I had the pleasure of sitting down with Claire Potter, author and Professor of History at The New School. Potter is the Co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar, she hosts the podcast Exiles on 12th Street, and she spends her free time writing Political Junkie, a Substack newsletter about politics, culture, media, and higher education. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Politico, Yale Review, AlterNet, Dissent, Eurozine, The Village Voice, Inside Higher Education, and Jacobin. This past summer, Potter published her new book, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, July 7, 2020). Currently, she is researching and writing a biography of journalist and radical feminist activist Susan Brownmiller.
In conversation, we take a deep dive into Potter’s new biography of Susan Brownmiller and issues surrounding social justice discourse. Potter’s motivation for writing about Brownmiller encompasses the notion that “it’s incumbent upon older feminists to step up and help lay the historical groundwork” for younger activists to organize socio-political change. Her work as an author serves to inspire younger generations of feminists and activists to engage with each other and share their ideas through writing.
12TH STREET: Recently, you have been working on a biography of Susan Brownmiller. What led you to choose Susan and her life as a topic?
CLAIRE POTTER: There aren’t enough biographies about feminists, which is sort of surprising because women’s history has been around since the 1970s. I think part of the reason is that not many historians like to do recent history. It’s hard to do recent history. There are a lot of people still alive. There are a lot of people who will disagree with you. On the other hand, doing recent history has a lot of advantages because a lot of people are still alive. I did a lot of research before I wrote my last book about feminist anti-rape and anti-violence projects, and Susan Brownmiller was one of the women who helped me write it. I had worked a little bit in her archive at Harvard University, so when I went on sabbatical, and we had a pandemic, there was a whole other book that I was supposed to be writing. I realized I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t do the research, so I went back into this old research. While I was going through it I thought, “You know, nobody has ever written a biography of Susan Brownmiller, and she basically invented the anti-rape movement.” That book she wrote, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, was just a feminist blockbuster of immense proportions. Not only did it change how the law was enforced, it changed laws. For example, women used to be legally required to talk about their sex lives, talk about what they were wearing, and so on. Susan helped to change all of that, and honestly, there was a big feminist movement behind her. But you needed people like Susan Brownmiller to take feminist ideas to the larger public. I became interested in writing that biography when I realized I had so much material about her. I called her and said, “Susan, you know that book I was working on that you were helping me with? I put it aside, but now I want to write a biography of you.” She was silent for a couple of minutes, and then she said, “Well, you better get started; I’m very old.”
STREET: What are your hopes and intentions for the biography?
POTTER: I think the biography will be useful for a couple of reasons: one is because of how the feminist movement was structured. They had horizontal leadership; they believed in leaderlessness and that everybody’s ideas belonged to everybody. Because of that belief, we don’t have a very clear picture of what particular individuals did and how they moved women’s liberation forward. So I think that’s a really important project. Susan is a part of many written histories of the women’s movement, and people tell the same stories about her over and over again. But nobody has dug into who she was: A working-class girl from Brooklyn whose father was an immigrant and the first person in her family to go to college. She worked her way through college and fought to become a journalist in the 1950s and 1960s when women were not offered these jobs. Then, she helped build the Women’s Liberation Movement with everything that she knew about media.
One thing all historians know is that the Women’s Liberation Movement made powerful use of the media. The question is, how did they know how to do that? And if you look at the evidence, it’s Susan Brownmiller saying, “If you’re going to have an anti-pornography movement, you have to put your office right in Times Square. Not just because that’s where the pornography is, but because Times Square is the center of the media world, and that is where people will notice us.” Here’s a woman without whom the Women’s Liberation Movement would have been a very, very different movement. It wouldn’t have been as powerful or as public as it was. You’re hearing about my reasons for writing the book while at the same time you’re hearing about my hopes for the book, which is that when people read it, they will understand radical feminism differently.
STREET: With sexual assault being such a complicated subject to navigate, what was the drive behind writing and publishing this project now?
