exceptions: Ms. and Mother Jones.
In the years following the publication of Woman Hating,
it began to be regarded as a feminist classic. The honor in
this will only be apparent to those who value Mary
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication o f the Rights o f Women or
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible. It was a great
honor. Feminists alone were responsible for the survival of
Woman Hating. Feminists occupied the offices of Woman
* After Our Blood was published, I went to this same weekly to beg—yes,
beg—for some attention to the book, which was dying. The male writer
whose “release” had been threatened by “Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality’ ” asked to meet me. He told me, over and over, how very beautiful Our Blood was. “You know—urn—um, ” I said, “that—urn, urn—That
Speech is in Our Blood—you know, the one you wrote about. ” “So
beautiful, ” he said, “so beautiful. ” The editor-in-chief of the weekly
wrote me that Our Blood was so fine, so moving. But Our Blood did not
get any help, not even a mention, in those pages.
Hating's publisher to demand that the book be published in
paper. Phyllis Chesler contacted feminist writers of reputation all over the country to ask for written statements of support for the book. Those writers responded with astonishing generosity. Feminist newspapers reported the suppression of the book. Feminists who worked in bookstores scavenged distributors’ warehouses for copies of the book and wrote over and over to the publisher to demand
the book. Women’s studies programs began using it.
Women passed the book from hand to hand, bought second
and third and fourth copies to give friends whenever they
could find it. Even though the publisher of Woman Hating
had told me it was “mediocre, ” the pressure finally resulted
in a paperback edition in 1976: 2500 leftover unbound
copies were bound in paper and distributed, sort of.
Problems with distribution continued, and bookstores,
which reported selling the book steadily when it was in
stock, had to wait months for orders to be filled. Woman
Hating is now in its fifth tiny paperback printing. The book
is not another piece of lost women’s literature only because
feminists would not give it up. In a way this story is
heartening, because it shows what activism can accomplish,
even in the Yahoo land of Amerikan publishing.
But I had nowhere to go, no way to continue as a writer.
So I went on the road—to women’s groups who passed a hat
for me at the end of my talk, to schools where feminist
students fought to get me a hundred dollars or so, to
conferences where women sold T-shirts to pay me. I spent
weeks or months writing a talk. I took long, dreary bus rides
to do what appeared to be only an evening’s work and slept
wherever there was room. Being an insomniac, I did not
sleep much. Women shared their homes, their food, their
hearts with me, and I met women in every circumstance,
nice women and mean women, brave women and terrified
women. And the women I met had suffered every crime,
every indignity: and I listened. “The Rape Atrocity and the
Boy Next D oor” (in this volume) always elicited the same
responses: I heard about rape after rape; women’s lives
passed before me, rape after rape; women who had been
raped in homes, in cars, on beaches, in alleys, in classrooms, by one man, by two men, by five men, by eight men, hit, drugged, knifed, tom , women who had been sleeping,
women who had been with their children, women who had
been out for a walk or shopping or going to school or going
home from school or in their offices working or in factories
or in stockrooms, young women, girls, old women, thin
women, fat women, housewives, secretaries, hookers,
teachers, students. I simply could not bear it. So I stopped
giving the speech. I thought I would die from it. I learned
what I had to know, and more than I could stand to know.
My life on the road was an exhausting mixture of good
and bad, the ridiculous and the sublime. One fairly typical
example: I gave the last lecture in Our Blood (“The Root
Cause, ” my favorite) on my twenty-ninth birthday. I had
written it as a birthday present to myself. The lecture was
sponsored by a Boston-based political collective. They were
because it was my birthday and I wanted my family with me,
my friend and our dog. I had offered to come another time
but they wanted me then— en famille. One collective
member drove to New York in the most horrible thunderstorm I have ever seen to pick us up and drive us back to Boston. The other cars on the road were blurs of red light
here and there. The driver was exhausted, it was impossible
to see; and the driver did not like my political views. He
kept asking me about various psychoanalytic theories, none
of which I had the good sense to appreciate. I kept trying to
change the subject—he kept insisting that I tell him what I
thought of so-and-so—every time I got so cornered that I
had to answer, he slammed his foot down on the gas pedal.
