This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 35, Summer 1997.
Susan Brownmiller’s classic history of rape, Against Our Will, has long been the target of criticism for its alleged essentialism and racism. Stevi Jackson reassesses her own response to the book, takes on some of its critics, and asks whether others read the same book.
When Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will was published in 1975, it was a book I had to own. I wasn’t prepared to wait for the paperback, but instead spent a large chunk of my meagre income on the hardback edition. It was neither the first feminist statement on rape (it post-dates Susan Griffin’s article ‘The All American Crime’ by three years) nor the first book — Andrea Media and Kathleen Thompson’s Against Rape was published in 1974. It was, however, the most comprehensive feminist treatment to have been published at that time, and in its breadth and scope has yet to be surpassed.
Against Our Will is a staggeringly ambitious book, the product of four years of intensive research. It is nothing less than a history of rape and its regulation from pre-history to the present day, taking in times and places as far apart as Ancient Greece and Palestine, Medieval Europe, Bangladesh and Zaire in the twentieth century as well as the USA from the War of Independence to the 1970s. It is difficult to imagine anyone undertaking such an enterprise today. Feminists have become much more cautious about the dangers of sweeping cross-cultural and historical comparisons, much more reluctant to stray beyond the boundaries of our expertise, and habitually anxious about the criticisms other feminists might make of our work if we fail to carefully qualify every statement we make.
That the book exists at all is a testimony to the energy of early second wave feminism, the pressing need we felt to uncover the causes of women’s oppression and the confidence the movement gave women in undertaking such difficult pioneering work. The book was directly inspired by Susan Brownmiller’s experience of activism. In explaining how she came to write it, she says: ‘I wrote this book because I am a woman who changed her mind about rape’ (p 9). She recalls her initial reluctance to see rape as feminist issue and how her views were changed through her involvement in the women’s movement. From seeing rape as a ‘a sex crime, a product of a diseased deranged mind’ she came to see it as a political crime, a crime against women.
This is the central message of the book, giving it a clear political purpose: to explain why rape is a central issue for feminists, and to argue that this is not an inevitable fact of human nature, but a product and expression of patriarchal power. Rape is, according to Brownmiller, ‘nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear’ (p 15).
Finding Fault
Against Our Will has attracted a great deal of criticism — bell hooks and Angela Davis both accuse Brownmiller of colluding with racism and almost everyone with an interest in having a go at radical feminism has dismissed it as essentialist (seeing men as having an inbuilt urge to subjugate women), universalist (making sweeping generalisations across cultures and histories) and reductionist (reducing women’s subordination to a single cause).
I wanted to write this reappraisal in part to defend Brownmiller against some of her critics — particularly those whom I felt had misrepresented her. However, I found this to be a more complex task than I had anticipated. Before I began re-reading the book I was unsure what I would make of Brownmiller’s position on racism from today’s perspective. I felt far more confident that I could counter those who had accused her of essentialism, that here her critics were simply wrong. What I had taken away from my early reading on the book was a strong sense of rape as rooted in social relations rather than being a product of men’s natures. I found, however that my own memories of the book were not entirely accurate, that Brownmiller had not been as quite as grossly misrepresented as I had thought — but she has still been seriously misrepresented. She does, at some points in her argument, lay herself open to the charge that she assumes an inbuilt male urge to dominate women through rape. Elsewhere, however, she suggests that men are not rapists by virtue of their intrinsic nature, but that rape is a product of patriarchal power relations reinforced both ideologically and institutionally. Taking the book as a whole, its logic is on the side of the anti-essentialist position: that rape is not a natural act, but a social and political one. I suspect some of her critics actually object to seeing rape as a political issue, but deflect their criticism to the apparently easier target of essentialism.