POTTER: Well, I think one of the things I’m very informed by is the #MeToo movement. When I talked to my writing group about this book—there were three other women in my writing group and eight men—everybody was very enthusiastic. Then one of the men asked, “So why does this book have to be written now?” I said to him, “The reason why this book has to be written now is we need to know why this shit is still happening fifty years later.” We owe it to younger women to figure out what went wrong there. Now, on the other hand, there are things that can happen now, like you can get the governor to resign because he’s been, you know, groping women. That was unthinkable in the 1970s. Activism in the 1970s laid the foundation for that, but there were other things that it didn’t accomplish. Radical feminism didn’t dislodge the patriarchy. Radical Feminism helped to bring women into the workplace without ever really reforming the workplace. Radical feminism championed divorce without ever being able to change the fact that single women are more likely to fall into poverty after being divorced than any other group. I think Radical feminism had a vision that was only partially realized. In the later chapters of the Brownmiller biography, which takes place in the 1990s and 2000s, I’ll explore how Brownmiller and her sisters watched what they had achieved. It morphed into a kind of popular feminism, a kind of lean-in feminism, where women CEOs were telling other women that all you have to do is be really well organized and go after what you want, and everything’s gonna be fine.
How did the radical Women’s Liberation Movement—which was full of former communists, red diaper babies, people who really, really cared about class—how did that vision for radical working-class feminism disappear? I think younger feminists are owed answers because now they are organizing to change these things again, and they are making great strides. And I think it’s incumbent upon older feminists to step up and help lay the historical groundwork for that.
STREET: Do you have a predicted timeline for this Brownmiller project?
POTTER: Yes, I do. The 50th anniversary of Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape by Susan Brownmiller is in 2025. I want this book to come out in 2025, and I want Against Our Will to get a lot of attention in 2025. I’m talking to Susan about doing a new edition of the book with an introduction, possibly by me, or possibly by feminist writers like Rebecca Traister or Roxane Gay. Or maybe a combination of essays that are packaged with the book. I mean, it’s an interesting text that was very controversial at the time for a variety of reasons. One being there were a lot of men that just didn’t want to read about rape. They either dismissed it or thought it was absurd. On the other hand, there were a lot of women who said, “This is one of the most important books that’s ever been written.” And then another critique has lasted—a critique of the kind of feminism in the book—which, to some extent, demonized Black men. There were passages in the book about Emmett Till, who was lynched at age fourteen for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Brownmiller expressed her horror at Till’s lynching but also asked the reader to imagine the position of the woman who was “whistled at” as the object of daily sexual harassment. In doing so, she positioned Till in a place of masculine privilege. And I think it was extremely controversial because many Black feminists and activists believed at the time that the incident was invented (decades later, the woman linked to Till’s murder admitted that she had made up the whole thing). They believed that Brownmiller’s telling of the story lacked that crucial context and excused the lynching, as well as the power of white women in the South to condemn Black men to death. But what I find interesting is that it’s one of those books that people have read about, but they have never actually read. Very often, people will read these critiques and just dismiss the book and say, “Well, you know, that’s a racist book, I don’t want to read it.” I want to push people back toward the text. I want to push them back to those difficult conversations that white feminists and feminists of color were having about sexual violence in those days because I think they’re very, very relevant to our current moment. I want to remind them of how feminists are actually trying to repair that long-term damage and move forward together.
STREET: How do you plan on addressing these critiques and getting your message across without alienating people?
POTTER: Partly, it’s by representing those criticisms fully and making my own judgment about them. Angela Davis was one of the chief critics of Brownmiller’s book. She had a radio show on KPFA in San Francisco, and on the show, she did four segments in which she critiqued the book and then opened the mic to call-ins. Part of what Davis was doing, which I think was really important, was that she taught her audience how to read. She was going through it and saying, “Okay, here’s my criticism. Now, here’s the evidence behind my criticism. Here’s another criticism. Here’s the evidence behind that.” In other words, Davis’s criticism was saying, “Yes, this is a racist book, and let me tell you why.” So I want to represent that moment fully because there’s this idea that there was white feminism and Black feminism in the 1970s. In fact, there was a tremendous amount of interaction between both groups of intellectuals, sometimes working together, sometimes crossing lines, but always speaking to each other. And I want to recreate that moment because I think it’s hard to understand when you only read about it in a history book. You need to know who the characters are, what they were trying to do. Angela Davis was not trying to destroy Susan Brownmiller. She was trying to say, “Your book is wrong. It is doing racist work in the world, and this is why.” Susan disagreed emphatically, and so it was a debate among feminists in which the stakes were quite high. But I think representing that debate is extremely important.
STREET: What made you focus on political writing versus creative writing and fiction or other types of nonfiction?