I thought that we would probably die from the driver’s
fatigue and fury and God’s rain. We were an hour late, and
the jam-packed audience had waited. The acoustics in the
room were superb, which enhanced not only my own voice
but the endless howling of my dog, who finally bounded
through the audience to sit on stage during the question-
and-answer period. The audience was fabulous: involved,
serious, challenging. Many of the ideas in the lecture were
new and, because they directly confronted the political
nature of male sexuality, enraging. The woman with whom
we were supposed to stay and who was responsible for our
trip home was so enraged that she ran out, never to return.
We were stranded, without money, not knowing where to
turn. A person can be stranded and get by, even though she
will be imperiled; two people with a German shepherd and
no money are in a mess. Finally, a woman whom I knew
slightly took us all in and loaned us the money to get home.
Working (and it is demanding, intense, difficult work) and
traveling in such endlessly improvised circumstances require
that one develop an affection for low comedy and gross
melodrama. I never did. Instead I became tired and
demoralized. And I got even poorer, because no one could
ever afford to pay me for the time it took to do the writing.
I did not begin demanding realistic fees, secure accommodations, and safe travel in exchange for my work until after the publication of Our Blood. I had tried intermittently and mostly failed. But now I had to be paid and safe.
I felt I had really entered middle age. This presented new
problems for feminist organizers who had little access to the
material resources in their communities. It also presented
me with new problems. For a long time I got no work at all,
so I just got poorer and poorer. It made no sense to anyone
but me: if you have nothing, and someone offers you
something, how can you turn it down? But I did, because I
knew that I would never make a living unless I took a stand.
I had a fine and growing reputation as a speaker and writer;
but still, there was no money for me. When I first began to
ask for fees, I got angry responses from women: how could
the author of Woman Hating be such a scummy capitalist
pig, one woman asked in a nearly obscene letter. The letter
writer was going to live on a farm and have nothing to do
with rat-shit capitalists and bourgeois feminist creeps. Well,
I wrote back, I didn’t live on a farm and didn’t want to. I
bought food in a supermarket and paid rent to a landlord
and I wanted to write books. I answered all the angry
letters. I tried to explain the politics of getting the money,
especially from colleges and universities: the money was
there; it was hard to get; why should it go to Phyllis Schlafly
or William F. Buckley, Jr.? I had to live and I had to write.
Surely my writing m attered, it mattered to them or why did
they want me: and did they want me to stop writing? I
needed money to write. I had done the rotten jobs and I
was living in real, not romantic, poverty. I found that the
effort to explain really helped—not always, and resentments still surfaced, but enough to make me see that explaining even without finally convincing was worthwhile.
Even if I didn’t get paid, somebody else might. After a long
fallow period I began to lecture again. I lectured erratically
and never made enough to live on, even in what I think of
as stable poverty, even when my fees were high. Many
feminist activists did fight for the money and sometimes got
it. So I managed—friends loaned me money, sometimes
anonymous donations came in the mail, women handed me
checks at lectures and refused to let me refuse them,
feminist writers gave me gifts of money and loaned me
money, and women fought incredible and bitter battles with
college administrators and committees and faculties to get
me hired and paid. The women’s movement kept me alive. I
did not live well or safely or easily, but I did not stop writing
either. I remain extremely grateful to those who went the
distance for me.
I decided to publish the talks in Our Blood because I was
desperate for money, the magazines were still closed to me,
and I was living hand-to-mouth on the road. A book was my
only chance.
The editor who decided to publish Our Blood did not
particularly like my politics, but she did like my prose. I was
happy to be appreciated as a writer. The company was the
only unionized publishing house in New York and it also
had an active women’s group. The women employees were
universally wonderful to me—vitally interested in feminism,
moved by my work, conscious and kind. They invited me to
address the employees of the company on their biennial
women’s day, shortly before the publication of Our Blood. I
discussed the systematic presumption of male ownership of
women’s bodies and labor, the material reality of that
ownership, the economic degrading of women’s work. (The
talk was subsequently published in abridged form under the
title “Phallic Imperialism” in Ms., December 1976. ) Some
men in suits sat dourly through it, taking notes. That,
needless to say, was the end of Our Blood. There was one
other telling event: a highly placed department head threw
the manuscript of Our Blood at my editor across a room. I
did not recognize male tenderness, he said. I don’t know
whether he made the observation before or after he threw
the manuscript.
