[In the following review, Winslow asserts that In Our Time makes a significant contribution to the available literature on the history of the women's movement.]

Susan Brownmiller is one of the best-known pioneers of the radical women's liberation movement. An early activist in New York Radical Women, she was a leading organizer of some of the first, groundbreaking actions—the sit-in at Ladies Home Journal, the Speak Outs on abortion and rape, the battered women's movement and the campaigns against prostitution and pornography. In Our Time is an exciting, partisan, unapologetic, contentious and welcome contribution to the growing literature about the women's liberation movement, much of which is memoir (Karla Jay's Tales of the Lavender Menace and The Feminist Memoir Project, edited by Rachel Blau du Plessis and Ann Snitow, to name just two). In an attempt to “recapture a vivid piece of radical history that changed the world,” Brownmiller says she wrote this book “with a sense of urgency because I could see that much of the movement's story had already been lost or distorted.”

Brownmiller reminds us of the bad old days when Help Wanted columns were divided into Male and Female (the latter being the dead-end jobs), when abortion was illegal, when there were no words to describe sexual harassment, when rape was a woman's fault and when marriage was the only acceptable (read ladylike) profession, when women, if divorced, were socially ostracized and denied credit, and if married, needed a husband to countersign most legal documents. Using her journalistic skills, Brownmiller takes you into the meeting rooms, living rooms, storefronts, picket lines, Mother Courage restaurant, Full Moon Rising Coffee House and consciousness-raising sessions of the early radical women's liberation movement.

The book is full of anecdotes about the movement's origins and activities. Because she was at the center of that movement, she knows and worked with all the feminist leaders. For those who never heard of or met Kathie Amatniek/Sarachild, Naomi Weisstein, Jo Freeman, Carol Hanisch, Lucinda Cisler, Ros Baxandall, or Shulamith Firestone, Brownmiller brings them to life. She generously credits theorists like Anne Koedt (“Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm”), Patricia Mainardi (“The Politics of Housework”) and the Boston Women's Health Collective (Our Bodies, Ourselves).

There are vivid portrayals of movement stars: Kate Millett, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Ellen Willis, Rita Mae Brown, Shere Hite, Jill Johnston, Charlotte Bunch, Jane Alpert, Flo Kennedy, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Robin Morgan, Alix Kates Shulman and Gloria Steinem. For a movement that has been characterized as humorless, Brownmiller's memoir captures the fun and joy of the daring Miss America protest, the WITCH hexes of bridal fairs, the celebrated sit-in at the Ladies Home Journal, the ogle-ins and the women's dances. At the same time, she details the intensity of the debates, the arguments, the polemics, the splits, the denunciations, the trashings, the jealousies, the oversized egos, the frail egos that characterized this movement. Jane Galvin-Lewis dismissed the splits and schisms in the National Black Feminist Organization as “just oppressed people's bickering.” Gloria Steinem, often at the center of controversy, once whispered in Brownmiller's ear, “We're lucky this is the women's movement. In other movements they shoot each other.” In attempting to understand the movement's internal combustion, Brownmiller argues, “Like most utopian visionaries at war with the world, they lacked the flexibility and the practical skills to triumph on the larger stage they had brought into creation.”

Many historians, journalists and political pundits, left, right and center, male and female, have spent a great deal of time trying to distort the women's movement. Brownmiller counters the portrayal of an elitist, all-white, mother-hating, children-hating, housewife-hating, man-hating, sex-hating, ageist, lesbian-yet-homophobic movement by chronicling the diversity of its members and their activities. Having been involved with and now writing about the women's liberation movement in Seattle, I find much of the historical writing about the women's movement too focused on a few East Coast cities. While succumbing to New York chauvinism—“New York represented the roiling center of pure feminist theory (in opposition to Chicago and Washington's socialist/feminist/anti-imperialist vision)”—Brownmiller discusses feminist activities and introduces us to unknown women's liberation activists in Seattle, Denver and Austin. (Disclosure: In order to broaden the scope of the book, she contacted me to get names of people in the movement in Seattle. For this, she thanks me in the Acknowledgments.)

Brownmiller believes that no movement “agonized more, or flailed itself harder, over its failure to attract vast numbers of women of color.” Like many other early feminists, she gained her first political experience in the civil rights movement, working as a summer volunteer in Mississippi, an experience that made her and others very race-conscious. Pam Allen, another early activist, wrote a “Memo to My White Sisters,” warning that “we will lose our chance of finding our humanity” if the women's movement cannot make “alliances among poor black women.” But as Brownmiller shows, women of color such as Flo Kennedy, Pat Robinson, Francis Beale, Cellestine Ware and Eleanor Holmes Norton were present at the creation and played central, albeit unacknowledged, roles in political activity and the development of feminist theory. Brownmiller believes that the repeated flagellation among white women over the issue of race “was born of feminine insecurity, that middle-class white women had no right to make any demands for themselves, or to achieve something of political importance of their own. Black women did come into the movement singly, and sometimes, although rarely, they came in groups. Burdened by two distinct forms of oppression—three when the voices of black lesbian feminists began to be heard—they never forgot their divided loyalties, and how could they.” But in spite of all its problems, Brownmiller concludes that “no other movement in our lifetime achieved such broad based societal changes that cut across so many class and racial lines.”