Re-reading the book now, more than twenty years after I first read it, I did so with a more critical eye, finding more problems with her argument than I had seen before. This is hardly surprising — it would have been astonishing if, with so many more years of feminist ideas and debate to draw upon, I could find no faults. It is always easy, with hindsight, to be critical of pioneering feminist work, to forget the context in which it was written and to ignore the debts we owe to those who first opened up new areas for feminist analysis. Whatever the flaws in this book, the research Brownmiller undertook provided us with a valuable resource for the further development of feminist analyses of rape.
Rape in history
I will return to some of the specific criticisms of Brownmiller later, but first I want to try to give some sense of the book’s content. Given its sheer size and scope, this is no easy task and I will not attempt a comprehensive summary. Much of the book consists of detailed and meticulously researched case studies of rape in particular cultural contexts. These include: the history of rape in warfare and in riots; rape as a tool of oppression of whole peoples as under slavery and during the subjugation of Native Americans; rape in all male prisons and, most controversially, ‘inter-racial’ rape. Brownmiller also includes a thorough dissection of ‘the police blotter rapist’ — the rapist who comes to the attention of the police — and of research on victims’ responses to rape (she uses the word ‘victims’; the concept of ‘survivors’ had not, at this time, entered the feminist vocabulary). Finally, she discusses, briefly, strategies for fighting back, both individually and collectively.
Brownmiller starts her survey of rape from the dawn of human pre-history, speculating that rape had its origins in the earliest days of hominid evolution, when man’s realisation that ‘his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear’ was ‘one of the most important discoveries of pre-historic times’ (pp 14-15). It is here that her argument is at its shakiest since we cannot possibly know what happened at this time. There are no grounds for stating, as a certainty, that ‘one of the earliest forms of male bonding must have been the gang rape of a woman by a gang of marauding men’ (p 14). Moreover, what we know about variations in patterns of rape in different cultures suggests that hunter-gatherer societies are the least rape-prone. Importantly, suggesting that men rape simply because, back there in the distant past, they discovered that they could undercuts Brownmiller’s attempts to represent rape as a social and political act, since it implies that it is an inevitable part of male human nature — a point of view she seems to deny elsewhere in the book (see pp 391 and 400-401).
Once she moves on to literate and record keeping cultures, Brownmiller is on surer ground. She charts the development of laws on rape from ancient Judaism through medieval British Law to modern times. This history is important since it reveals, very clearly, that the legal regulation of rape began with the assumption that rape was a crime against a man’s property — and we are still living with the consequences of this idea of rape as a property crime.
Following her overview of the history of rape law, Brownmiller begins her careful and graphic cataloguing of instances of rape in various contexts. It makes for grim reading. At the time she wrote the book many people, including feminists, still needed the full horror of rape brought home to them. Brownmiller does this very effectively. In the process she debunks many of the myths with which feminists are now so familiar, but which we often still find ourselves having to de-mystify over and over again. She demonstrates very clearly that rape is not the act of a few crazed psychopaths, that ‘chaste’ women (including nuns) can be raped, that rape can befall any women whatever her age or social status, that women do not ask for it, that accusations of rape are not the result of women who are vengeful, hysterical or who ‘changed their minds afterwards’.
Rape as a War Crime
She first turns her attention to one of the starkest ways in which rape has served as a weapon of intimidation — in warfare. Women have been fair game for conquering armies since the beginning of recorded history. There has been a gradual change in military thinking, though, from the assumption that rape was a just reward for victorious troops to the modern idea that it is a regrettable but inevitable part of war. Rape may now be officially outlawed by international conventions, it may in theory be punishable by military authorities, but rape in major theatres of war is still widespread and it is still used as a systematic method of intimidation. We hardly need reminding of this in the context of recent events in former Yugoslavia. The deliberate use of rape as a weapon of terror is nothing new.
