Susan Brownmiller

Susan Brownmiller (Brooklyn, 1935 - New York, 2025) was an American journalist, author and feminist activist. Born Susan Warhaftig, she took the name Brownmiller in 1961, and she is best remembered for her 1975 study of rape, which framed it as a political problem rather than a matter of passion.

She grew up in Brooklyn in a lower-middle-class Jewish family and was an only child. Her father had emigrated from a Polish shtetl and worked as a salesman, later at Macy's, while her mother was a secretary in the Empire State Building. She spent two years at Cornell University on scholarships, from 1952 to 1954, but did not graduate. She had wanted to act, but drifted into magazine work almost by accident. She then held editorial, research and reporting jobs at Coronet, Newsweek, NBC, The Village Voice and ABC, and from 1968 worked as a freelance writer for outlets such as The New York Times, Vogue and The Nation.

Her activism began with civil rights work: she joined the Congress of Racial Equality and in 1964 volunteered for Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Her feminism took shape in 1968 through consciousness-raising groups linked to New York Radical Women. In 1970 she organised a sit-in at the offices of Ladies' Home Journal, a magazine criticised for being edited by a man. She then spent four years researching rape, from ancient law codes to newspapers, films and crime statistics. Her central argument was that rape is a deliberate means of intimidation that keeps all women in a state of fear. Some feminists, including bell hooks and Angela Davis, objected to how the book handled race.

The book helped push for changes in laws and public attitudes about rape. Time named her one of its women of the year in 1975, and the New York Public Library chose the book in 1995 as one of the hundred most important books of the twentieth century. Her work found a new readership with the MeToo movement in 2017. She died in New York on 24 May 2025.