Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Rita Dworkin (September 26, 1946 – April 9, 2005) was an American radical feminist and writer. She was best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued led to rape and other forms of violence against women.

Her life and work

Dworkin was born in Camden, New Jersey. Her father was a schoolteacher and dedicated socialist whom she credited with inspiring her passion for social justice. Though she described her Jewish household as being in many ways dominated by the memory of the Holocaust, she had a generally happy and normal childhood until the age of 9, when she was molested in a movie theater. In 1965, while a student at Bennington College, she 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, where she was subjected to a internal examination by prison doctors that was so rough that she bled for days afterwards. Her testimony of the experience was reported internationally and led to the prison's closure.

Related Topics:
Camden, New Jersey - Socialist - Jew - Holocaust - 1965 - Bennington College - Vietnam War - United States - United Nations - New York Women's House of Detention

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After graduating, she moved to Amsterdam and married a Dutch anarchist, who physically abused her during the course of a five-year marriage. After escaping from him Dworkin found herself caught far away from home, in the Netherlands, nearly destitute and in desperate need of money; for a while she became a prostitute in order to survive. In 1971, she began working on "early pieces and fragments" of Woman Hating with her friend Ricki Abrams, and after making her way back to the United States, she completed the work on her own. Woman Hating became Dworkin's first published book in 1974.

Related Topics:
Amsterdam - Anarchist - Netherlands - Prostitute - 1971 - United States - 1974

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In the United States, Dworkin became involved in the radical feminist movement, focusing on campaigns against violence against women. In addition to her writing and activism, Dworkin gained notoriety as a speaker, mostly for events organized by local feminist groups. She became well-known for passionate, uncompromising speeches that inspired her audience to action, such as her speech at the first Take Back the Night march in 1978, and her 1983 speech at the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men, entitled I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape. Many of Dworkin's early speeches are reprinted in her books Our Blood (1976) and Letters from a War Zone (1988).

Related Topics:
United States - Radical feminist - Take Back the Night - 1978 - 1983

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Dworkin married John Stoltenberg in 1998, yet they identified themselves as lesbian and gay, respectively.

Related Topics:
John Stoltenberg - Lesbian - Gay

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In June 2000, Dworkin published a controversial article in the New Statesman, stating that one or more men had raped her in a hotel in Paris in 1999, using a drug in her drink (probably GHB, according to Dworkin) to disable her.

Related Topics:
June 2000 - 1999 - GHB

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She died the morning of April 9, 2005, at her home in Washington, D.C.. She was 58 years old. The cause of death has not been established. She had been suffering from osteoarthritis for several years (which she thought, according to her last column for the Guardian, might have been exacerbated by wounds from the rape in Paris).

Related Topics:
April 9 - 2005 - Washington, D.C. - Osteoarthritis

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