there,'' recalls Marilyn Webb, who would play a significant role in the founding of Women's Liberation in Washington D.C. "When the SNCC letter from Mary and Casey was read aloud, it precipitated a three-day marathon discussion about women in SDS. We'd been dealing with civil rights, with the Vietnam War, we'd been urging resistance to the draft with slogans like 'Women Say Yes to Men Who Say No'--that had been our mentality. This was one of the first conversations where we talked about what was happening with us. We ended up talking about everything, including our sexuality.''

Community organizers trained by Saul Alinsky, who ran workshops and wrote primers on the principles of activism, Marilyn Webb and Heather Booth were soon to marry New Left leaders. They were to try as well to marry the new women's thinking to SDS. The political union, however, was not to be.

The following April, "A Kind of Memo'' surfaced yet again, this time in Liberation, a leftist-pacifist magazine. Having served as catalysts, Mary King and Casey Hayden then retired from the fray. SNCC, their beloved community, no longer welcomed white participation. They had lost their political moorings. It would be characteristic of the emerging feminist movement that various women would surface for brief moments in leadership roles and then, exhausted by the effort, depart from the scene.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Dial Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385314868
• ISBN 13: 9780385314862
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368