Andrea Dworkin is dead. As far as I know, Duberman did not meet her but had exclusive access to her archives, in which there were a lot of letters.returnreturnThe book kicks off by showing Dworkin’s fierce sides as she, nineteen years old, joined a sit-in at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations to protest the escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam:returnreturn

Minutes later, the police suddenly descended, and Andrea was among those carted off to night court. Her legal-aid attorney tried to persuade the presiding judge to free her on her own recognizance, arguing that she posed no danger to society during the period that would precede sentencing.returnreturnThe judge rejected the plea, fixed bail at $500 and, when Andrea said she couldn’t pay, remanded her to the notorious bastille in the heart of Greenwich Village known as the Women’s House of Detention. After being showered and searched, she was subjected to a “vaginal exam” by a prison nurse, then taken up to her cell and locked in. The following afternoon she was brought back to the examination room for another “inspection”; when an alarmed Andrea asked a policewoman why, the reply was another question: “Are you a virgin?” Andrea refused to answer.returnreturnAt that point two male doctors entered the room, one explaining loudly to the other that he suspected venereal disease. Andrea was ordered onto the table and told to put her legs in the stirrups. While the one doctor stood by, the other applied pressure initially to Andrea’s stomach and then to her breast. “You’re hurting me,” Andrea protested. Ignoring her, he put on a rubber glove and inserted his hand first into her rectum, then into her vagina. Removing his hand, he explained to the other doctor that he would now probe further with a speculum. Andrea had never heard the word before.returnreturnAs the exam proceeded and her pain mounted, the second doctor plied her with questions: How many girls at Bennington are virgins? I don’t know, Andrea said. How many freshmen at Bennington are virgins? I don’t know, Andrea said, as the pain from the forceps grew worse. “That’s what you should know about,” he barked, “not Vietnam.”returnreturnWhen Andrea started to bleed—it would continue for the next two weeks—the doctor withdrew the forceps and ordered her back to the cell block. On the way, Andrea asked the accompanying policewoman if she could make a phone call. “It’s Friday,” the officer said. “No calls are allowed on weekends. Monday is George Washington’s birthday. You can call on Tuesday.” Released within a few days, Andrea decided to write to every newspaper listed in the Yellow Pages describing conditions at the House of Detention (built to house 400, it currently held 657 inmates) and her own mistreatment there.

returnreturnThis is not a wishy-washy biography about a simple bougie girl but a nuanced book about a person who desperately fought against injustice, be it real, imagined, against herself, or others.returnreturnDuberman does the reader a service by contrasting how Dworking was treated with disrespect and even hatred with how she treated others, both with love, hatred, and everything inbetween. She worked and lived in a time and place where feminism was not rated highly, in an extremely patriarchal society.returnreturnDworkin met Cornelius Dirk de Bruin, a.k.a. Iwan, who abused her terribly:returnreturn

The beatings escalated to the point where Iwan was kicking her in the stomach, banging her head against the floor, even hitting her with a beam of wood that bruised her so badly she could hardly walk for days. She managed, once, to get herself to a doctor; he told her he could write her a prescription for Valium or have her committed; she chose the Valium. Sometimes Iwan beat her into unconsciousness.returnreturnHer pain and fear became so great that she would scream out in agony, but no neighbor appeared to check on her. “If you scream for years,” she later wrote, “they will look through you for years.” They “see the bruises and injuries—and do nothing. . . . They say it’s your fault or you like it or they deny it is happening . . . you begin to feel you don’t exist . . . you begin to believe that he can hurt you as much as he wants and no one will help you. . . . Once you lose language, your isolation is absolute. . . . I wanted to die. . . . When I would come to after being beaten unconscious, the first feeling I had was a sorrow that I was alive.”returnreturnAt age twenty-five, the brilliant, dynamic Andrea had become (as she subsequently described it) “a woman whose whole life was speechless desperation. . . . Smothering anxiety, waking nightmares, cold sweats, sobs that I choked on were the constants of my daily life. . . . I was nearly dead, catatonic, without the will to live.”

returnreturnTo read of de Bruin’s horrific abuse and harassment of Dworkin is harrowing. The pain she suffered is described via her own words, in explicit detail.returnreturn

Gradually, very gradually, the forgotten emotion of anger began to resurface. And “the anger of the survivor” (as she later wrote) “is murderous. It is more dangerous to her than to the one who hurt her. She does not believe in murder; she wants him dead but will not kill him. She never gives up wanting him dead.”returnreturnClarity also began to return, and with it the knowledge that in the future (as she wrote) “it will be very difficult to lie to her or to manipulate her. She sees through the social strategies that have controlled her as a woman, the sexual strategies that have reduced her to a shadow of her own native possibilities. . . . The emotional severity of the survivor appears to others, even those closest to her, to be cold and unyielding, ruthless in its intensity. She knows too much about suffering to try to measure it when it is real, but she despises self-pity. She is self-protective, not out of arrogance, but because she has been ruined by her own fragility.”

returnreturnDworkin read a lot of modern feminist theory, formed her own theories, and put her words into action. As Duberman writes, ‘Andrea’s transition from abused hausfrau to formidably independent feminist, had been rapid—and astonishingly absolute.’returnreturn'Woman Hating' contains stories about the history of anti-feminist abuse and Dworkin’s vision about the future. She worked furiously from thereon, establishing herself as a key figure in the American 1970s feminist scene. She spoke out against pornography, gave speeches, moved south (which was a very bad idea), and solidified her (unconventional) partnership with John Stoltenberg.returnreturnDworkin was vehement against those who opposed her, and this in spite of some even being her friends. An example, where Gloria Steinem edited Dworkin carelessly:returnreturn