Brownmiller’s examples range from early European wars through the American War of Independence to the World Wars, ending with two examples which were very recent at the time she was writing the book — Bangladesh and Vietnam. After the second ‘world war’ the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals recorded thousands of cases of rape. German Nazi troops raped conquered women with regular brutality, and used rape against the women of communities which harboured resistance fighters (as well as against individual women who resisted Nazism). It was estimated that 20,000 rapes occurred in the first month of the Japanese occupation of Nanking. However, ‘allied’ troops also raped, particularly during their advance into Germany. More recently, between 200,000 and 400,000 Bangladeshi women were raped during the nine month Pakistani occupation of their country in 1971. During the same period, American troops continued to rape and sexually assault Vietnamese women with routine, causal brutality as they had throughout the US involvement in Vietnam. As in all war situations, acts of rape in Vietnam frequently took the form of gang rape, accompanied by other forms of torture and brutality (breasts mutilated, bottles, stakes and other objects thrust into women’s vaginas etc.) and finally, if the woman was not already dead, she was likely to be shot.
Two key themes emerge from Brownmiller’s analysis of rape in war which recur throughout the book. First, that the likelihood of rape increases in situations where men’s patriarchal power is augmented by other power hierarchies. Second, she is aware of the propaganda value of rape atrocity stories — but the fact that such stories are used by one side in a war to demonise the other, does not mean that real rapes do not happen. This is important because the existence of this form of propaganda has often been used to deny or minimise women’s claims to have been raped in war. A similar issue arises, much more controversially in her discussion on interracial rape later in the book.
Patterns and profiles
Another feature of rape in war which recurs in other settings is the tendency for rape to be accompanied by other acts of violence. In discussing ‘police blotter rapists’ — the ones who make it into the official statistics — Brownmiller quotes a study on rape in Sydney which refers to ‘gratuitous acts and extravagant defilements’, particularly in gang rapes, where they served to emphasise the toughness of the rapists and their contempt for women. Other studies also demonstrate that rapists frequently use more force or violence than is needed merely to subdue their victim, that they frequently act in pairs or gangs and that rapes are frequently planned.
Those men prosecuted and convicted for rape are not a random sample of rapists, but they do not conform to the stereotype of the psychopath or the man overcome by momentary lust either. Incomplete though they are, studies based on official crime statistics do much to dispel the popular myths associated with rape. The ‘police blotter rapist’ emerges as a man remarkably similar to other criminals. Young, working class and Black men are over-represented here as they are in other areas of the crime statistics. This does not mean that all rapists fit this profile — only those who are caught. While Brownmiller repeatedly points out that official statistics on rape are not fully representative and should therefore be interpreted with caution, she fails to point out that they are likely to include a systematic bias in the direction of those most likely to be caught, and that respectable white, middle class men can frequently rape without coming to the attention of the police. This is perhaps a surprising omission given that elsewhere Brownmiller draws our attention to the use of rape to reinforce institutionalised male power.
In chapter 8 she points out that while ‘all rape is an exercise in power.. some men have an edge’ because they ‘operate within an institutional setting that works to their advantage and in which a victim has little chance to redress her grievance’. Rape in war and under slavery fall into this category, but there are many more situations in which this occurs. Those covered in this chapter include men’s rape of other men (often young, gay or ‘effeminate’) in prisons, rape by the police, and the sexual abuse of children.
Brownmiller was among the first feminists to raise the issue of the sexual abuse of children. At the time she was writing, there were no national statistics on this crime in the USA. From what evidence was available, she pieces together the picture that has since become so familiar to us, in particular that sexual abuse of children is far more common that is generally believed, is typically ongoing over a period of time rather than being confined to single incidents and is perpetrated by ‘normal’ men known to the child rather than by a tiny population of identifiable ‘perverts’. She also draws our attention to the institutionalised power of fathers over their children, the reluctance of the law to interfere in the ‘private’ world of the family and the concealment of rape and abuse under the heading of ‘incest’. In addressing this issue and the silence which then surrounded it, Brownmiller contributed to the growing feminist understanding of child sexual abuse as a manifestation of male power.