POTTER: I became interested in politics very young. My father and I used to watch the political conventions together, and he would go out on Sundays to get bagels and orange juice and always bring back a copy of The New York Times for me. Cornelia Dayton, a really good friend of mine who’s a historian now at the University of Connecticut, spent the entire summer of 1973 with me watching the Watergate hearings. Whenever there was a break, we would call each other on the telephone and say, “Oh, my God, can you believe what Gordon Liddy said?” After that summer, Cornelia’s mother wanted to do a birthday thing for her. She said, “I’ll take you on a trip, and you can invite anyone that you want.” And Cornelia was like, “I want to go to Washington with Claire, and we want to go to the Senate and the House of Representatives.” We were, I don’t know, fourteen years old. I fell in love with Washington. Just fell in love with it. It was like that line in Hamilton: “I want to be in the room where it happens.” And I’ve wanted to be in the room where it happens ever since. Not everyone has the time to fully engage in politics but for me, writing about politics, writing about political history, getting my hands dirty and jumping into political campaigns, and using what I know to try and help a candidate win. . . I think it’s some of the most exciting work in the world.
12TH STREET: Was it your interest in politics that motivated you to become a history professor and study recent history?
POTTER: When I went to graduate school to study history, I intended to become a journalist. I did not intend to become a history professor. And then, I became a history professor through this sort of circuitous route. Very often, when you’re in grad school, part of your financial package is teaching. There was a certain moment in which I thought that I would have a better chance of being the writer I wanted to be if I became a professor; if I could support myself in this extremely pleasurable way, in which I am around lots of smart people all the time, including incredibly smart students who bring good ideas to the table. There was a very long time when I was doing what all academics do: writing academic books, writing academic articles, and so on. Around 2006, I started focusing on public writing. Because of that, I now write scholarly books for a general audience. That’s what I call them because they’re all extremely well researched, and they should stand up to anybody’s scrutiny. I want people beyond the academy to read, enjoy, and be informed by them.
STREET: Is that what plays a part in your Substack Political Junkies?
POTTER: Absolutely. I started blogging in 2006 in part because I was having difficulty finding time for my academic writing. I was at a crossroads about what I wanted to do, and I thought if I got up every day and wrote a blog post, then at least I’d be writing. At least I’d be back to feeling good about writing. So, Substack is a continuation of my life as a blogger. After I started blogging, I started writing a lot of articles for Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. I shut down my blog in 2015 and started working for Public Seminar. And then when I figured out what Substack was all about, I thought, “this is like blogging! I can just publish something whenever I have something to say,” and so I started doing it again. The newsletter feeds back into my books and allows other people to know what I’m thinking about and pull me into other kinds of conversations.
STREET: How do you think the format of writing, article versus book, changes the way politics can be explored and communicated?
POTTER: One of the reasons I like writing the newsletter is that most people don’t have time to read books. And most people are stuck on their computers. When you write shorter pieces, you grab people where they are, and you grab this small amount of attention that they may have for you. You have to write to fit that window of attention. Most people, when they read a newspaper article, don’t even finish it. So, that’s a whole different kind of reading challenge. How do you persuade people to read the article you’ve written? I think writing books is a different matter. Writing books is how to get an audience to engage with a much bigger slice of history. Most of us are very consumed with the now, but my opinion pieces are also inevitably historical. The first piece I ever did for The New York Times was on likability. It was when Elizabeth Warren had announced her campaign for President, and an editor from the NYT called me and said, “People are saying that she’s not likable. They said Hillary Clinton wasn’t likable. What does that mean?” So, I did all this research about likability. I learned that it’s only men who can be likable. For instance, there are all these historical reasons why liking women is impossible because the standard for likability was established with Eisenhower, then Kennedy. What was great about that piece is that I got to make it an argument for this conversation that was just stuck. People were saying, “I don’t like Hillary, I don’t like Elizabeth Warren, I don’t like Kamala.” But nobody could say why. They would be like, “Oh, I don’t like her clothes. She’s too fat. She’s too harsh. I don’t like the sound of her voice.” You could say that’s all misogyny, which it is, but then you also have to ask why are women so de facto unlikable? Anyway, that’s what the piece was about. And people read it to the end. I know this because there were thousands and thousands of comments that people wrote in the NYT. All of a sudden, they were inviting me onto television and radio shows. I was on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR, and people were just calling a mile a minute. Then, there was this wonderful moment when I was in a history department meeting, and a text from my sister came in on my phone: “Kamala Harris is talking about your article right now.” Somebody on Kamala’s campaign had read it. With those articles, you have an opportunity to make an impact on people. But you also have an opportunity to make an impact on decision-makers who don’t have time to read a whole book.
