In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution Kindle Edition

No one should write a history of the Women's Liberation feminist era without reading all this book's details that generously attribute origins of many vanguard ideas and actions to the right women. However, since it is only one person's memoir, history writers need to also go to archived newspapers and group documents available at Duke University, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe and the NYU Tamiment Library and if they are alive interview women mentioned in this book before writing their histories. Also the bra-burner attribution came about not because of pre-Miss America Pageant protest publicity--that did get the press there to put Women's Liberation on the map--but because major newspapers like the New York Times reported AFTERWARDS that bras were burned when they clearly Knew they were not.

The Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970s changed the Western world, and its ideas are finally catching hold in the rest of the globe although we have a long way to go, to put it mildly. "In Our Time" traces the political activism that brought to light such key issues as abortion rights, rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, and more-- deeply systemic societal problems that could not have been addressed by earlier feminist generations. Techniques employed by the WLM included consciousness raising in small groups, public speakouts, 24-hour crisis centers, safe shelters, legislative initiatives, and a juggernaut of books ranging from intellectual theory to popular novels that were embraced by the reading public.

From the visionaries to the popular leaders, from the unexpected joys of newfound sisterhood to the bitter, probably unavoidable inner-movement quarrels, "In Our Time" paints a vivid picture of a momentous decade of lasting revolutionary change. This is what a movement looks like, from an organizer and theoretician who was there.

I was a very active feminist in the period described in this book, albeit in Arkansas, where the politics were much less leftist "movement." Still, I remember the issues, arguments, and activities vividly described in this book. I should add, I met Susan at a speech which I helped organize. She is every bit as straightforward and, well, nice, in person as she is in the book.

good book, bit left out many aspects of inner city experiences. More of the Ms. magazine version of womens’ groups. Still a good read.

Susan Brownmiller (born 1935) is an American feminist journalist, author, and activist; she co-founded the “Women Against Pornography” group in 1979. She has written other books, such as Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape,Femininity,Shirley Chisholm,Waverly Place (a novel), etc. [NOTE: page numbers below refer to the 360-page hardcover edition.]

She wrote in the Prologue to this 1999 memoir, “All movements eventually wane and nobody likes to be reminded of past injustices when conditions improve. It is also true that the pell-mell rush of events that got us from there to here… was poorly understood in its time… I set out to write this memoir with a sense of urgency because I could see that so much of that movement’s story had already been lost or distorted… The pages that follow, written from the partisan vantage point of a participant-observer, are my attempt to recapture a vivid piece of radical history that changed the world.” (Pg. 10)

She recalls her attendance at a Consciousness-Raising group: “Saying ‘I’ve had three illegal abortions’ aloud was my feminist immersion in the power of sisterhood. A medical procedure I’d been forced to secure alone, shrouded in silence, was not ‘a personal problem’ any more than the matter of my gender in the newsroom was ‘a personal problem.’ My solitary efforts to forge my own destiny were fragments of women’s shared, hidden history, links to past and future generations, pieces of the puzzle of sexual oppression… I learned that I was not alone.” (Pg. 7)

Working in the movement, she acknowledges, “The failure to attract poor black women, or poor Hispanic women, or ‘ghetto women,’ or ‘welfare women,’ would be used as a club against Women’s Liberation by its critics with numbing consistency for the next thirty years. Yet no other movement in our lifetime achieved such broad-based societal changes that cut across so many class and racial lines.” (Pg. 33-34)

She recalls, “I have to admit that after my first flush of enthusiasm, my attendance at New York Radical Women was sporadic. In truth, the early meetings weren’t feminist enough for me… So, for other reasons, was Betty Friedan. I remember the night the author of The Feminine Mystique and the founder of NOW arrived in her trademark long skirt and high-heeled boots to brave the generation gap and take notes on this scruffy, unladylike phenomenon called Women’s Liberation. As the voluble drama swirled around her, she scribbled page after page in a spiral notebook, alternating her labors with vigorous shakes of her head: No, No, No!’” (Pg. 48-49) Later, she adds, “Her stormy marriage was coming apart. The insiders in NOW compared notes on her drinking and the knock-down-drag-out fights she had with [husband] Carl that left her with shiners on several occasions.” (Pg. 70)

She summarizes, “I can attest that in New York City during the late sixties and early seventies, nothing was more exciting, or more intellectually stimulating, than to sit in a room with a bunch of women who were working to uncover their collective truths.” (Pg. 80)

She recounts her invention of the term “lavender herring” as a counterpart to Friedan’s fears of a “Lavender Menace.”: “I was proud of that invented phrase, ‘lavender herring.’ In political usage a red herring is a smokescreen or a diversion from the issue at hand, and the issue at hand… was the feminist movement. Conjecturing that ‘lavender menace’ owed its inspiration to ‘the Red Menace,’ I played with Friedan’s color scheme to poke fun at her fear. I did not anticipate that some lesbians in the movement would read ‘lavender herring’ … as a scathing putdown, or that what I considered a cute turn of phrase would come back to haunt me.” (Pg. 82)

