Andrea Dworkin
The second-wave feminist movement of the latter twentieth century generated a wave of writing and activism that pushed questions of gender and sexuality into mainstream public debate. Andrea Dworkin was born on September 26, 1946, in Camden, and went on to work across several interconnected roles — as a writer, essayist, novelist, journalist, literary critic, feminist, and women's rights activist — throughout the decades that followed.
Dworkin attended Cherry Hill High School West and later Bennington College. She worked in English across multiple forms, combining polemical nonfiction, fiction, and cultural criticism in ways that reflected the breadth of her occupational identities. Her notable works include Pornography: Men Possessing Women and Intercourse, both of which became part of the public record of feminist writing in the late twentieth century. The range of her output — spanning so many different genres and modes — set her apart from writers who confined themselves to a single form.
Her work earned concrete recognition: Dworkin received the American Book Awards, an honor associated with writing outside the commercial mainstream. She died on April 9, 2005, in Washington, D.C., as a United States citizen. The American Book Awards remain the most specific marker of formal recognition attached to her name in the available record.
Quotes by Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Dworkin's insights on:
People don't understand the tyranny of media. The few women that the media will allow in have to think about male approval and their own success - and their writing reflects that.
I see my books as a body of work, in my opinion, of singular importance and deeply disrespected in a way that is savagely unfair.
As long as there is rape... there is not going to be any peace or justice or equality or freedom. You are not going to become what you want to become or who you want to become. You are not going to live in the world you want to live in.
My hatred is precious. I don't want to waste it on those who are colluding in their own oppression.
People want me to shut up, but I won't. I believe social change is possible; that's why I'm an activist.
Because feminism is a movement for liberation of the powerless by the powerless in a closed system based on their powerlessness, right-wing women judge it a futile movement. Frequently they also judge it a malicious movement in that it jeopardizes the bargains with power that they can make; feminism calls into question for the men confronted by it the sincerity of women who conform without political resistance.
Women are objects, commodities, some deemed more expensive than others. But it is only by asserting one’s humanness every time, in all situations, that one becomes someone as opposed to something. That, after all is the core of our struggle.
Greatness is not synonymous with perfection or popularity. In the long-arc narratives of male genius that reach far beyond a lifetime, greatness is established despite, and in the glaring light of, great flaws. Great men are by definition to be reckoned with and honored for the dilemmas they force us to confront, while the ways to castigate a woman of brilliance and ambition are second-nature and sometimes fatal, whether she’s deemed evil or merely, as they say, problematic.