STREET: How did it feel when you found out that prominent political figures like Kamala Harris talked about your article and circulated it?
POTTER: It was awesome. And I have to say that one of the best feelings in the world was when the article came out. It came out online on a Saturday, and it made the front cover of the Sunday Review above the fold, which is a big deal. I read the newspaper online, but a lot of people in my building get it delivered. So I came down to walk my dog that Sunday morning, and there was The New York Times with my piece. There is no better feeling than that. That’s what most writers want to do: persuade other people and change how other people think. And so, when policymakers have read my work, I know I’ve done my job right. It is a dream.
STREET: Clearly, you’ve been successful in your career, so I wanted to ask you writer-to-writer: what’s been your biggest challenge or setback in your career, and how did you overcome it?
POTTER: I hit a point where, without giving you any of the gory details, members of my department at Wesleyan decided they were going to get in the way of my moving forward, my promotion to full professor. It was a tremendous blow to my confidence. The thing is, when you’re doing a review for something like that, you have to turn in all of your writing. And over and over again, they would get back to me and say, “We just don’t think that your writing is advanced enough for us to promote you to full professor.” Meanwhile, they were promoting other people who had written far less and published a great deal less. It was initially very confusing because it was the first time in my life that I actively understood that I was the object of sexism. And that’s speaking from a position of enormous privilege. Most Black women historians that I know realized very early on that they were going to have to battle racism and sexism to make a career as a historian. When that happened at Wesleyan I started questioning, “Am I not a good writer? Do I not know how to do this in the way I thought I did?” Eventually, that changed. Part of how that changed was blogging. That’s how I got myself out of that rut. And I was like, “I’m going to write every day, and I’m going to write for people and find out who wants to read me.” I became part of this network of bloggers on Substack. We all encouraged each other, pushed each other forward, and developed projects together. I was able to overcome that blow to my confidence at Wesleyan. But I think the advice I would give to anybody who has a failure of confidence is to find some readers. Because part of what can destroy your confidence as a writer is thinking that nobody cares. Whether it’s joining a writing group, starting a Substack, a blog, taking part in a community newspaper, or working with others on getting stories out about your local community, whatever it is—find the people who want to read you, even if they’re not the people who are supposed to be nurturing you. Because once you do that, your confidence returns.
STREET: Do you have any other tips for writers who are struggling to produce material?
POTTER: I believe in the writing group. I had a wonderful writing group while I was living in New Haven. A guy named Edward Ball had won the National Book Award, which was very cool. We had a rule that everybody had to present every time we met, whether it was five pages, a book proposal, a chapter, you just had to give something to the group. I credit Edward Ball as one of the people who helped me. Edward could look at a piece of writing and say, “We’ve almost got it, but not quite.” And then he would make suggestions, and he was always right. So, Edward was able to teach craft without calling it that. I’m not sure I even believe in craft, but certain kinds of things make for better writing.
STREET: Can you tell me a bit of how your work as a professor informs what you put forward for publication?
POTTER: Most of The New School, including Eugene Lang College, is seminar-style teaching, but I taught one seminar and one lecture every semester where I used to teach. When you’re teaching a lecture course, you’re telling a story. If you’re gonna stand up in front of students for an hour and 20 minutes, you can’t just say, “Here are all the things that happened, and this is what they mean.” You have to tell a story about America, in all its complexity at that moment. That kind of storytelling fed back into my writing; there’s no question about that. Also, when you’re teaching, students challenge you all the time. The best students challenge you a lot, so teaching is a really good way to figure out what you think. They may have a perspective that has come out of not being trapped in the knowledge that already exists. They’ll ask a question that challenges what is on the page. Then you have to listen to them and figure out, “Alright, how am I going to respond to that? That’s an interesting question. I’ve never thought about that before. Okay, let me think out loud here and see if I can respond to that.” And it pushes you forward enormously.
. . .
You can find more information about Claire Potter and her work on her website, https://clairepotter.com.