49 Facts About Andrea Dworkin

1.

Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist writer and activist best known for her analysis of pornography.

2.

Andrea Dworkin interrogated premises underlying concepts such as freedom of the press and civil liberties.

3.

Andrea Dworkin was born on September 26,1946, in Camden, New Jersey, to Harry Dworkin and Sylvia Spiegel.

4.

Andrea Dworkin's father was the grandson of a Russian Jew who fled Russia when he was 15 years old in order to escape military service, and her mother was the child of Jewish immigrants from Hungary.

5.

Andrea Dworkin's father was a school teacher and dedicated socialist, whom she credited with inspiring her passion for social justice.

6.

Andrea Dworkin said she "probably would have become a rabbi" if women could have while she was in high school and she "would have liked" being a Talmudic scholar.

7.

Andrea Dworkin began writing poetry and fiction in the sixth grade.

8.

Andrea Dworkin was particularly influenced by Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Henry Miller, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Che Guevara, and the Beat poets, especially Allen Ginsberg, and has included among writers she "admired most" Jean Genet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron.

9.

Andrea Dworkin graduated in 1964 from what is Cherry Hill High School West.

10.

In 1965, while a freshman at Bennington College, Andrea 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, known for housing renowned leftist women.

11.

Andrea Dworkin spoke in public and testified before a grand jury about her experience, and the media coverage of her testimony made national and international news.

12.

The grand jury declined to make an indictment in the case, but Andrea Dworkin's testimony contributed to public outrage over the mistreatment of inmates.

13.

Andrea Dworkin traveled from Paris to Athens on the Orient Express, and went to live and write on the island of Crete.

14.

Andrea Dworkin wrote several poems and dialogues which she hand-printed after returning to the United States; these became the book Morning Hair.

15.

Andrea Dworkin graduated with a Bachelor's degree in literature in 1968.

16.

Andrea Dworkin tried to work up the money to return to the United States.

17.

Andrea Dworkin later wrote that she eventually agreed to help smuggle a briefcase of heroin through customs in return for $1,000 and an airplane ticket, thinking that if she was successful she could return home with the ticket and the money, and if caught she would at least escape her ex-husband's abuse by going to prison.

18.

In New York City, Andrea Dworkin worked again as an anti-war organizer, participated in demonstrations for lesbian rights and against apartheid in South Africa.

19.

From 1974 through 1983, Andrea Dworkin wrote prolifically, producing four volumes developing her overall thesis about the practice, meaning, and function of patriarchal, misogynist violence.

20.

Andrea Dworkin was a strong opponent of President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton during the scandal centered on his behavior toward Monica Lewinsky, whom she supported.

21.

Andrea Dworkin expressed support for Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick.

22.

Andrea Dworkin's articles ignited public controversy when writers such as Catherine Bennett and Julia Gracen published doubts about her account, polarizing opinion between skeptics and supporters such as Catharine MacKinnon, Katharine Viner, and Gloria Steinem.

23.

In 2002, Andrea Dworkin published her autobiography, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant.

24.

Andrea Dworkin is known for her role as a speaker, writer, and activist in the feminist anti-pornography movement.

25.

Andrea Dworkin spoke at the first Take Back the Night march in November 1978, and joined 3,000 women in a march through the red-light district of San Francisco.

26.

In 1981, Andrea Dworkin published Pornography: Men Possessing Women, which analyzes contemporary and historical pornography as an industry of misogynistic dehumanization.

27.

Andrea Dworkin argues that pornography is implicated in violence against women, both in its production, and in the social consequences of its consumption by encouraging men to eroticize the domination, humiliation, and abuse of women.

28.

Andrea Dworkin, who joined The American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel, argued in Pornography that this denigration of women is built into linguistic norms.

29.

Andrea Dworkin continued to support the civil rights approach in her writing and activism, and supported anti-pornography feminists who organized later campaigns in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Bellingham, Washington, to pass versions of the ordinance by voter initiative.

30.

On January 22,1986, Andrea Dworkin testified for half an hour before the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography in New York City, and answered questions from commissioners after completing her testimony.

31.

Andrea Dworkin opposed LEAF's position, arguing that feminists should not support or attempt to reform criminal obscenity law.

32.

Andrea Dworkin identifies the book a revolutionary act, an expression of a "commitment to ending male dominance" in all its cultural and social manifestations.

33.

Andrea Dworkin describes the impossibility of a revolution for women if women with privilege and comfort are not willing to give up each in solidarity with women not so entitled.

34.

Andrea Dworkin's exploration exists in a Western literary lineage that includes Orlando: A Biography, by Virginia Woolf, and Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy.

35.

Andrea Dworkin identifies factors which influenced the chapter: 'years of reading Freud and trying to figure out abstractly what all this was about'.

36.

In 1983, Andrea Dworkin published Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females, an examination of women's reasons for collaborating with conservative men for the limitation of women's freedom.

37.

Andrea Dworkin published three fictional works after achieving notability as a feminist author and activist.

38.

Andrea Dworkin published a collection of short stories, the new womans broken heart in 1980.

39.

However, Andrea Dworkin aimed to depict men's harm to women as normalized political harm, not as eccentric eroticism.

40.

Andrea Dworkin became one of the most influential writers and spokeswomen of American radical feminism during the late 1970s and the 1980s.

41.

Andrea Dworkin characterized pornography as an industry of damaging objectification and abuse, not a metaphysical fantasy realm.

42.

Andrea Dworkin discussed prostitution as a system of exploitation, and intercourse as a key site of intimate subordination in patriarchy.

43.

Rebecca Traister stated that Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse was one of the books that inspired her 2018 book Good and Mad.

44.

Andrea Dworkin came out of movements led by leftist men, such as when protesting the Vietnam War or when active in the Gay liberation Movement.

45.

Andrea Dworkin spoke with and wrote about politically conservative women, resulting in the publication of Right-Wing Women.

46.

Andrea Dworkin testified at a Meese Commission hearing on pornography while Attorney General Edwin Meese was serving socially conservative President Ronald Reagan.

47.

Andrea Dworkin had a political discourse with National Review writer David Frum and their spouses arranged by Christopher Hitchens.

48.

Where the physical appearance of male writers is regarded as irrelevant or cherished as a charming eccentricity, Andrea Dworkin's was reviled and mocked and turned into pornography.

49.

In 1989, Andrea Dworkin wrote an article about her life as a battered wife in the Netherlands, "What Battery Really Is", in response to Susan Brownmiller, who had argued that Hedda Nussbaum, a battered woman, should have been indicted for her failure to stop Joel Steinberg from murdering their adoptive daughter.