She says of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, “my heart leaped at the book’s opening chapters… [The book] was strong on economic injustice, scathing in its analysis of male hatred. Further into the text I experience doubt. It was apparent to me that as much as Greer thrilled to the vision of bedding down men in multiples while retaining her personal autonomy, she did not particularly like or respect women. Neither did she believe in organized movements. Hers was a personal, idiosyncratic declaration of independence, true to her anarchist-libertarian ideals. The woman went out of her way to scatter shots across the wide bow of the American movement…” (Pg. 159)

She reveals that after Friedan was slighted by the National Women’s Political Caucus’s selection of Gloria Steinem rather than her as its delegate to the 1972 Democratic Convention, “Friedan by then was feeling usurped by Steinem, and in her usual manner Betty struck back intemperately… [Steinem] always took the high road in her public responses. Friedan would get her excruciating comeuppance in Ms. magazine, where she would be treated as something akin to a non-person. (NOW, a case of guilt by association, would also be slighted in Ms. as a distant, cooperating entity somewhere off to the side.” (Pg. 168-169)

She explains, “In New York Radical Feminists … Lesbian life was put forward as the new political utopia, free of hampering sex roles and unequal status… but those of us who loved women as friends, not as sexual partners, were upset by the logic and the clamor. We desired to change men, not our sexual orientation. I watched in frustration as heterosexual women left the movement in droves… more from a sense that the movement had exhausted its usefulness for them. They were replaced by newly uncloseted lesbians from all walks of life… I stayed, and developed a lasting reputation in certain lesbian circles as an unregenerate homophobe, an assessment that genuinely distressed me… I thought it was ridiculous to gauge feminist commitment by sexual preference. So did many lesbian feminists, but their voices got lost in the furor of the times.” (Pg. 173)

She states, “I spent the next four years writing ‘Against Our Will’ in the New York Public Library, where the card catalogue had more entries for rapeseed than for rape but the stacks held treasures that could be retrieved if I followed a dim trail of footnotes and trusted my instincts. The book surprised me as it grew… I was finding answers to questions that no one had ever asked before.” (Pg. 204) When the book was nearly done, a member of her local women’s group argued, “Do you have to put your name on your book? … You should take a stand and be the first feminist author to do away with personal ego.” Brownmiller comments, “That night as the movement’s familiar demons of fame and public recognition rose to the surface… I knew I had reached the point of diminishing returns in West Village-One. I never went back.” (Pg. 211-212)

She laments, “This combustible mix---the male left’s disintegration, the expanding popularity and growth of the women’s movement, and the eclipse of some feminist founders who did not take their displacement lightly---imploded during the spring and summer of 1975, plunging the ranks of Women’s Liberation into vicious internecine battles at the very moment of its greatest success. Rifts, accusations, and countercharges pitted woman against woman with an ugliness and intensity few of us had experienced before.” (Pg. 227) She also recounts the attempts by the Redstockings and Friedan to paint Steinem as a CIA agent (pg. 237-238, 241-242).

She says of Andrea Dworkin, “Saturday evening culminated in a candlelit ‘Take Back the Night’ march… kicked off by an exhortation by Andrea Dworkin… I dubbed her Rolling Thunder. Perspiring in her trademark denim coveralls, she employed the rhetorical cadences that would make her both a cult idol and an object of ridicule a few years later. Dworkin’s dramatized martyrdom and revival-tent theatrics never sat well with me, but I retained my respect for her courage long after I absented myself from the pornography wars.” (Pg. 301-302) Later, she adds, “There had been an innocent bravery to the anti-pornography campaign in the beginning… But the innocence was soon submerged in a tide of philosophical differences and name-calling. Movement women were waging a battle over who owned feminism… and plainly on this issue no trademark existed. Ironically, the anti-porn initiative constituted the last gasp of radical feminism. No issue of comparable passion has arisen to take its place.” (Pg. 325)

She concludes, “My conflict with the battered-women’s advocates … came at the close of a decade that had begun with the debilitating pornography wars. It was the code that marked my decision to retreat as a public spokesperson in the feminist cause. Radical movements that are past their peak often latch on to sectarian quarrels fought with the passion of earlier times, but the new social contract we had brought into being … required reasoned analysis, not passionate oratory… the victories had been sufficient for the majority of women to desire a less confrontational, more peaceable time. We had moved into a holding pattern. Put simply, feminist theory had gone as far as it could go in the twentieth century.” (Pg. 329)

Much more than simply a personal “memoir,” Brownmiller’s book is a veritable history of the women’s movement, and is told in an open, honest, and always engaging way. It will be “must reading” for anyone wanting to know more about the history of the “Second Wave” movement.