BROWNMILLER'S BIG CHANCE

"I'm grateful to the Movement for giving me a channel, a constructive way to use my rage," says Susan Brownmiller, 40, a veteran journalist and one of the brightest and angriest of America's feminists.

Brownmiller lives alone in an "early bourgeois" Greenwich Village apartment, leads a spartan, work-centered life and has no hobbies. A native of Brooklyn, Brownmiller attended Cornell, leaving before graduation to study acting in Manhattan. She appeared in two off-Broadway plays and worked as a Newsweek researcher. Studying nights at the Jefferson School of Social Science, she took a course taught by Herbert Aptheker, the American Communist historian and specialist in Southern studies. In the historian's thunderous lectures on white exploitation of Southern blacks, including the abuse of black women, Brownmiller recalls, "I heard for the first time in my life that rape was a political act." She joined the civil rights movement, working two years in Mississippi as a summer volunteer. After a brief stint as a TV reporter in Philadelphia, she signed on as a Village Voice staff writer.

In the late '60s, she was invited to one of the first feminist groups in New York. At the session were Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis and Robin Morgan, now all familiar names in feminist circles. "All of a sudden I knew I was home," says Brownmiller. "I knew I was where I belonged." As a member of the New York Radical Feminists, she was a prime mover behind two major feminist meetings: a conference on prostitution and a 1971 speak-out on rape. Laying out the program on rape, she thought, "My God, I'm organizing a book!"

She thought the book would take six months to research and six to write. Instead, it took four years. Says Brownmiller: "The years of apprenticeship had been for this one chance, this one crack at it. Whatever I've been in my life is in that book."

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