[lit-ideas] Andrea Dworkin
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2005 23:13:50 -0700
Radical Feminist Writer Andrea Dworkin Dies
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 12, 2005; Page B06
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."
She studied at Bennington College in Vermont, where she lobbied the
administration to allow men to spend the night in women's dorms. But she
later likened the school to "the archetypical brothel," where female
students were practically given to prominent guest speakers.
After Bennington, she spent several years in Europe and briefly married
a man she described as a Dutch anarchist and flower child who also
burned her with cigarettes and beat her, she said.
She also worked as a waitress, teacher, receptionist, salesclerk,
factory worker and assistant to poet Muriel Rukeyser, who encouraged her
literary aspirations.
Her earliest titles were largely ignored by reviewers but assured her a
steady income through speaking engagements. By many accounts, she was a
galvanizing presence at feminist and anti-pornography rallies.
Ms. Dworkin's later books included "Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel and
Women's Liberation" (2000), which asked whether women should have their
own country, just as the Jews received theirs.
She wrote two novels that had clusters of admirers around the globe. The
response prompted her to quip that her fictions were "easier to find in
English in Nigeria than in the U.S."
She and her companion of 30 years, John Stoltenberg, married in 1998.
Both were gay, and they called each other life partners. She accompanied
him to Washington from New York last year for his job as managing editor
of AARP magazine. He is her only immediate survivor.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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