"Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so." -- Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Rita Dworkin (September 26, 1946 — April 9, 2005) was an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women, and for statements that were interpreted as claiming that all heterosexual sex is rape, an interpretation she rejected.
An anti-war activist and anarchist in the late 1960s, Dworkin wrote 10 books on radical feminist theory and practice. During the late 1970s and the 1980s, she gained national fame as a spokeswoman for the feminist anti-pornography movement, and for her writing on pornography and sexuality, particularly in Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) and Intercourse (1987), which remain her two most widely known books.
"A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.""All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.""As long as there is rape... there is not going to be any peace or justice or equality or freedom. You are not going to become what you want to become or who you want to become. You are not going to live in the world you want to live in.""Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact.""Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.""Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer.""Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.""Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.""Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.""Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.""Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it.""Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.""Men know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are.""Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.""Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice.""No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.""No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it.""Only when manhood is dead - and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it - only then will we know what it is to be free.""Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.""Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.""The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other.""The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.""The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.""Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.""While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.""Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not.""Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do."""Women's fashion" is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.""You think intercourse is a private act; it's not, it's a social act. Men are sexually predatory in life; and women are sexually manipulative. When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love."
Dworkin was born in Camden, New Jersey, to Harry Dworkin and Sylvia Spiegel. She had one younger brother, Mark. Her father was a schoolteacher and dedicated socialist, whom she credited with inspiring her passion for social justice. Her relationship with her mother was strained, but Dworkin later wrote about how her mother's belief in legal birth control and legal abortion, "long before these were respectable beliefs," inspired her later activism.
Though she described her Jewish household as being in many ways dominated by the memory of the Holocaust, it nonetheless provided a happy childhood until the age of nine when an unknown man molested her in a movie theater. When Dworkin was 10, her family moved from the city to the suburbs of Cherry Hill Township, New Jersey (then known as Delaware Township), which she later wrote she "experienced as being kidnapped by aliens and taken to a penal colony". In sixth grade, the administration at her new school punished her for refusing to sing "Silent Night" (as a Jew, she objected to being forced to sing Christian religious songs at school).
Dworkin began writing poetry and fiction in the sixth grade. Throughout high school, she read avidly, with encouragement from her parents. She was particularly influenced by Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Henry Miller, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Che Guevara, and the Beat poets, especially Allen Ginsberg.
College and early activism
In 1965, while a student at Bennington College, Dworkin was arrested during an anti-Vietnam War protest at the United States Mission to the United Nations and sent to the New York Women's House of Detention. Dworkin testified that the doctors in the House of Detention gave her an internal examination which was so rough that she bled for days afterwards. She spoke in public and testified before a grand jury about her experience, and the media coverage of her testimony made national and international news. The grand jury declined to make an indictment in the case, but Dworkin's testimony contributed to public outrage over the mistreatment of inmates. The prison was closed seven years later.
Soon after testifying before the grand jury, Dworkin left Bennington to live in Greece and to pursue her writing. She traveled from Paris to Athens on the Orient Express, and went to live and write in Crete. While in Crete, she wrote a series of poems titled (Vietnam) Variations, a collection of poems and prose poem that she printed on the island in a book called Child, and a novel in a style resembling magical realism called Notes on Burning Boyfriend -- a reference to the pacifist Norman Morrison, who had burned himself to death in protest of the Vietnam War. She also wrote several poems and dialogues which she hand-printed after returning to the United States in a book called Morning Hair.
After living in Crete, Dworkin returned to Bennington for two years, where she continued to study literature and participated in campaigns against the college's student conduct code, for contraception on campus, for the legalization of abortion, and against the Vietnam War. She graduated with a degree in literature in 1968.
After graduation, she moved to Amsterdam to interview Dutch anarchists in the Provo countercultural movement. While there, she became involved with, then married, one of the anarchists she met. Soon after they were married, he began to abuse her severely, punching and kicking her, burning her with cigarettes, beating her on her legs with a wooden beam, and banging her head against the floor until he knocked her unconscious.
After she left her husband late in 1971, Dworkin says her ex-husband attacked, persecuted, and harassed her, beating her and threatening her whenever he found where she was hiding. She found herself desperate for money, often homeless, thousands of miles from her family, later remarking that, "I often lived the life of a fugitive, except that it was the more desperate life of a battered woman who had run away for the last time, whatever the outcome". For a while, she was a prostitute. Ricki Abrams, a feminist and fellow expatriate, sheltered Dworkin in her home, and helped her find places to stay on houseboats, a communal farm, and deserted buildings. Dworkin tried to work up the money to return to the United States.
Abrams introduced Dworkin to early radical feminist writing from the United States, and Dworkin was especially inspired by Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, and Robin Morgan's Sisterhood is Powerful. She and Abrams began to work together on "early pieces and fragments" of a radical feminist text on the hatred of women in culture and history, including a completed draft of a chapter on the pornographic counterculture magazine Suck, which was published by a group of fellow expatriates in the Netherlands.
