SOURCE: Cunningham, Ann Marie. “Spotlight on Rape.” Progressive 40, no. 1 (January 1976): 52–53.

In the following positive review, Cunningham asserts that Against Our Will provides important information on the role of rape in human history.

Susan Brownmiller wrote this remarkable, prickly book [Against Our Will], the first history of rape, because she changed her mind. A woman who always walked quickly and carried a confident look, a civil libertarian whose sympathies went out to the accused, Brownmiller had to hear victims' testimonies at a 1970 public speak-out before she stopped believing that if women were raped, it was their own fault. She realized then that the physiological truism that women can be raped but cannot rape, has meant that although few men are rapists; the threat of “the one crime” has cut across age, race, class, and time to chill and circumscribe all women's lives. Basically a violent means of overpowering and...