Andrea Dworkin Biography

American feminist writer, critical commentator, and political activist, born in Camden, New Jersey, educated at Bennington College. Active in women's campaigns throughout the USA, Dworkin has associated herself with the anti-pornography campaign. Her impassioned, and frequently controversial, writings attempt to lay bare the nature of patriarchal control; above all she sees such control expressed in acts of aggression against women. Her influential critical work Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) is a searing documentation of male violence against women, as is Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (1982). Dworkin has also written a fictional first-person account of a precarious female existence as a prostitute in New York's Lower East Side in her novel, Ice and Fire (1986), as well as a quasi-autobiographical novel about the female experience of rape, Mercy (1990). Equally controversial and even more polemical is Intercourse (1987). The control of women through domesticity and women's acceptance of male authority are discussed in Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (1983). A decade of campaign speeches, interviews, and essays are collected in Letters from a War Zone (1988).