In Memory of Andrea Dworkin

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month

In Memory of Andrea Dworkin

(September 26, 1946 - April 9, 2005)

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Radical Feminist Writer Andrea Dworkin Dies

By Adam Bernstein

Washington Post - April 12, 2005

Andrea Dworkin, 58, a self-proclaimed radical feminist whose scathing writings about sexuality, and pornography in particular, made her a provocative icon of the women's movement, died April 9 at her home in Washington.

A spokeswoman for the D.C. medical examiner's office said further investigation is needed to determine the cause of death. Ms. Dworkin had a variety of health problems and had several falls after recent knee surgery.

Encouraged by her socially conscious father, Ms. Dworkin embraced dissent from an early age. She refused to sing Christmas carols in elementary school and by sixth grade decided she wanted to change restrictive abortion laws. She admired books by the Bronte sisters as well as Che Guevara.

As a college freshman, she was arrested at the United Nations for protesting the Vietnam War and taken to a women's detention center. A humiliating body cavity search by male doctors followed. Her denunciations of her treatment helped shut down the facility.

Ms. Dworkin spent her career exploring what she considered the subordination of women, which she saw everywhere from marriage to pornography to conservative politics.

Using terms such as "gynocide" to describe a cultural holocaust against women, she was adored by some who found in her writings and lectures a refreshing rebelliousness, and decried by others, including novelist Anne Tyler, who found her tendency toward sweeping statements ludicrous.

Beginning with her book "Woman Hating" (1974), written when she was 27, Ms. Dworkin found her full, strident voice. Embracing a polemical style that sometimes overshadowed the content of her writing, she declared the book's objective was "to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family, [and] in its most hideous form, the national state."

"Woman Hating" connected foot binding in China, witch burning in Europe, misogyny in fairy tales and pornography. She also argued that gender itself had to be eliminated before sexual equality could be achieved.

Her book "Intercourse" (1987) helped define her as a firebrand because some reviewers said she was labeling all sex as rape. She spent countless interviews denying that, but she had written pointedly over the years about marriage laws that she felt "mandated intercourse."

Perhaps her best-known title is "Pornography: Men Possessing Women" (1981). The book received positive attention from unlikely quarters, including Punch magazine, which said she "writes like a Leon Trotsky of the sex war."

About that time, she teamed with legal scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon to advocate for having pornography ruled a violation of women's civil rights. Their crusade began on behalf of Linda Lovelace, the porn actress who starred in "Deep Throat" and whose best-selling memoir about exploitation, "Ordeal," had just been published.

While teaching together at the University of Minnesota, Ms. Dworkin and MacKinnon conceived of an anti-pornography ordinance that did not ban flesh magazines and videos but enabled those "harmed" by them to sue pornographers for damages. The measure twice passed the Minneapolis City Council but was vetoed by the mayor. Other communities approved the measure, but federal courts ruled the laws unconstitutional on free speech grounds, decisions upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In all, Ms. Dworkin said, she was far happier as a provocateur than a politician.

"I find compromise not impossible but incomprehensible," she said in an interview with New Statesman magazine. "Politicians kept talking to me about incinerators. I was bewildered. They'd vote for the civil rights bill if Legislator X would vote to put some incinerator somewhere -- not in their district, I think. My eyes would glaze over. Then I'd become enraged.

"The trade-offs, the payoffs, sometimes actual blackmail and bribery," she added. "I was good at holding the politicians' feet to the fire, in private and in public, to excoriate them, to move their constituents, but from a basis of principle. That I can do. I have good practical instincts on where dominant structures are vulnerable. This requires a high tolerance for risk and conflict."

Andrea Rita Dworkin was born Sept. 26, 1946, in Camden, N.J., and raised in what became Cherry Hill, N.J. She helped care for her ill mother and was shuffled among other relatives. Her father was a guidance counselor and post office employee, so pro-labor that he once refused a management job there.

Her early desire was to be a Greenwich Village artist, and she made frequent trips to New York, paying her bus fare, she said, by finding "some stupid man . . . and basically exchange sex for money."

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Founder of the Domestic Violence Movement in Judaism 

Back in the early 1960s, when I realized that my husband was an alcoholic, I turned first to my rabbi and then to a Jewish psychotherapist. Both assured me that since it was well known that Jews are not alcoholics, if my husband had a drinking problem it must be something I was doing. I was devastated. What was I doing wrong? For many years I wore two faces, a public face and a private face.

In the 1970s, when I joined a feminist consciousness-raising group, I heard other women’s stories. I recognized that I was not alone. Other Jewish women were living with alcoholic husbands, or with domestic abuse. Each woman believed, like me, that she was alone in her suffering. I realized that we had to change community attitudes and behaviors. I wanted to insure that when any woman sought help for addiction, alcoholism, or abuse in her family she would not be blamed for the behavior of her significant other.

By the mid-1980s, some Jewish professional social work agencies and organizations began to address these problems, but these stigmatized behaviors were still not recognized by the general Jewish population. When I spoke publicly about these issues, audiences tended to dismiss statistics, refused to recognize the symptoms of these problems, and continued to believe the myth that these behaviors did not impact the Jewish community. With great trepidation I decided to tell my story, owning what had happened to me, so that others could own what was happening to them. 

In August 1987, the Feminist Task Force of New Jewish Agenda asked me to keynote a panel entitled “The Changing Jewish Family.” The evening before my talk I attended a 12-step meeting at which I heard many conference participants tell the horror stories of their lives. When I rose to speak, I stated that before we could heal the world we first had to heal ourselves. I was amazed to watch hundreds of people burst into tears. By destroying the myths that had imprisoned us we had begun the process oftikkun olam, repairing the world.

Biography

Marcia Cohn Spiegel was born in Chicago on October 16, 1927, and earned a B.A. in psychology from Rockford College in 1949. She was an active volunteer in her suburban community and synagogue until two simultaneous awakenings changed the course of her life: she discovered how few women were included in Jewish texts and anthologies, and at the same time she was forced to acknowledge that her husband was an alcoholic. In 1976, she enrolled in the School of Jewish Communal Service of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where her thesis The Heritage of Noah: Alcoholism in the Jewish Community Today was the first documentation of the disease in the Jewish community. Spiegel has taught at the University of Judaism, UCLA, and synagogues and centers across the U.S., Russia, Ukraine, London, Jerusalem, and Sydney. She has written extensively in scholarly journals, Jewish periodicals, and anthologies, about Jewish women’s poetry, alcoholism, addiction, domestic violence, and sexual abuse.