''Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape'' is a 1975 book about

rape Rape is a type of sexual assault involving sexual intercourse, or other forms of sexual penetration, carried out against a person without consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority, or against a person ...

Susan Brownmiller Susan Brownmiller (born Susan Warhaftig; February 15, 1935 – May 24, 2025) was an American journalist, author, and feminist activist, best known for her 1975 book '' Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape'', which was selected by The New ...

, in which the author argues that rape is "a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear."

Summary

Brownmiller criticizes authors such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing,

Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies seen as originating fro ...

Karl Marx Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...

, and

Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''.Clinton Duffy and others. She discusses rape in war, challenges the Freudian concept of women's rape fantasies, and compares it to the gang

lynching Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged or convicted transgressor or to intimidate others. It can also be an extreme form of i ...

s of

African Americans African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa ...

by white men. This comparison was used to show how lynching was once considered acceptable by communities, and then attitudes changed, followed by changed laws; Brownmiller hoped the same would happen with rape.

Reception

''Against Our Will'' is credited by some with changing the public outlook and attitudes about

. It is cited as having influenced changes in law regarding rape, such as state criminal codes that required a corroborating witness to a rape, and that permitted a defendant's lawyer to introduce evidence in court regarding a victim's prior sexual history. Mary Ellen Gale wrote in ''

The New York Times Book Review ''The New York Times Book Review'' (''NYTBR'') is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times'' in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely rea ...

'' that ''Against Our Will'' "deserves a place on the shelf next to those rare books about social problems which force us to make connections we have too long evaded, and change the way we feel about what we know." The book was included in the "Women Rise" category of the

New York Public Library The New York Public Library (NYPL) is a public library system in New York City. With nearly 53 million items and 92 locations, the New York Public Library is the second-largest public library in the United States behind the Library of Congress a ...

's Books of the Century. The critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt gave the book a mostly positive review in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'', noting that Brownmiller "organized an enormous body of information into a multipurposed tool" that gave a program for modernizing rape laws while considering the treatment of rape in war overly detailed and numbing. Others have taken a more critical view of the work. Gay scholar John Lauritsen dismissed ''Against Our Will'', calling it "a shoddy piece of work from start to finish: ludicrously inaccurate, reactionary, dishonest, and vulgarly written."

Angela Davis Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of ...

argued that Brownmiller disregarded the part that black women played in the anti-lynching movement and that Brownmiller's discussion of rape and race became an "unthinking partnership which borders on racism". Brownmiller's conclusions about rapists' motivations have been criticized by the anthropologist Donald Symons in '' The Evolution of Human Sexuality'' (1979), and by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer in '' A Natural History of Rape'' (2000). The historian

Peter Gay Peter Joachim Gay ( né Fröhlich ; June 20, 1923 – May 12, 2015) was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for ...

wrote that ''Against Our Will'' "deserves pride of place among (rightly) indignant" feminist discussions of rape, but that Brownmiller's treatment of

is unfair. The critic

Camille Paglia Camille Anna Paglia ( ; born April 2, 1947) is an American academic, social critic and Feminism, feminist. Paglia was a professor at the University of the Arts (Philadelphia), University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1984 until ...

called ''Against Our Will'' well-meaning, but nevertheless dismissed it as an example of "the limitations of white middle-class assumptions in understanding extreme emotional states or acts." The behavioral ecologist John Alcock wrote that while Brownmiller claimed that no zoologist had ever observed animals raping in their natural habitat, there was already "ample evidence" of forced copulations among animals in 1975, and that further evidence has accumulated since then. In 2015, ''

Time Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...

'' described this thesis as "startling," and called ''Against Our Will'' a "convincing and awesome portrait of men's cruelty to women."

References

External links

* {{authority control 1975 non-fiction books American non-fiction books Books about rape English-language non-fiction books Feminist books Radical feminist books Feminism and sexuality Second-wave feminism in the United States Simon & Schuster books