Introduction // Andrea Dworkin Biographical Essay
Preliminary work towards a proper account of the life and work of Andrea Dworkin
Note: This Introduction serves as a sneak peak at a biographical essay which will be posted here on my Substack at a later date. Enjoy!
Amsterdam, 1972. At 26 years old, Andrea Rita Dworkin made a vow. She made this vow to herself and that vow was that she would become a real writer and that she would use everything that she knew to help women.1 While Dworkin had been abroad in Europe and was unable to witness the beginning of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the states, she had managed to read some of the radical feminist literature which was coming out of that movement. It was Dworkin’s understanding, however, that something was missing from all that she read. She writes about how “in 1972 what I knew was not a part of feminism: what I knew about male dominance and in sex or rape in marriage.”2 These topics are ones which Andrea was, unfortunately, closely acquainted with, having just escaped an abusive marriage and being pursued by her batterer husband, and having endured the harsh realities of growing up as a girl in a man’s world, being raped for the first time at the age of 9. Andrea’s ultimate goal in writing her debut book Woman Hating (1974) was, in her words, “to find out what happened to me and why.”3
Dworkin’s life and activism offer a strong counterpoint to popular narratives of the Sixties as being defined solely by “Free Love,” a notion which her activism actively questioned (see “Renouncing Sexual Equality”). Additionally, her theorizing on gender and sex was radical even by today’s standards and prefigured — and arguably even surpassed in its revolutionary potential — some of the social constructionist views which are now popular.4 There are many reasons why we still can benefit from hearing Dworkin’s message, but it is for these reasons in particular that Dworkin is the radical we desperately need.
Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War against Women, (Free Press, 2002), pp. 22.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 20.
As noted, Dworkin’s positions were arguably even more radical than those held by many more recent social constructionists (especially when compared to Queer Studies, where a Butlerian “subversion” approach to destabilizing gender exists in tension with the gender – and sex – abolition approach which Dworkin and others have taken; for more on these abolitionist approaches, see in particular Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, (Beacon Press, 2002). Monique Wittig is perhaps the most exemplar of those who hold this position.