苏珊·布朗米勒

苏珊·布朗米勒（Susan Brownmiller ，1935年2月15日—2025年5月24日） 是一名美国记者、作家和女性主义活动家。

生平

布朗米勒生于纽约布鲁克林区，其父母是一对犹太人夫妇。 她的父亲来自波兰的犹太小镇 ，后来成为梅西百货的供应商，她的母亲则是帝国大厦的一名秘书。

布朗米勒曾在康奈尔大学就读。

布朗米勒支持人民获得公民权利和政治权利，并在1964年的静坐运动期间加入学生非暴力协调委员会。1964年，布朗米勒参加自由之夏。

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 York Public Library as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century.

Early life and education

Susan Brownmiller was born in Brooklyn, New York City, on February 15, 1935, to Mae and Samuel Warhaftig, a lower-middle-class Jewish couple. She was raised in Brooklyn and was the only child of her parents. Her father emigrated from a Polish shtetl and became a salesman in the Garment Center and later a vendor in Macy's department store, and her mother was a secretary in the Empire State Building. She later took the pen name Brownmiller, legally changing her name in 1961.

As a child Brownmiller was sent to the East Midwood Jewish Center for two afternoons a week to learn Hebrew and Jewish history. She would later comment, "It all got sort of mishmashed in my brain except for one thread: a helluva lot of people over the centuries seemed to want to harm Jewish people. ... I can argue that my chosen path – to fight against physical harm, specifically the terror of violence against women – had its origins in what I had learned in Hebrew School about the pogroms and The Holocaust."

She had "a stormy adolescence", attending Cornell University for two years (1952 to 1954) on scholarships, but not graduating. She later studied acting in New York City. She appeared in two off-Broadway productions.

Activism

Brownmiller was a worker in progressive Democrat Mark Lane's successful 1960 campaign for the New York Assembly and his unsuccessful 1962 congressional campaign. They began a relationship which lasted for three years. Brownmiller said of Lane after his death in 2016 that "Mark was a crucial person in my life for a few years. This was before feminism. My ambition was to latch myself to Mark's career and be the Evita of Gracie Mansion".

Brownmiller also participated in civil rights activism, joining CORE and SNCC during the sit-in movement in 1964. Brownmiller volunteered for Freedom Summer in 1964, wherein she worked on voter registration in Meridian, Mississippi. According to her own account:

Jan Goodman and I were in the second batch of volunteers for Mississippi Freedom Summer....When no one else at the Memphis orientation session volunteered for Meridian, Jan and I accepted the assignment. Between us, we had a good ten years of organizing experience, hers in Democratic primaries and presidential campaigns, mine in CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, and both of us together in voter registration drives in East Harlem. The night we arrived in Meridian, a field secretary called a meeting, asking to see the new volunteers. Proudly we raised our hands. 'Shit!' he exploded. 'I asked for volunteers and they sent me white women.'

She first became involved in the Women's Liberation Movement in New York City in 1968, by participating in a consciousness-raising group in the newly formed New York Radical Women organization, where she stated: "I've had three illegal abortions."

Brownmiller went on to coordinate a sit-in against Ladies' Home Journal in March 1970. As the informal leader of the West Village-1 brigade within the New York Radical Feminists (formed in late 1969), by February 1970 she began to mount a challenge to Shulamith Firestone's leadership, which eventually split the organisation and prompted Firestone's departure in late May/early June 1970.

She began work on her book Against Our Will after a New York Radical Feminists speak-out on rape in 1971, and then spent four years researching and writing in the New York Public Library.

In 1972, Brownmiller signed her name to the Ms. campaign “We Have Had Abortions” which called for an end to "archaic laws" limiting reproductive freedom; they encouraged women to share their stories and take action.