Susan Brownmiller

"Those of us who planned the Ladies’ Home Journal sit-in understood that there was something essentially hilarious about 200 women sitting in at a women’s magazine and claiming it didn’t reflect the interests of women.”

Susan Brownmiller was born in Brookyn, and attended Cornell University.  Galvanized by the 1960 southern sit-ins, she joined CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality).  She worked at Newsweek as a researcher in 1963-4 and volunteered for the Mississippi Summer Project (now called Freedom Summer) in 1964.

Brownmiller was working fulltime as a writer for ABC-TV News and freelancing for the Village Voice, when the feminist movement began.  She saw the power of consciousness-raising and wrote about abortion rights. She organized the Ladies Home Journal sit-in (1970), helped organize the New York Radical Feminist speak-out and conference on rape in 1971, then started a book on rape, which would take four years to complete, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975). Her other books include:  Shirley Chisholm, a biography for children (1970), Femininity (1984), Waverly Place, a novel (1989), and In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (1999) on the women’s movement.