In Our Time: Memoir of A Revolution (ISBN 0385314868)

Amazon.com Review:
Susan Brownmiller was a Gucci-clad, 33-year-old writer grappling privately with the decidedly masculine preserve of feature journalism when she attended her first consciousness-raising session in 1968. Her first impression? Oh, brother! But as other women around the room told their stories, they resonated with something deep in Brownmiller's psyche, and when it was time to tell her own--"I've had three illegal abortions"--the ambitious reporter experienced something akin to a road-to-Damascus conversion. Brownmiller's 1975 classic, Against Our Will, changed the nation's perception of rape and turned her into a feminist icon overnight. In Our Time, though, is less an argument for transformation than an encyclopedic look at the forces that shaped the social movement of late-20th-century feminism, from occasional clashes of colorful personalities like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer (who, 30 years later, have a tendency to seem larger than life) to the methodical, often unexciting, day-by-day planning behind the landmark sit-ins, lawsuits, and other headline events. Sisterhood's call to arms was most persuasive when the enemy was economic oppression and the battle cry "equal pay for equal work!" Solidarity was harder to muster, Brownmiller reports, when it came to targeting social injustices, particularly those pertaining to sex. Were Clarence Thomas's raunchy remarks to Anita Hill business as usual or a type of harassment? Was pornography a male counterreaction intended to degrade newly liberated women or an effort to make sexual pleasure available to fantasists of all persuasions? These arguments persist today--and In Our Time reminds us that they must be viewed in historical context. --Patrizia DiLucchio

"The Blood on the Floor was all Mine":
This is a most unusual work: a far-ranging account of a major social movement through the eyes of someone at the heart of the storm. The cast is enormous, with many well known personalities sharing the limelight once again with those whom history has unfortunately forgotten. Brownmiller is as involved and passionate about her cause (and prone to her trademark wiseacre remarks) today as she was then, and has things to say about many of her former compatriots that may cause embarassment. For all that, she has a lot of important thins to say, and I believe that this is an important book, that deserves to be read.

A excellent resource for women's history:
Imagine a time when there was no such phrase as "sexual harassment" yet its practice went on unchecked, a time when there were no domestic violence shelters for battered women, no rape clinics for victims of sexual violence, a time when the classified ads were divided into columns for "Male" and "Female" jobs... "In Our Time" is an excellent first hand account of Susan Brownmiller's experience of the women's movement. She has successfully integrated her own personal experience (as a journalist then as a scholarly writer) with that of her friends and enemies, the movers and shakers of the women's movement. Her work is infinitely readable and having both a scholarly reflection of the sequence of events coupled with her emotional account is riveting. Two major things emerge from this book. First, like most movements the women's movement was intensely grass-roots with all its heated emotions and disorganization. Made up (with a few exceptions) of young women, initial efforts at organization suffered from awkward leadership and infighting. Second, nevertheless, the issues women were fighting for struck such a chord across America that eventually the movement was comprised of women from all races and backgrounds - resulting in the successful passage of important legislation. Brownmiller's book would be an excellent addition to a women's history collection - one warning though, there are a ton of names of movement leaders peppered throughout the book and someone new to the history might be confused initially. A reading of a more scholarly book might be a good preface. Thanks Susan for a super book!

Essential, readable history of how women changed the world:
Many of the accomplishments of the feminist movement are now banal: the acknowledgement that sexual harassment is a real phenomenon, the acceptance of the principle of equal work for equal pay, the idea that women have rights in bed...Susan Brownmiller reminds us that until recently this wasn't the case and gives us her first-hand version of how these struggles resulted in a better reality for women today. She tells us about the early genesis of the movement and its links to the civil rights struggle, the anti-Vietnam war movement, and the New Left; and how in a short time it emerged a distinct force of its own. Descriptive and analytic without ever being polemical or strident, Brownmiller also describes her own role in the movement with candor and humaness -- and with the sense of humour that feminists were often accused of lacking. For those of us on the latter-peripheral end of the 60s and early 70s movement, this is a wonderful summary; and so that we treasure the progress that has been made, it should be read by those who care about social justice and how it is achieved.

Substantial and chatty at once:
Like the rest of the world I was fammillar with Ms. Brownmiller through her 1975 classic on rape, I was previously unaware to this time, the extent to which she had been involved in the feminist movement. Certainly, with Rosalyn Baxendal/Linda Gordon and Ruth Rosen, there is no shortage of insider accounts of the women's liberation movement, but this book manages to take the reader--whatever their perspective on feminism---to a deeper level than the other two. Aside from some clearly defensive behavior towards Gloria Steinem's popularity and past involvement with a Helsinki festival (Brownmiller uses emotion-ladden words to infer Steinem knew exactly how shady her actions were--but did it anyway) the book is impartially written and balanced, not an easy task when chronicling your own victories. Because the names mentioned in this book may be unfammilar to a large number of Americans, this book could have wound up as an enlarged ego trip, but name dropping is balanced with clear examples of street actions and demands. It would have been much easier to write off or down play the erractic behavior of some of the media-annointed (many of the early groups with New Left refugees rejected a hierarchy in favor of collective consensus) leaders of the women's movement, but Brownmiller sympathetically and crtically examines their contributions to the larger goal of eradicating sexism. As far out as some of these women were, their flamboyant media personalities were in retrospect what the movement needed to have impact long after the male left was delegitimized.

Born just enough too late:
This was the most memorable book of my summer reading list. I loved it. Susan Brownmiller has thought carefully and insightfully about feminism's herstory. The little gems she recalls, like the (reluctant) appearance of 'feminist media stars' on particular television shows, grounds the larger story she is trying to tell. These little moments give the grander story that she is trying to tell a richness and an intensity that is unlike most histories (whether they are about feminism or any other movement). I know that the patterns and shifts that Brownmiller describes could only have been identified and interpreted with the passage of time. Still, I left the book with a sadness because I was born just enough too late to enjoy the heady days of feminism that she recounts in these pages. I am grateful that she left me convinced it was worth continuing to fight in the (vapid) post-feminist age that we are supposed to be living in now. I shall return to her words when I need a refill of feminist energy.