When she published Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape in 1975, Susan Brownmiller, who has died aged 90, could not have imagined how controversial her book would be across the political spectrum. Against Our Will revolutionised attitudes to rape, and was also the catalyst for change in laws on sex crime.
In it, Brownmiller described rapists as “frontline masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known”, and stated: “Man’s discovery that his genitalia 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.”
