Word: raped
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dilemma for women is that they are still unlikely to win a rape conviction if they cannot present evidence of a struggle with the rapist, though fighting back may bring mutilation or murder. In an extreme example of this bias, a one-armed Chicago woman who had been raped at gunpoint was asked accusingly by the defense attorney: "Did you even try to grab the gun?" Yet researchers increasingly agree with the feminist advice to fight back unless the attacker is armed. Says Clinical Psychologist James Selkin, director of the Denver General Hospital's Violence Research Unit: "A potential...
Despite the risk, the signs are that more and more women are inclined to fight back. In her book, The Politics of Rape, Diana Russell, a Mills College sociologist, gives a dramatic example of their growing pugnacity: three women-angry at a man who boasted that he had committed rape-sought him out, punched him in the genitals and beat him up. "I'd like to see more women hit back or hit first," said one of the women. "I think women should learn how to use guns, and I think they should carry them in the streets...
Brownmiller, too, insists that it is time for women to fight back. But she is less interested in individual action than in defining the issue politically and forcing society to act. "My purpose in this book has been to give rape its history," she writes. "Now we must deny it a future...
...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...
...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...