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DWORKIN, Andrea

Born 26 September 1946, Camden, New Jersey

Daughter of Harry and Sylvia Spiegal Dworkin; married 1969 (divorced)

As a child, Andrea Dworkin aspired to be a writer or lawyer to "really change society." Arrested at eighteen for demonstrating for civil rights, she was held four days in the New York Women's House of Detention and forced to undergo a painful internal examination. She hemorrhaged vaginally for two weeks, then went to the media to publicize the atrocity. The experience informed her later passionate feminist militancy and polemical writing. Retreating to Crete (1965-66), Dworkin published her first book, Child (1966). She completed her B.A. in literature and philosophy at Bennington College in 1968.

Dworkin then left for five years in Amsterdam, where she began Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality (1974), aiming to incite revolution in conventional sex roles and cultural institutions by tracing the roots of sexism through psychology and pornography as a means by which men control and possess women. Her generalizations about all men as neurotically dominant brutes and all male-female relationships as pathological led critics to lambaste her extremist separatist ideology. Dworkin emerged as one of the most strident voices of radical feminism, calling in a speech at a National Organization for Women (NOW) Conference on Sexuality for heterosexual sex without erection or penetration, leading opponents to coin the term "castrating feminists." Dworkin developed this argument in the book Intercourse (1987).

Radical lesbians criticized her bisexuality, and Dworkin rejected political lesbianism as a personal politic reminiscent of biological determinism. She said of the latter that it "justified atrocity" and attacked the militancy of "prescribers" who "enforce sexual conformity" that impels the search for new enemies, dividing women from women in the name of sexuality. While denying a biological basis for sexism, the "essentialist" Dworkin universalizes concepts of women and motherhood, misogyny and sexism. She favors the concept of androgyny. The nine essays in Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourse on Sexual Politics (1976) describe destructive male dominance and the artificial sex roles permeating cultures in Asia, Europe, and America, citing manifestations of "gynocide" in fairytales, customs, religion, pornography, and other literature as leading to deprivation of women's rights.

Dworkin focuses on pornography as the chief agency perpetuating the violent male power system. Her essay in the volume Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography (1980) and her Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) reject the notion that pornography creatively expresses eroticism, seeing it as a violent instrument by which men subjugate women, deprive them of individuality, and keep them safe, secure, but subservient. Putting theory to practice, Dworkin teamed with attorney Catharine MacKinnon in 1983 to draft a controversial model civil ordinance defining pornography as illegal sex discrimination. It passed in Indianapolis; but despite Dworkin's testimony before the Minnesota attorney general, published as Pornography Is a Civil Rights Issue for Women (1986), the law was overturned in Minneapolis as violating freedom of speech. Dworkin and MacKinnon coauthored Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality (1988), outlining the history of women's legal status and describing their ill-fated law. New organizations like Women Against Pornography drew upon Dworkin for the slogan "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." Dworkin remained in the forefront of the antipornography movement with public appearances and Letters from a War Zone, 1976-1987 (1988, revised 1989).

Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (1983) argues that the 1970s antifeminist backlash from the political right stemmed from status anxiety, fear of personal consequences resulting from feminism's questioning of traditional roles in which many American women had invested a sense of self, and even greater fears of what their status would be outside the home. The political right "makes certain metaphysical and material promises to women that both exploit and quiet some of women's deepest fears. These fears originate in the perception that male violence against women is uncontrollable and unpredictable. Dependent on and subservient to men, women are always subject to this violence. The right promises to put enforceable restraints on male aggression, thus simplifying survival for women." Dworkin worries about a "coming gynocide," a grim future for all women but particularly for the poor and elderly.

Dworkin's short stories in New Woman's Broken Heart (1980) as well as her novel Ice and Fire (1986) are, like much new women's fiction, autobiographical, polemical, and experimental in style, sometimes finding black humor in the dilemmas of women's lives voiced from a militant feminist perspective. Critics faulted Ice and Fire for graphically describing sex, drugs, and urban violence, seeing her "calculated nastiness" as akin to pornography. Her intent was to shake up her readers' consciousness, contrasting the contemporary squalor to a woman's origins in a typical American childhood to underscore the impact of pornography on lives. Mercy (1991), her second novel, is equally caustic.

With Sexual Harassment: Women Speak Out (1993), Dworkin returned to nonfiction with an anthology of sexual harassment stories published in the wake of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. Dworkin cointroduces this volume, in which over 70 women share their sexual harassment experiences and the ways they responded. In Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women (1997), Dworkin offers a collection of speeches and essays drawing upon her experiences as a victim of both rape and spousal abuse. The harrowing pieces relate tragedies as diverse as the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, the oppression Orthodox Jewish women face in Israel due to strict religious laws, and sexual assault in Bosnian refugee camps. Dworkin alternately pleads and demands for justice, while arguing that not only the acts themselves, but also the impulses which gave rise to them, must be addressed.

Dworkin has contributed to periodicals such as Ms., Heresies, Social Policy, Village Voice, America Report, Gay Community News, and Christopher Street. She served for a time as an editor of Ms. magazine and lectures frequently around the country.