Much of what is said in this long, exhausting 1975 book seems like such common sense today that it is easy to forget how radical it was in its time. The extra degree of stridency of many of her points, rhetorically necessary then to break through the myths about rape, now sounds sometimes dated. But it is wrong to hold this against the book just because intense first-generation feminism is now out of fashion. Most of the improvements in societal attitudes and law enforcement concerning rape accrued since the 70’s we owe to this manifesto and the momentum it created.
A very long string of chapters is devoted to review of rape in many key historical eras, particularly in war and U.S. slavery. It’s a seemingly endless, painful slog through repetitious detail, with numerous first-hand accounts of victims, each unique yet all nearly identical. The cumulative impact is to prove like nothing else can the consistent patterns of rape as an exercise of domination throughout human history. Chapters reviewing rape in disparate contemporary settings (by police, in prison, U.S. crime statistics) as well as throughout various mythlogies, make the ubiquity of the pattern almost overwhelming.
The long, thoughtful discussion about the intersection of rape and violence against blacks may be controversial for some, but shouldn’t be if read objectively. She makes the point that the male mind-set of women being tools whose bodies are for mens’ use is so entrenched in all of society that some black liberation leaders of her time, like Eldredge Cleaver, fought back against white oppression by vowing to rape as many white women as possible. This has led some to criticize Brownmiller for placing female liberation above black liberation, but this is manifestly unfair. Pointing out that Cleaver and his ilk planned on “practicing” first on black women, she is highlighting that all women suffer from rape’s oppression, and emphasizing that black women get a double whammy. (Cleaver later recanted this strategy.)
The final section discusses her prescriptions for fixing the problem. The best recommendations, changing what are acceptable attitudes for men and police and a fairness overhaul of the legal treatment of rape, are pretty much what have been applied over the intervening decades, though not completely enough; to me this history just underscores the importance of this work. Her cursory recommendation that women bone up on self-defense, on the other hand, sadly seems to have been translated into arming all crime victims with more guns, if heeded at all.
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