SOURCE: Chesler, Ellen. “Abnormality as a Norm.” New Leader 59, no. 1 (5 January 1976): 16–17.

In the following review, Chesler asserts that the argument in Against Our Will is superficial and contradictory, questioning Brownmiller's use of sources to support her arguments.

Five years ago, while helping to organize a feminist speak-out on rape, Susan Brownmiller made a discovery: Rape could be seen as an extraordinary historical metaphor, a fundamental “way of looking at male-female relations, at sex, at strength, and at power.” Now, after four years of what she describes as grueling and methodical research, she has given us a book [Against Our Will] that jams the facts—against their will—into the Procrustean bed of her original “moment of revelation.”

This is not the definitive “historical analysis” it purports to be. It is a passionate, often angry, sometimes downright nasty treatise on man's historical oppression of woman, an oppression that Brownmiller...