Brownmiller's 1975 book, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, made her a movement superstar. The chapters about writing the book and its impact are some of the most fascinating, especially in light of late eighties and early nineties feminiphobia—for example, attempts by Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe to trivialize the women's movement's campaign against rape. Despite anti-feminist attacks by neo-conservative pundits and evolutionary psychologists, Against Our Will continues to be the definitive, albeit controversial, book on the subject.

Preparing to write this review, I reread Against Our Will, in particular the chapter on race. Writing about Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old black youth lynched in Money, Mississippi, for whistling at a white woman, Brownmiller had enraged readers when she asserted that Till and his murderers had something in common—the idea that white women were white men's property. I still gasp at her words: “We are rightly aghast that a whistle could be the cause for murder, but we must accept that Emmett Till and J. W. Milam shared something in common. They both understood that the whistle was no small tweet of hubba hubba or melodious approval for a well turned ankle.” The whistle was “the last reminder to Carolyn Bryant that this black boy, Till, had in mind to possess her.”

Brownmiller came under intense attack from a wide range of feminists and anti-racist activists for her analysis. Unfortunately, she seems impervious to 25 years of critique of both “old” and “new” left positions on rape, race and gender, and to important theoretical studies intersecting race, class, gender, hierarchies of power and domination. Equally unfortunate, she dismisses those who disagree with her analysis of rape, race and gender as inflexible and dogmatic leftists.

She is equally unreflective about the debate over pornography, never really discussing and drawing out the myriad implications of her anti-pornography stance. In some areas anti-porn feminists played into the hands of real estate developers. For example, Diane Feinstein, then mayor of San Francisco, “speaking out against the Kearney Street Blight, how it was bad for San Francisco's image,” supported Women Against Violence in Pornography and the Media (WAVPAM). Anti-porn activists found themselves in alliances with the police and religious moralists, none of them ever particularly sensitive to women's issues, who saw themselves as protectors of women and guardians of their morality.

More analysis and reflection would have strengthened the book. How did feminism inform Brownmiller's life? Did she take the principles of feminism into her relationships with family, friends, lovers, colleagues? She says almost nothing about this here: I got a greater sense of who she is personally from a recent article in The New York Times about her Saturday night poker game.

Political reflection and analysis would engage readers, especially those who would like to find their own connection to the women's liberation movement. Brownmiller needs to write more about the present state of feminism as well as its legacy. How did a feminist analysis of pornography and sexual harassment, even our slogan, “the personal is political,” become co-opted by the right wing, especially in light of the Clinton scandals? Given the intense, sororicidal political fights Brownmiller chronicles, what have we learned about our political behavior? Can we create radical feminist organizations and institutions without the personal carnage? Or is there something intrinsic about feminists and feminist activity and organization that leads to bitterness and burnout? How did institution-building affect radical feminist militancy? For example, the creation and maintenance of rape crisis centers and battered women's shelters meant that feminists found themselves having to make alliances and work with the (patriarchal) state apparatus—police departments, state and federal legislators, judges and social workers. What have we learned? What could be done differently? What has been the effect of women entering in and working within the Democratic Party? I think that has had as much of an impact on the decline of feminist militancy as the debate over pornography.

Reminding us of the women's movement's great triumphs—“the absolute rightness of the feminist vision”—Brownmiller fails to recognize that even today, rightly or wrongly, many women activists still see feminism as a white women's movement. I wonder whether she fully appreciates how class, race and nationality intersect with gender. She still believes that feminism can speak with one voice: “Of course it is wildly unrealistic to speak in one voice for half the human race, yet that is what feminism always attempts to do, and must do.” She has nothing to say about the global dimensions of the women's movement. While she may believe the movement in the United States is moribund, it is not true elsewhere, as the 1995 women's conference in Beijing demonstrated.

The book is a bit of a hybrid. It is not a memoir in the accepted sense of the word, for it lacks the requisite introspection and reflection. Nor is it a conventional history, for Brownmiller writes from the “partisan vantage point of a participant-observer.” Wisely, she decided not to claim that she is writing either a or the history of the radical women's liberation movement, too difficult an undertaking at this present time given its size and decentralization. In Our Time focuses on how feminist activism created feminist theory. Brownmiller's great achievement is to give the reader a sense of the transformative joy of living through and participating in one of the major social movements of the last fifty years.