Florence Rush, auteure du "Secret le mieux gardé" est décédée à l'âge de 91 ans

Florence Rush, figure essentielle du mouvement féministe aux USA vient de s'éteindre à l'âge de 91 ans. Son travail théorique et politique, ainsi que son engagement influenceront pour longtemps les femmes et les hommes dans le monde épris de liberté. Son livre fondamental sur l'inceste "le secret le mieux gardé", a été traduit en France et publié chez Denoël en 1984.
Ci- aprés, l'hommage rédigé par Susan Brownmiller, autre grande figure du mouvement féministe mondial.

RUSH—Florence, author of “The Best Kept Secret,” published by Prentice-Hall in 1980, and the first feminist theorist to call the sexual abuse of children a political and patriarchal issue, died on Tuesday, December 9, at her home in Manhattan, just short of her ninety-first birthday.  The cause was congestive heart failure.  A Bronx-born psychiatric social worker and community activist in New Rochelle who was married with three grown children, Ms. Rush joined a chapter of Older Women’s Liberation (OWL) in 1970 and subsequently found an apartment for herself in Greenwich Village. She electrified a New York Radical Feminist Conference on Rape in April 1971, winning a standing ovation for her speech on what was then a startling new concept.  The Rush theory, inspired by evidence she had collected in a facility for delinquent girls, identified fathers, stepfathers, older brothers, uncles, neighbors and family friends as the major sexual abusers of children, and traced the toleration of such abuse to the beginnings of history and cultural/religious customs.  Family abuse had been ignored by the reigning Freudian psychologists of the day who preferred to theorize about seductive children and girlish fantasies.  A wealth of books on child sexual abuse written by academics, journalists, and celebrities followed Rush’s pioneering papers and lectures, while personal accounts were to become a staple on television talk shows. When Rush’s younger son, Matthew, was stricken by AIDS in the mid-1980s, she formed one of the first mothers’ support groups in the nation.  A lecturer for Women Against Pornography in its early years, she later worked with New YorkNOW, the National Organization for Women, on its “Images of Children in the Media” committee, and enjoyed a weekly poker game with neighbors and friends until failing health curtailed her activities. She is survived by her son, Dr. Thomas Rush of Katonah, a specialist in infectious diseases, her daughter, Eleanor Rush Pushkar of Oakland, California, and two grandchildren.  She also leaves a network of friends who warmly recall her gracious hospitality in New Yorkand Fire Island, and will never forget her brilliant, original mind, her singular contribution to feminist theory, her nurturing advice and aid, her impossible platform shoes, and her baked lasagna.