Features
Community
Profile:
Jeffrey Trumbower
In
Memoriam:
Andrea Dworkin
In Memoriam
Andrea Dworkin 1946-2005
Feminist Activist and Author
by Euan Bear
According
to news reports and Internet sources, Andrea Dworkin, variously identified
as a "radical feminist writer," "anti-porn crusader,"
and "self-described lesbian," died on April 9 in Washington,
DC, in her sleep, according to The New York Times account. She was 58.
She is survived by her companion of 30 years, John Stoltenberg, a gay
man. The two were married in 1998.
Dworkin was most famous for her book
Woman Hating (1974), in which she explored links between women's
oppression in patriarchal cultures around the world, from Chinese footbinding
to American high heels, from medieval European witch burnings to modern
Western pornography.
At least two other books she wrote
achieved iconic feminist status: Pornography: Men Possessing Women
(1981) and Intercourse (1987).
She and lawyer Catherine MacKinnon succeeded in getting several cities
to adopt ordinances characterizing pornography as sex discrimination and
providing a basis for women who have been harmed by it to sue sellers
and producers. The ordinances were overturned by a Supreme Court ruling
in 1986 on the basis of restricting free speech.
Dworkin was born on September 26, 1946,
in Camden, NJ. According to the Washington Post's account, she began her
life of activism by refusing to sing Christmas carols in elementary school.
She wanted to be a Greenwich Village artist and paid for her bus trips
into the city by prostitution – exchanging sex for money.
Dworkin attended Bennington College,
graduating with a bachelor's in literature in 1968. As a Bennington freshman,
she demonstrated against the U.S. government's prosecution of the Vietnam
War at the United Nations. Her writings about her arrest, detention and
treatment in a New York women's detention center helped get the facility
closed.
She was later in an abusive marriage with a Dutch
man that lasted three years. Dworkin worked as a receptionist, waitress,
factory worker, and teacher. She also spent time as an assistant to poet
Muriel Rukeyser, according to the Post.
She published 13 books, including
two novels, among them: Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist
Militant (2002), Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel and Women's Liberation
(2000), Letters from a War Zone (1989), Right-Wing Women
(1983) and Our Blood: Prophesies and Discourses on Sexual Politics
(1976); her novel Ice and Fire (1987) was about prostitution,
and her novel Mercy (1991), was about serial rape. She also published
a collection of short stories, The New Woman's Broken Heart (1980).
Several commentators acknowledged
that Dworkin was demonized by anti-feminists, often misrepresented, and
when her arguments brooked no serious answer, frequently attacked because
of her appearance: she was fat and had long, curly, unruly hair.
Dworkin's ovular work on pornography as
a civil rights/ discrimination issue strengthened the feminist anti-violence
movements of the 1980s and made a strong case for connecting violent visualizations
with violent actions. She punched a hole in an oppressive fog of sexism
to let in light on how women are subjugated in obvious and subtle ways.
For tributes to Andrea Dworkin, point your browser to www.stopfamilyviolence.org/sfvo/dworkin.html
Also check the myths vs. the truth at www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/index.html
From Dworkin’s
Life and Death (1996):
We have made beginnings at breaking
the deep silence.... We have identified rape; we have identified incest;
we have identified battery; we have identified prostitution; we have identified
pornography – as crimes against women, as means of exploiting women,
as ways of hurting women that are systematic and supported by the practices
of the societies in which we live. We have identified sexual exploitation
as abuse. We have identified objectification and turning women into commodities
for sale as dehumanizing, deeply dehumanizing. We have identified objectification
and sexual exploitation as mechanisms for creating inferiority, real inferiority:
not an abstract concept but a life lived as an inferior person in a civil
society. We have identified patterns of violence that take place in intimate
relationships. We know now that most rape is not committed by the dangerous
and predatory stranger but by the dangerous and predatory boyfriend, lover,
friend, husband, neighbor, the man we are closest to, not the man who
is farthest away.
And we have learned more about the
stranger, too. We have learned more about the ways in which men who do
not know us target us and hunt us down. We have refused to accept the
presumption in this society that the victim is responsible for her own
abuse. We have refused to agree that she provoked it, that she wanted
it, that she liked it. These are the basic dogma of pornography, which
we have rejected. In rejecting pornography we have rejected the fundamentalism
of male supremacy... Nothing that we have done for women who have been
raped or battered has helped women who have been prostituted....
What remains to be done? To think
about helping a rape victim is one thing; to think about ending rape,
is another. We need to end rape. We need to end incest. We need to end
battery. We need to end prostitution and we need to end pornography. That
means that we need to refuse to accept that these are natural phenomena
that just happen because some guy is having a bad day.