Andrea Dworkin

Author profile

born

September 26, 1946 in Camden, New Jersey, The United States

died

April 09, 2005

gender

female

genre

Women & Gender Studies, Nonfiction

influences

Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Henry Miller, Fyodor Dostoevsky, E ...more

About this author

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Andrea Rita Dworkin 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.

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.

Dworkin was born to Harry Dworkin and Sylvia Spiegel. She had one younger brother, Mark. Her father was a schoolteacher and dedicated socialist, w...more Andrea Rita Dworkin 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.

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.

Dworkin was born 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.

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 poems 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 graduation, she moved to Amsterdam to interview Dutch anarchists in the Provo counter cultural 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 a(less)

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Books by Andrea Dworkin

Average rating: 3.69 · 1,163 ratings · 117 reviews · 12 distinct works

	Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin, Ariel Levy (Foreword by) 3.58 avg rating — 365 ratings — 6 editions	My rating:
	Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant 3.95 avg rating — 191 ratings — published 2002 — 4 editions	My rating:
	Pornography: Men Possessing Women 3.40 avg rating — 196 ratings — published 1981 — 6 editions	My rating:
	Woman Hating 3.73 avg rating — 106 ratings — published 1974 — 3 editions	My rating:
	Letters from a War Zone 3.92 avg rating — 65 ratings — published 1989 — 3 editions	My rating:
	Life and Death 3.90 avg rating — 59 ratings — 3 editions	My rating:
	Mercy: A Novel 3.56 avg rating — 45 ratings — 4 editions	My rating:
	Right Wing Women 4.12 avg rating — 41 ratings — 3 editions	My rating:
	Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation 4.07 avg rating — 30 ratings — 3 editions	My rating:
	Our Blood: Prophecies And Discourses On Sexual Politics 4.14 avg rating — 21 ratings — published 1976 — 3 editions	My rating:

More books by Andrea Dworkin…

Quotes by Andrea Dworkin

“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

tags: sexism

37 people liked it

“I'm going to ask you to remember the prostituted, the homeless, the battered, the raped, the tortured, the murdered, the raped-then-murdered, the murdered-then-raped; and I am going to ask you to remember the photographed, the ones that any or all of the above happened to and it was photographed and now the photographs are for sale in our free countries. I want you to think about those who have been hurt for the fun, the entertainment, the so-called speech of others; those who have been hurt for profit, for the financial benefit of pimps and entrepreneurs. I want you to remember the perpetrator and I am going to ask you to remember the victims: not just tonight but tomorrow and the next day. I want you to find a way to include them -- the perpetrators and the victims -- in what you do, how you think, how you act, what you care about, what your life means to you.

Now, I know, in this room, some of you are the women I have been talking about. I know that. People around you may not. I am going to ask you to use every single thing you can remember about what was done to you -- how it was done, where, by whom, when, and, if you know -- why -- to begin to tear male dominance to pieces, to pull it apart, to vandalize it, to destabilize it, to mess it up, to get in its way, to fuck it up. I have to ask you to resist, not to comply, to destroy the power men have over women, to refuse to accept it, to abhor it and to do whatever is necessary despite its cost to you to change it.”
― Andrea Dworkin

tags: feminism

23 people liked it

“I don’t believe rape is inevitable or natural. If I did, I would have no reason to be here. If I did, my political practice would be different than it is. Have you ever wondered why we [women] are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we believe in your humanity, against all the evidence.”
― Andrea Dworkin

tags: rape-culture

7 people liked it

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Polls

Wich book would you like to read during October and November

Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Lifeby Stephanie Staal

7 votes, 28.0%

Swamplandia!by Karen Russell

5 votes, 20.0%

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolutionby Sara Marcus

5 votes, 20.0%

Kindredby Octavia E. Butler

3 votes, 12.0%

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Storiesby Sandra Cisneros

2 votes, 8.0%

Pornography: Men Possessing Womenby Andrea Dworkin

2 votes, 8.0%

A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000–2010byCherríe L. Moraga

1 vote, 4.0%

25 total votes

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