The problem of race
It is Brownmiller’s desire to expose rape as both as an expression of male power and a means of perpetuating it, to demonstrate that any man can rape and any woman can be raped, which leads her into trouble on the issue of race. In my view she was actually more sensitive to racism than most white feminists writing at that time. She was willing to raise the issue and as such demonstrated some awareness of the specific forms of oppression suffered by Black women. However, she does not give systematic attention to the interrelationship between racism and male dominance in the lives of Black women today. This, along with her discussion of interracial rape, is what has angered her critics, particularly bell hooks and Angela Davis.
In Ain’t I a Woman, bell hooks admits that Brownmiller ‘successfully impresses upon readers that white men brutally assaulted Black women during slavery’, but goes on to argue that placing this abuse safely in the historical past effectively denies the ways in which this brutalisation, this casting Black women as whore continues today. Hence the continued devaluation of Black womanhood is at best concealed or at worst colluded with. Brownmiller does talk of the continued rape of Black women after the American Civil War by the Ku Klux Klan and she does, at various points in the book, indicate ways in which Black women continue to be victimised — for example their accounts of rape are less likely to be believed by the police and the courts. However, it is true that Brownmiller does not explicitly or systematically explore the historical continuity of Black women’s experience. This is partly a result of her vignette style, her focus on particular, bounded periods of history. This prevents her from exploring historical continuities other than the all-pervasiveness of rape as a weapon of male domination. In her zeal to inform us of the ubiquity of rape, and the fear of rape, in women’s lives, she neglects the ways in which other forms of systematic oppression intersect with patriarchy, shaping particular women’s experiences in very specific ways.
The most contentious chapter in Against Our Will is entitled is entitled ‘A Question of Race’ in which her focus is interracial rape. The primary object of her analysis here is the rape of white women by Black men, leading hooks to accuse her of seeing this form of rape as more important than any other. I do not think this was Brownmiller’s intention, since the main purpose of this chapter is to explore the role that the idea of Black men raping white women plays in the white male psyche. However, there is a problem here in that Brownmiller characterises this phenomenon as ‘the crossroads of racism and sexism’ (p 255, my emphasis). The other, equally important, side of that intersection is the continued systematic sexual harassment and rape of Black women by white men. Brownmiller thus ignores — and sometimes conceals — the racialised forms of sexism and sexualised forms of racism experienced by Black women.
Angela Davis is even more uncompromising than hooks. In Women, Race and Class she describes Brownmiller’s arguments as ‘pervaded with racist ideas’ (p 178). She sees Brownmiller as fuelling the stereotype of the Black rapist, of playing down lynchings of Black men and the continued likelihood, in a racist state, of their being falsely accused of rape. However, Brownmiller does consider, in some detail, the rough justice dealt to Black men who are accused of rape; from lynching through to due legal process, Black men who are accused of raping white women are punished far more harshly than any other rapists. This, she says, is ‘an incontestable historical fact’ (p 216). She is interested in the reasons for this, the ways in which white men, especially in the South, have been haunted by the spectre of Black men raping ‘their’ women: in other words that the oppressed might rise up and seize their most valued possessions. She calls this ‘the Southern white man’s property code’ and argues that it has been integral to the subjugation of women (white and Black) and Black men.
Brownmiller is also well aware of historical instances of false accusations of rape against Black men, documenting cases where Black men have been charged with white men’s crimes or where white women involved in consensual sex with Black men have cried rape as an act of personal self preservation. Here Davis accuses her of ‘choosing to take the side of white women’ and thus ‘capitulating to racism’ (pp 198-199). While Brownmiller certainly does express sympathy with white women cajoled or coerced into accusing innocent Black men of rape (and sometimes adopts a rather condescending tone towards the latter) she is not, in my view, taking sides in the way Davis implies. Indeed, Brownmiller’s argument is that pitting white women against Black men in this way is politically counter-productive.
Davis argues that accusations of rape and the inevitable lynchings of Black men which followed the end of slavery served to prevent women and Black people from allying to fight their oppression. However, Brownmiller herself is not unaware of this. She points out, however, that this is also the effect of proclaiming white women guilty of victimising Black men through false charges of rape — the line consistently taken by the Left at the time.
