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+--- Thread: In Our Time, by Susan Brownmiller (/showthread.php?tid=1343)
In Our Time, by Susan Brownmiller - ptittle - Jul 2 2025
In In Our Time, Susan Brownmiller, the author of the ground-breaking Against Our Will tell what it was like, the second-wave feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Highly recommended.
p2 re jobs for men and women
p5-6 what it was like before abortion was legal
“Women the world over are required to modify their behavior because of things that men fear and do.” p13
p35-39 the Miss America event
(I was reading this chapter the day I paddled past a group of young people having fun on the beach, one young woman wearing a thong ‘bathing suit’ – I almost pulled over to say something, but my god, where to begin; a week later, I paddled past the same spot, similar group, the young men in board shorts—not codpiece thongs—having lots of fun splashing around and swimming, the young women almost naked and very limited in their movements, walking across the sand in tiny steps as if they’d just learned how to walk, waving their hands as they stepped into the water as if they were afraid … and I got so fucking angry … it was all for nothing, the 60s and 70s, what those women did …it’s like we need to start women’s liberation all over again, start consciousness-raising groups again) (read Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen)
“The personal is political! Housework is political. Abortion is political. Standards of feminine beauty are political. Women’s oppression is political. Sexual satisfaction is political. A re-evaluation of male-female relations is political.” p45
Ruth Hershberger (Adam’s Rib, 1948) must have felt the same way about the 1950s. Again and again and again … how many times do we have to ‘discover’ all this shit??
about Naomi Weisstein, Ph.D. from Harvard, first in her class, “wound up in the tiny psychology department at Loyola after a humiliating round of job interviews punctuated by ‘Who did your research?’ and’ ‘How can a little girl like you teach a great big class of men?’ p51
the same old same old … Women saying simply “Women must take control of our bodies … We must define our own issues. We will take the struggle to our homes, to our jobs, to the streets.” and the men went berserk, screaming “Take her off the stage and fuck her!” “Take off your clothes!” “I’ll go to the streets with you. Down an alley!”
Again with the sexualizing us to reduce us. (Which is why it is sooooo annoying when women voluntarily sexualize themselves.
In the 1970s, Good Housekeeping, Seventeen, and so many others were run by men. In The Ladies’ Home Journal, more than half of the articles were written by men. p83-4
So if you read these magazines, you’re listening to a man telling you how to look, how to act …
So articles you’d never get to read … “How to Get a Divorce”, “How to Have an Orgasm”, What to Tell your Draft-age Son”, “How Detergents Harm our Rivers and Streams” …
“… men speak to woman through the bias of their male supremacist concepts” p85
[…the magazine’ purports to serve the interests of mothers and housewives” but doesn’t provide free daycare facilities on the premises for its employees’ children. p85
And still, 55 years later, so many ads in women’s magazines degrade women.
And still, 55 years later, so many “celebrity articles [are] oriented toward the preservation of youth…” p86
In 1971, an abortion ban challenge, Abele v. Markle, the judge ruled that the 850 plaintiffs lacked legal standing because they were not pregnant and thus had “an inusiufficient personal stake in the outcome” p118 (but read the whole chapter)
unfuckingbelievable.
Roraback had to actually argue that all women of childbearing age had a direct personal stake in the outcome.
…the classic Women’s Liberation position: “Pregnancy to a woman is one of the most determinative aspects of life. It disrupts her body, it disrupts her education, it disrupts her employment, and it often disrupts her entire family life.” p130
“… the internal damage to people’s psyches that resulted from years of conforming to low expectations” p145
“Lester Bernstein, my old boss in Nation … I’d thought he had understood my frustration and boredom. But now he inquired with puzzled sincerity, ‘When you worked here, Susan [Brownmiller] did you have ambition?’ / For two years not a week had gone by without my asking if I could ‘do more’. He hadn’t noticed.” p145-6
So they’re not cruel. They’re just clueless?
Even so, that doesn’t absolve them. If you are in a position of responsibility, you’d better NOT be clueless.
re Shere Hite’s The Hite Report – the all-male sales department hated the book so much, it got a small first printing p254