Andrea Dworkin

Help build a biography! Shown here is an outline chronology of the life of Andrea Dworkin. If you are a new visitor, please read the following.

Who is Andrea Dworkin?

Ms Dworkin is an influential theorist, writer, lecturer and campaigner on feminist issues. The closest she has come to writing an autobiography is a long contribution she wrote in 1994 for the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, volume 21 (New York: Gale Research Inc., published 1995). To learn more about her, you should also visit her official web site.

What has she written?

Ms Dworkin is the author of many books and feature articles as shown in this full bibliography. To understand Andrea Dworkin and her opinions, you should read her work (or, at least, a good cross section of it).

Why are the facts of her life so important?

Because Ms Dworkin has stated that:

"Everything I have written in these non-fiction essays about myself is true." [Source]

And, in more general terms:

"Autobiography is the unseen foundation of my non-fiction work, especially Intercourse and Pornography: Men Possessing Women. These two non-fiction books are not "about" me. There is no first-person writing in them. Conceptually, each involved the assimilation of research in many intellectually distinct areas using analytical skills culled from different disciplines. The research materials had nothing to do with me personally. They were free-standing, objectively independent (for instance, not interviews conducted by me). Yet when I wrote Intercourse and Pornography: Men Possessing Women, I used my life in every decision I made. It was my compass. Only by using it could I find north and stay on course. If a reader could lift up the words on the page, she would see-- far, far under the surface--my life. If the print on the page turned into blood, it would be my blood from many different places and times. But I did not want the reader to see my life or my blood. I wanted her to see intercourse or pornography. I wanted her to know them the way I know them: which is deeply." [Source. Our emphasis.]

From this, it is not unreasonable to conclude that a deeper understanding of Ms Dworkin’s life (where her ‘north’ is) will inevitably lead to a deeper understanding of her arguments. By way of further confirmation, Dworkin…

"…describes a time when, ‘homeless, poor, . . . sexually traumatized, I learned to trade sex for money. I spent a lot of years out on the street, living hand to mouth.’ That experience, according to this letter, is part of what informs the commitment behind all her writing." [Letter to The New York Times Book Review May 3, 1992, paraphrased in The Lie Detector page of her official web-site. Our emphasis.]

In other words, Ms Dworkin’s theories about prostitution can be believed because she was a prostitute; her theories about child abuse can be believed because she was sexually abused as a child; her theories about male violence can be believed because she was beaten by her husband and her theories about rape can be believed because she has been raped and suffered ‘rape-like’ experiences.

Believe the life, believe the experiences and you must believe the polemic.

What do we need?

Facts about all periods of Andrea Dworkin’s life. Small facts and big facts. Read through the chronology as it stands and, if you feel you can add anything to it, e-mail us at joe.friday@offmsg.connectfree.co.uk. Indicate clearly if you wish to remain anonymous.

We will take the information and attempt to corroborate it in some way, maybe by cross-referencing it to other e-mails, maybe against other sources. Only when we are confident that the purported facts are real facts will they be added to the chronology.

In terms of quality of data, documentary evidence is supreme; a copy of a marriage certificate or a divorce decree will always beat just kind of knowing that someone was married. Eye-witness evidence rates highly too, especially if it mentions the presence of other witnesses. Blatant rumour and innuendo comes very low on the scale.

What we don’t need, and won’t publish are opinions, discussions of her views, short hagiographies, insults and slander. That can stay in the news groups where it belongs.

So, if you went to Bennington College with Ms Dworkin, walked the streets of New York with her in anti-war demonstrations, bumped into her at the Paradiso Club in Amsterdam, contact us. Were you there when she flew into Israel? Was she staying in the hotel room next to you in Paris last year?