Brownmiller was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Mae and Samuel Warhaftig, a lower-middle-class Jewish couple.
[2] Her father emigrated from a Polish shtetl[2] and became a salesman in the Garment Center and later a vendor in Macy's department store, and her mother was a secretary in the Empire State Building.
I can argue that my chosen path – to fight against physical harm, specifically the terror of violence against women – had its origins in what I had learned in Hebrew School about the pogroms and The Holocaust.
[9] In 1972, Brownmiller signed her name to the Ms. campaign “We Have Had Abortions” which called for an end to "archaic laws" limiting reproductive freedom; they encouraged women to share their stories and take action.
[14] In New York, she began writing for The Village Voice and became a network TV newswriter at the American Broadcasting Company, a job she held until 1968.
[3] Against Our Will (1975)[15] is a feminist book in which Brownmiller argues that rape "is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.
[citation needed] The book also received criticism from feminists, including bell hooks and Angela Davis, who wrote Brownmiller's discussion of rape and race became an "unthinking partisanship which borders on racism".
[19] Brownmiller won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship[25] in 1973 to research and write about the crime of rape.
"[28] "I would like to be in close association with a man whose work I respect," she told an interviewer in 1976, attributing her unmarried status to the fact that she was "not willing to compromise.