Dworkin later wrote that she eventually agreed to help smuggle a briefcase of heroin through customs in return for $1,000 and an airplane ticket, thinking that if she was successful she could return home with the ticket and the money, and if caught she would at least escape her ex-husband's abuse by going to prison. The deal for the briefcase fell through, but the man who had promised Dworkin the money gave her the airline ticket anyway, and she returned to the United States in 1972.
Before she left Amsterdam, Dworkin spoke with Abrams about her experiences in the Netherlands, the emerging feminist movement, and the book they had begun to write together. Dworkin agreed to complete the book — which she eventually titled Woman Hating — and publish it when she reached the United States. In her memoirs, Dworkin relates that during that conversation she vowed to dedicate her life to the feminist movement:
In addition to books, articles, and speeches listed here, she wrote for anthologies and wrote additional articles, and some of her works were translated into other languages.
Nonfiction
Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (2002) ISBN 0-465-01754-1
Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation (2000) ISBN 0-684-83612-2
Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women (1997) ISBN 0-684-83512-6
In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (with Catharine MacKinnon, 1997) ISBN 0-674-44579-1
Letters from a War Zone: Writings (1988) ISBN 1-55652-185-5 ISBN 0-525-24824-2 ISBN 0-436-13962-6
Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality (1988) ISBN 0-9621849-0-X
Intercourse (1987) ISBN 0-684-83239-9
Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (1983) ISBN 0-399-50671-3
Pornography—Men Possessing Women (1981) ISBN 0-399-50532-6 ... Online summary, excerpts
Our Blood: Prophesies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (1976) ISBN 0-399-50575-X ISBN 0-06-011116-X
Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality (Dutton, 1974) ISBN 0-452-26827-3 ISBN 0-525-48397-7
Fiction and poetry
Mercy (1990, ISBN 0-941423-88-3)
Ice and Fire (1986, ISBN 0-436-13960-X)
The New Woman's Broken Heart: Short Stories (1980, ISBN 0-9603628-0-0)
Morning Hair (self-published, 1968)
Child (1966) (Heraklion, Crete, 1966)
Articles
Marx and Gandhi were liberals: Feminism and the "radical" left (1977 (ASIN B0006XEJCG))
Why so-called radical men love and need pornography (1978 (ASIN B0006XX57G))
Against the male flood: Censorship, pornography and equality (1985 (ASIN B00073AVJA))
The reasons why: Essays on the new civil rights law recognizing pornography as sex discrimination (1985 (ASIN B000711OSO))
Pornography is a civil rights issue for women (1986 (ASIN B00071HFYG))
A good rape. (1996 (ASIN B0008DT8DE)) (Book Review)
Out of the closet.(Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Cross-Dressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitude) (1996 (ASIN B0008E679Q)) (Book Review)
The day I was drugged and raped (1996 (ASIN B0008IYNJS))
Are you listening, Hillary? President Rape is who he is (1999) (excerpt)
Digitalized speeches and interviews
Why Men Like Pornography & Prostitution So Much Andrea Dworkin Keynote Speech at International Trafficking Conference, 1989. (Audio File: 22 min, 128 kbit/s, mp3)
Andrea Dworkin's Attorney General's Commission Testimony on Pornography and Prostitution
Violence, Abuse &Women's Citizenship Brighton, UK November 10, 1996
"Freedom Now: Ending Violence Against Women"
"Speech from Duke University, January, 1985"
Taped Phone Interview Andrea Dworkin interviewed by Nikki Craft on Allen Ginsberg, May 9, 1990. (Audio File, 20 min, 128 kbit/s, mp3)
Reviews of Author's Works
Ice and Fire, by Andrea Dworkin; Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin. "Male and Female, Men and Women". Reviewed by Carol Sternhell for the New York Times (May 3, 1987).
Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin; Feminism Unmodified, by Catharine MacKinnon. "Porn in the U.S.A., Part I". Reviewed by Maureen Mullarkey for The Nation (May 30, 1987):
Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin (Tenth Anniversary Edition 1997). Reviewed by Giney Villar for Women in Action (3:1998).
Pornography: Men Possessing Women. "Unburning a Witch: Re-Reading Andrea Dworkin". Reviewed by Jed Brandt for the NYC Indypendent (February 7, 2005).
Related Work
She was a member of The American Heritage Dictionary's Usage Panel.
Brownmiller, Susan (1999). In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (ISBN 0-385-31486-8).
Robinson, Jeremy Mark (2008). Andrea Dworkin (ISBN 978-1-86171-126-7). Crescent Moon.
Strossen, Nadine, Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights (ISBN 0-8147-8149-7). New York University Press, 2000. (First edition New York: Scribner, 1995).
