For a time, Dworkin engaged in sex work for survival. After escaping and divorcing her husband, he stalked her and continued the abuse whenever he found her again.
At nine years old, she was molested by a man, and as an adult in Europe, she was married to an abusive man who was sexually and physically violent. She’s probably most well-known for her anti-pornography and anti-sex work perspectives.ĭworkin was a survivor of multiple gender-based violences. Much of her work is focused on sexual violence against women under patriarchy. The survivors and families we serve must always come first in our priorities at Walnut Avenue.Īndrea Dworkin (1946-2005) was a Jewish American radical feminist who began publishing as a writer in 1974. Instead, the purpose here is to acknowledge the personal complexities of Andrea Dworkin as a person while explaining why her legacy has caused harm to many of the marginalized survivors we support every day. This post isn’t going to address the wider phenomenon of contemporary radical feminism, although Dworkin’s work has been so influential to the shaping of contemporary radical feminist thought that it will necessarily come up. One of these radical feminists included Andrea Dworkin. The original solidarity between radical feminist women of all kinds (cis, trans, and gender-nonconforming alike) began to fall apart when some prominent radical feminists highlighted women who they felt were doing their womanhood and activism the “wrong way”: most notably, women who were trans, women who were sexually attracted to men, and sex workers and porn performers. Unfortunately, radical feminism has become something different today.
Many younger people today can hardly imagine the limitations forced on women even just forty or fifty years ago, and when taken in its historical context, radical feminism no longer seems so extreme after all. Starting from surround the 1970s, radical feminism in the US was a movement responding to a system that, for example, had zero sexual harassment laws for workplaces, barred women from having their own credit cards, and the legal right for employers and landlords to refuse to work with or rent to women. Unless you’re interested in feminist theory, most people haven’t heard about Andrea Dworkin or why she might be any more controversial than other feminist figures speaking out against patriarchal violence.
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