This wasn’t the last time that Andrea made Gloria, in her position as editor-in-chief of Ms., the target of complaint—though what Andrea called the “tenderness” she felt for Gloria to some extent stayed her hand. Over the years their run-ins were few, especially when put in the context of the trench warfare that periodically engulfed the feminist movement. But on at least one other occasion a serious conflict arose over what Andrea regarded as a breach of contract; she went so far—in a letter to Robin Morgan—as to accuse Gloria of “dishonesty” and “repeated lies.”returnreturnHaving learned better over the years than to tamper with Andrea’s prose without her express consent, Gloria—facing an eleventh-hour deadline, and following legal advice—rewrote a sentence in one of Andrea’s articles, and for the word “Porsche” substituted “auto.”returnreturnIt deeply upset Andrea. Ferdinand Porsche, head of the auto company, had been imprisoned for twenty months after World War II for war crimes (though never brought to trial), and in her Ms. article Andrea had deliberately called the firm out for its complicity in cooperating with the Nazis. To Andrea, establishing the linkage between the name “Porsche” and anti-Semitism was profoundly important. In response, Gloria implied that Andrea’s extreme distress about the changing of a single word was disproportionate—which upset Andrea still more.returnreturn“If you believe that it is all trivial and that I wasted time and energy on something not very important,” Andrea responded, “then I simply don’t know how to be clear and understood, and I can’t operate in a context that reduces my deepest concerns to a misguided personal overzealousness. I am absolutely lost . . . how can I hope to be understood and respected if you don’t understand the issues involved here?”returnreturnGloria pleaded ignorance of the Porsche connection to the Nazis, and Andrea in turn repeated that “I care a great deal for you, as I told you. . . Surely you must know that I have been a loyal friend, and that, while I must protect my work and my ethics, I do not want to harm either you or the magazine.” Gloria never again touched a word of Andrea’s prose without prior consultation, and Andrea never again found fault with her standards, either ethical or journalistic.

returnreturnDworkin could be isolated, destitute, even starving, and would yet express her thoughts in contrast to a massive wall of hatred against her, e.g. as Larry Flynt, owner of Hustler, a porn magazine, made sure that she was ridiculed and hated in many pages of his magazine.returnreturnThere are salient points in the book.returnreturn

Andrea and Kitty felt secure enough in their relationship to read each other’s work with an eye toward improving, not simply admiring, it (though they usually did). When Kitty, for example, read Andrea’s book Pornography in manuscript, she pulled no punches: “You take certain things on the level of their own self-presentation, which is myth, and hold them to that standard, rather than criticizing deeper realities, which in each case are even more open to attack. Example . . . where you say ‘the objective scientists’ find such and such, it is not clear whether you are faulting their objectivity or questioning objectivity itself. It seems more like the former, and I think the latter is more devastating and telling.”returnreturnConversely, though Andrea praised Kitty’s speech “Violence Against Women—A Perspective” as “wonderful,” she felt free to tell her that “I think it is just patently wrong to say that ‘lesbian eroticism’ per se is not from the male standpoint, and also that therefore from the male standpoint it is the most obscene. . . . The Well of Loneliness is I think saturated with the ‘male viewpoint.’”

returnreturnThe book also goes into her non-explicit feminist work, for example, Scapegoat:returnreturn

Scapegoat is something of an anomaly in Andrea’s body of work. Her long-standing theme of misogyny shares the stage this time around, and is often crowded off it, by her impassioned discussions of anti-Semitism and the militaristic turn taken by the state of Israel. Scapegoat is also the most traditionally academic of Andrea’s books (though her insights go deeper and the pulsating intensity of her prose is more riveting than can be said for most academic works); it seems a surprising anomaly for a writer who in earlier books experimented with twisting autobiography into fiction, and then back again, to end up in Scapegoat with all the scholarly apparatus of the professoriate and a prose style all but free of onrushing proclamation.returnreturnSingular, too, is the near absence in Scapegoat of those occasional apocalyptic outbursts that previously studded her work. Aside from the innate drama of the subject matter itself, Scapegoat is notably free of showy theatricality or grandiloquence. The tone throughout is highly sophisticated, the analysis measured, deliberate, exquisitely cerebral. The central theme of Scapegoat is the analogous dehumanization of Jews and women in Nazi Germany, and Palestinians and women in the state of Israel. Andrea nowhere suggests any equation between the unmitigated vileness of the German Nazis and the current behavior of Israeli men. In her view, the link between the two, though only marginal, is the cultivation in both instances of a hyper-masculinity reliant for believability and force on the scapegoating of others. The matter of scale is all-important, as is the differing cultural context in which the warrior model emerged in the two countries, and the ways in which it was publicly deployed.

returnreturnThis is, strangely, both an impersonal book and a personal one; while Duberman goes through the motions of Dworkin’s life, he does not seem to have interviewed a single person to contrast what he is writing about. This kind of armchair biography brings light, but not enough, in my experience, and this book suffers because of it.returnreturnWhen Duberman gets personal, some weird stuff pours through. An example of this:returnreturn

The New York Times, weighing in a month after the publication of Scapegoat, managed to put a damper—as only the Times can—on whatever momentum might have been building for the book

returnreturnI most certainly agree that The New York Times has a lot to answer for, but this type of writing sidetracks Dworkin in a way that I feel she does not deserve.returnreturnThe weirdness aside—of which there are really only remnants—this book does delve into Dworkin’s life and her interactions with others, mainly thanks to Duberman’s exclusive access to Dworkin’s archives.returnreturnThe book does breathe and is quite exciting to read at times. Dworkin was an unabashed firebrand, a beacon of modern feminism: brash, outrageous, angry, and free. We all have things to learn from her and this book reminds us to do just that.