Andrea Rita Dworkin (September 26, 1946 – April 9, 2005) was an American radical feminist writer and activist best known for her analysis of pornography. Her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 30 years. They are found in a dozen solo works: nine books of non-fiction, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Another three volumes were co-written or co-edited with US constitutional law professor and feminist activist Catharine A. MacKinnon.
The central objective of Dworkin's work is analyzing Western society, culture, and politics through the prism of men's sexual violence against women in a patriarchal context. She wrote on a wide range of topics including the lives of Joan of Arc, Margaret Papandreou, and Nicole Brown Simpson; she analyzed the literature of Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys, Leo Tolstoy, Marquis de Sade, Kōbō Abe, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, and Isaac Bashevis Singer; she brought her own radical feminist perspective to her examination of subjects historically written or described from men's point of view, including fairy tales, homosexuality, lesbianism, virginity, antisemitism, the State of Israel, the Holocaust, biological superiority, and racism. She interrogated premises underlying concepts such as freedom of the press and civil liberties. She theorized the sexual politics of intelligence, fear, courage, and integrity. She described a male supremacist political ideology manifesting in and constituted by rape, battery, prostitution, and pornography.
Biography Early life Andrea Dworkin was born on September 26, 1946, in Camden, New Jersey, to Harry Dworkin and Sylvia Spiegel. Her father was the grandson of a Russian Jew who fled Russia when he was 15 years old in order to escape military service, and her mother was the child of Jewish immigrants from Hungary. She had one younger brother, Mark. Her father was a school teacher and dedicated socialist, whom she credited with inspiring her passion for social justice. Her relationship with her mother was strained, but Dworkin later wrote that her mother's belief in legal birth control and 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 she reached the age of nine, when an unknown man molested her in a movie theater. When Dworkin was ten, her family moved from the city to the suburbs of Cherry Hill, 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). She said she "probably would have become a rabbi" if women could have while she was in high school and she "would have liked" being a Talmudic scholar.Vincent, Norah, Sex, Love and Politics: Andrea Dworkin, in New York Press, vol. 11, no. 5, February 4–10, 1998, p. 42, col. 1 (main title and subtitle may have been in either order, per id., p. ).
Dworkin began writing poetry and fiction in the sixth grade.; Around that time, she was undecided about whether to become a lawyer or a writer, because of her interest then in abortion, and chose writing because she could "do it in a room alone" and "nobody could stop me".Both quotations: Vincent, Norah, Sex, Love and Politics, op. cit., p. 42, col. 4. 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, and has included among writers she "admired most" Jean Genet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron.Vincent, Norah, Sex, Love and Politics, op. cit., p. 42, col. 4 (quoting interviewer Vincent). She graduated in 1964 from what is now Cherry Hill High School West.. "Today the drive-in spot is occupied by the Crowne Plaza hotel, where the Worthingtons, along with about 100 former classmates, gathered on a recent Saturday night for the 50th reunion of their Cherry Hill High School West graduating class..... On the 'In Memory' board with 54 other deceased classmates was Andrea Dworkin, the feminist known for her writings against pornography."
College and early activism In 1965, while a freshman 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. After writing to the Commissioner of Corrections Anna Cross, 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 College on the ocean liner Castel Felice 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 on the island of Crete. While there, she wrote a series of poems titled (Vietnam) Variations, a collection of poems and prose poems that she printed on the island in a book called Child (1965), and a novel in a style resembling magical realism called Notes on Burning Boyfriend—a reference to Norman Morrison, a pacifist 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; these became the book Morning Hair (1967).
After living in Crete, Dworkin returned to Bennington College 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 Bachelor's degree in literature in 1968.
Life in the Netherlands After graduation, Dworkin moved to Amsterdam to interview Dutch anarchists in the Provo movement, which used theatrical street happenings to instigate change.; While there, she became involved with one of the anarchists, Cornelius (Iwan) Dirk de Bruin,Dworkin, Andrea. Videotape Collection of Andrea Dworkin, 1981–1998 (Inclusive): A Finding Aid (Cambridge, Mass.: Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard Univ. (Vt-136), Feb., 2009) , as accessed October 18, 2018. and they married. Soon after, she says that De Bruin 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 De Bruin late in 1971, Dworkin said 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: "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." Due to poverty, Dworkin turned to prostitution for a period. 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 in 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 notably 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:
Return to New York and contact with the feminist movement In New York City, Dworkin worked again as an anti-war organizer, participated in demonstrations for lesbian rights and against apartheid in South Africa. The feminist poet Muriel Rukeyser hired her as an assistant. Dworkin later said, "I was the worst assistant in the history of the world. But Muriel kept me on because she believed in me as a writer." Dworkin also joined a feminist consciousness raising group, and soon became involved in radical feminist organizing, focusing on campaigns against men's violence against women. In addition to her writing and activism, Dworkin gained notoriety as a speaker, mostly for events organized by local feminist groups. She became well known for passionate, uncompromising speeches that aroused strong feelings in both supporters and critics, and inspired her audience to action, such as her speech at the first organizational Take Back the Night march in November 1978 (led by WAVPM), and her 1983 speech at the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men (now the National Organization for Men Against Sexism) titled "I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape."
Relationship with John Stoltenberg In 1974, Andrea and John Stoltenberg were introduced by a mutual friend, a theater director, at a meeting of the then-fledgling Gay Academic Union. Later in 1974, not attending together, they both walked out of a poetry reading—a benefit for the War Resisters League in Greenwich Village—due to the misogynist content. It was then they began their decades-long intellectual and personal relationship. Moving in together, their agreement was that while they would always live together, they could have relationships outside of their partnership. They planned never to marry unless one of two things occurred: as Andrea stated to the New York Times in 1985, "unless one of us is terminally ill or jailed for political activity." About that piece, John said the "editor refused to allow the writer to identify us as gay and lesbian, as we had asked." They married in 1998 due to her ill health, specifically painful osteoarthritis. Their life of thirty-one years together ended in April 2005 with Dworkin's sudden death from heart disease, an enlarged heart. Since then, he has lived with his husband in Washington, D.C.