By pitting white women against Black men in their effort to alert the nation to the extra punishment wreaked on Blacks for a case of interracial rape, leftists and liberals… drove a wedge between two movements for human rights and today we are still struggling to overcome this historic legacy. Yet the similarities between the types of oppression suffered by blacks and women, and heaped on black women, are more impressive than the antagonisms between us (p 254).
She goes on to argue that lynching and rape serve parallel functions against the two oppressed groups:
as punishment for being uppity, for getting out of line, for failing to recognize ‘one’s place’, for assuming sexual freedom, or for behaviour no more provocative than walking down the wrong road at night in the wrong part of town and presenting a convenient, isolated target for group hatred and rage (pp 254-255).
Brownmiller also makes the point — and this is what Davis finds particularly offensive — that some Black radicals seem bent on fulfilling the stereotype of the marauding rapist of the white man’s nightmares and hence themselves play a part in maintaining the division between Black people and women. She suggests that one way in which Black men have expressed defiance towards white society is by threatening white men’s exclusive rights over ‘their’ women. She takes on those Black radical men who, like Eldridge Cleaver, defined the rape of white women as deliberate ‘insurrectionary act’, a protest against the historical abuse of Black women by white men, an act of revenge. This critique needed to be made in an era when most of the left thought this was a right-on thing to do. It is worth noting in this context that bell hooks also criticises Black male activists who justify having sexual relationships with white women ‘on the grounds that they are exploiting white women like white men exploited black women’ (p 70).
I remember reading Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice when I was a student and knew I was expected to find this Black Panther theorist admirable, despite the unease I felt at his description of his career as a rapist. To challenge the prevailing view of him as a an icon of Black heroism was to risk the charge of racism. Brownmiller took this risk in drawing attention to the way in which Cleaver ‘practised’ being a rapist on Black women until he felt himself ‘smooth enough to cross the tracks’, that his grievance was against white men, yet he punished women (both white and Black) for it. In effect he was acting within the ‘white man’s property code’, treating white women as white men’s property. It ‘delighted’ him, he said, that he was ‘trampling on white man’s law…and that I was defiling his women’ (p 26). Brownmiller over-states her case in implying that Cleaver and others like him were part of a trend towards and increase in ‘interracial rape’, and this is undoubtedly dangerous in a racist society. Nonetheless, she did feminism a major service in saying what had previously been unsayable in radical white circles: that Black men should not be valorised for raping white women in the name of a misguided liberationary politics.
The problem of essentialism
The other major criticism frequently made of Brownmiller is that her argument is essentialist, that she assumes a universal male propensity for rape, that men rape because they have the biological capacity to do so. Yes, there are enough universalising and naturalising statements to have made me wince at regular intervals while re-reading the book. It is unfortunate that the worst of these come right at the beginning of the book, in the dubious assertions about pre-history which I highlighted earlier. This makes her an easy target for critics who, having decided she is irredeemably essentialist, need read no further.
Later in the book, however, Brownmiller provides plentiful arguments for viewing rape as a social act, ‘a societal problem resulting from a distorted masculine philosophy of aggression’ (p 400). She notes that rape is a variable social practice, that there are some recorded societies in which it does not occur (see p 284). To say that she ‘ignores the absence of rape in some societies’, as Lynne Segal claims in Is the Future Female (p 103) is simply not true — although the direction of her polemic makes her focus on situations and cultures where rape is prevalent rather than where it is not.
