Susan Brownmiller > Quotes

“[Rape is] nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”
― Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape

“Women are all female impersonators to some degree.”
― Susan Brownmiller

“A world without rape would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe for it may turn to weapon with sudden swiftness borne of harmful intent...Rather than society's abberants or"spoilers of purity," men who rape have serves in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorists guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.”
― Susan Brownmiller

“As Beauvoir remarked, “It is not easy to play the idol, the fairy, the faraway princess, when one feels a bloody cloth between one’s legs; and, more generally, when one is conscious of the primitive misery of being a body.”
― Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

“ALL RAPE IS AN exercise in power, but some rapists have an edge that is more than physical. They operate within an institutionalized setting that works to their advantage and in which a victim has little chance to redress her grievance. Rape in slavery and rape in wartime are two such examples. But rapists may also operate within an emotional setting or within a dependent relationship that provides a hierarchical, authoritarian structure of its own that weakens a victim’s resistance, distorts her perspective and confounds her will.”
― Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape

“The tyranny of Venus is felt whenever a woman thinks—or whenever a man thinks and tells a woman—that her hips are too wide, her thighs are too large, her breasts are too small, her waist is too high, her legs are too short to meet the current erotic standard.”
― Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

“Man's discovery that his genetilia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe”
― Susan Brownmiller

“Since femininity in all respects is a matter of containment, a woman whose hair exceeds the esthetic limits of her culture probably will employ some depilatory procedure to bring her body into line.”
― Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

“All rape is an exercise in power (..). Rapists may operate within an emotional setting or within a dependent relationship that provides a hierarchical, authoritarian structure of its own that weakens a victim’s resistance, distorts her perspective and confounds her will.”
― Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape

“Leg hair was not a problem to American women before the 1920s because the legs of most women were never on public view. When a change in attitude toward recreation, fashion and female emancipation during the prosperous, post-war Jazz Age made it socially acceptable for women of all ages and classes to expose their limbs, modesty regarding the propriety of showing legs was transformed with astonishing rapidity into a dainty self-consciousness regarding “unsightly” hair.”
― Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

“Biologically a woman has fewer functional sweat glands than a man and she also has a slightly higher sweating threshold except when pregnant. So women as a rule do perspire less than men, but this minor difference has not been deemed large enough to distinguish the sexes. A lady is not supposed to sweat at all.”
― Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

“The animal-like aspect of body hair, to a very refined sensibility, and the fact that women under detention were denied their razors, undoubtedly led a pioneer criminologist of the nineteenth century named Cesare Lombroso to propose that the body type of the female offender was characteristically hirsute.”
― Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

“Depending on what was available in a given climate, a variety of porous fibers were used (and still are used in most countries) to stanch the monthly blood: makeshift paddings of roots and husks, homemade tampons of wadded paper, cotton or wool, and reusable diapers fashioned from folded lengths of heavy cloth, the shameful, bulky menstrual rags of my grandmother’s generation that were furtively scrubbed in cold water and left to dry in a secret place.”
― Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

“When New York City created a special Rape Analysis Squad
commanded by police- women, the female police officers found
that only 2 percent of all rape complaints were false—about
the same false-report rate that is usual for other kinds of
felonies.
(a a talk given by Judge Lawrence H. Cooke before the Association of the Bar of the City of New York)”
― Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape

“believe lesbian feminists, the angriest of the angry, initially saw unwanted sexual attention by men with greater clarity than their heterosexual sisters and were less of a mind to be persuaded that it was vaguely complimentary or basically trivial. And black women, emerging from a history of slavery, segregation, job discrimination, and sexual abuse, were fighting mad. Doors were beginning to open for them, and then, bam, the same old story, opportunity turning to ashes. The success of race discrimination complaints during this time may have encouraged women of color to pursue their rights in cases of sexual harassment.”
― Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution

“WITCH. The useful acronym stood for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, but it could also mean Women Inspired to Tell their Collective History, Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays, and a host of imaginative variations. Proclaiming that witches were the original female rebels, hounded, persecuted, and burned at the stake because they had knowledge that men wanted suppressed, WITCH devoted itself to hit-and-run guerrilla theater, called “zaps.”
― Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution

“In one year, 1975, thirty states overhauled their rape laws to make them more equitable to victims. Between 1970, when the feminist movement first started to talk about rape, and 1979, when the militance had receded, every state in the union went through a serious reevaluation of its rape codes and made significant adjustments.”
― Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution

“In A Tale of Two Cities Madame Defarge makes sinister use of a nurturant task, her knitting, to implement her vengeance. Childless and driven, she embodies the terrifying excesses of the French Revolution.”
― Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

“Warner records that the one female biological function permitted the Virgin in Christian faith was the act of nursing, yet by the sixteenth century contemporary prudishness and the upper-class custom of employing a wet nurse led to the virtual disappearance from art of the suckling Madonna”
― Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

“According to the classical Greeks, in the perfect female torso the distance between the nipples of the breasts, the distance from the lower edge of the breast to the navel, and the distance from the navel to the crotch were units of equal length.”
― Susan Brownmiller, Femininity