Brownmiller insists, throughout the book, that rape is not an expression of male sexual needs; indeed that the idea that rape results from uncontrollable sexual impulses is, in her view part of the ideology of rape. She suggests, rather, that rape is supported by ideological and cultural factors, that men learn rape in a culture which treats women’s sexuality as a commodity to be bought sold or seized by force. In other words Brownmiller does exactly what Segal says needs doing (and what she implies Brownmiller does not do): tackles ‘the dominant mythology which sees rape as an inevitable product of male needs’ (p 103). An entire chapter of Against Our Will, entitled ‘The Myth of the Heroic Rapist’ is devoted to this end and it is also central to her arguments on campaigning against rape:
Once we accept as basic truth that rape is not a crime of irrational, impulsive, uncontrollable lust, but a deliberate, hostile, violent act of degradation and possession …we must look towards those elements in our culture that promote and propagandize these attitudes, which offer men, and in particular young, impressionable adolescent males…the ideological and psychological encouragement to commit their acts of aggression (p 391).
Brownmiller does not, then, see rape as a fact of human life, but believes that men could change, that men are not born to rape, that rape could be eradicated. Indeed she even calls for collaboration with men in this crusade in tones I am sure Segal (given her desire not to alienate men) would approve of: ‘the approach must be long range and co-operative and must have the understanding and good will of many men as well as women’ (p 404).
As the passage quoted above indicates, Brownmiller does force us to confront the hatred and contempt for women enacted through rape — and this may be what Segal would prefer not to see. Although Segal recognises that the structure of our society, ‘which have allowed men sexually to abuse women with relative impunity’, she prefers to account for men’s motives for rape in terms of the psychological problems they have in proving their masculinity. According to Segal, rape expresses men’s ‘anger, inadequacy, guilt and fear of women’; it is attributable in part, she says, to ‘the cultural connections which are made between “masculinity” and heterosexual performance’ (p 103). It is rather ironic the Segal criticises Brownmiller for giving insufficient weight to social factors when she herself resorts to such psychologised explanations of male motives.
While Brownmiller emphasises that rape is an enactment of male power, she does not treat this power ‘as reducible to direct sexual coercion of women’ as Segal (p 103) claims. Nor do I think she is intending to offer rape as an overall explanation of women’s oppression — a common interpretation of her work even on the part of those who are more sympathetic to her (see, for example, Sylvia Walby’s Theorizing Patriarchy p 134). She does, however, consider it central to the maintenance of women’s subordination and hence benefiting men in general (not just those who rape). This is because rape acts as a social control mechanism to keep women in their place — a point that been frequently made since in many a sober sociological study. The only points at which she seems to be offering rape as a foundation for the wider subordination is, once again, in the problematic opening to Against Our Will where she suggests that marriage might have originated through women seeking protection from one man against the aggression of other men. Nowhere else in the book does she imply that male domination derives from rape: rather her argument as I read it is that rape serves the cause of male domination.
The final message of the book is a positive one. Its purpose, says Brownmiller ‘has been to give rape its history. Now we must deny it a future’.
Still a classic
Brownmiller’s arguments may be flawed in places, but Against Our Will deserves its place as a feminist classic. Sometimes it is inconsistent and contradictory, as should be clear from the contrast between Brownmiller’s opening, universalising, argument and her later insistence on the social causes of rape. Many, if not all, of the charges brought against her by Black feminists are justified; but while she may have been insensitive to some aspects of racism, she at least had the courage to confront the issue at a time when few other white feminists dared to. There are other omissions and biases too — in particular her unquestioning assumption that heterosexuality is the norm for both women and men. Again this is not unusual in work from the 1970s. For all its faults, however, Against Our Will played a crucial part in furthering feminist analyses of rape. It provided us with a wealth of historical data on the subject and remains, for that reason, an invaluable resource for feminist work in this area. It is a book which still deserves to be read and built upon by feminists today.
References
Susan Brownmiller Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Secker & Warburg, 1975)
Eldridge Cleaver Soul on Ice (Panther Books, 1970)
Angela Davis Women, Race and Class (The Women’s Press, 1982)
bell hooks Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Pluto Press, 1982)
Andrea Medea and Kathleen Thompson Against Rape (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1974)
Lynne Segal Is the Future Female: Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism (Virago, 1987)
Sylvia Walby Theorizing Patriarchy (Blackwell, 1990)