Our Blood was published in cloth in 1976. The only
review of it in a major periodical was in Ms. many months
after the book was out of bookstores. It was a rave.
Otherwise, the book was ignored: but purposefully, maliciously. Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and Karen DeCrow tried to review the book to no avail. I contacted
nearly a hundred feminist writers, activists, editors. A large
majority made countless efforts to have the book reviewed.
Some managed to publish reviews in feminist publications,
but even those who frequently published elsewhere were
unable to place reviews. No one was able to break the larger
silence.
Our Blood was sent to virtually every paperback publisher in the United States, sometimes more than once, over a period of years. None would publish it. Therefore, it is
with great joy, and a shaky sense of victory, that I welcome
its publication in this edition. I have a special love for this
book. Most feminists I know who have read Our Blood
have taken me aside at one time or another to tell me that
they have a special affection and respect for it. There is, I
believe, something quite beautiful and unique about it.
Perhaps that is because it was written for a human voice.
Perhaps it is because I had to fight so hard to say what is in
it. Perhaps it is because Our Blood has touched so many
women’s lives directly: it has been said over and over again
to real women and the experience of saying the words has
informed the writing of them. Woman Hating was written
by a younger writer, one more reckless and more hopeful
both. This book is more disciplined, more somber, more
rigorous, and in some ways more impassioned. I am happy
that it will now reach a larger audience, and sorry that it
took so long.
Andrea Dworkin
New York City
March 1981
1
Fem inism , A rt, and My M other S ylvia
I am very happy to be here today. It is no small thing for me
to be here. There are many other places I could be. This is not
what my mother had planned for me.
I want to tell you something about my mother. Her name is
Sylvia. Her father’s name is Spiegel. Her husband’s name is
Dworkin. She is fifty-nine years old, my mother, and just a few
months ago she had a serious heart attack. She is recovered
now and back on her job. She is a secretary in a high school.
She has been a heart patient most of her life, and all of mine.
When she was a child she had rheumatic fever. She says that
her real trouble began when she was pregnant with my brother
Mark and got pneumonia. After that, her life was a misery of
illness. After years of debilitating illness—heart failures, toxic
reactions to the drugs that kept her alive—she underwent
Delivered at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, April 16, 1974.
heart surgery, then she suffered a brain clot, a stroke, that
robbed her of speech for a long time. She recovered from the
heart surgery. She recovered from her stroke, although she
still speaks more slowly than she thinks. Then, about eight
years ago she had a heart attack. She recovered. Then, a few
months ago she had a heart attack. She recovered.
My mother was bom in Jersey City, New Jersey, the second
oldest of seven children, two boys, five girls. Her parents,
Sadi
e and Edward, who were cousins, came from someplace
in Hungary. Her father died before I was bom. Her mother is
now eighty. There is no way of knowing of course if my mother’s heart would have been injured so badly had she been bom into a wealthy family. I suspect not, but I do not know. There
is also of course no way of knowing if she would have received
different medical treatment had she not been a girl. But regardless, it all happened the way it happened, and so she was very ill most of her life. Since she was a girl, no one encouraged her to read books (though she tells me that she used to love to read and does not remember when or why she stopped
reading); no one encouraged her to go to college or asked her
to consider the problems of the world in which she lived. Because her family was poor, she had to work as soon as she finished high school. She worked as a secretary full-time, and
on Saturdays and some evenings she did part-time work as a
“salesgirl” in a department store. Then she married my father.
My father was a school teacher and he also worked nights
in the post office because he had medical bills to pay. He had
to keep my mother alive, and he had two children to support
as well. I say along with Joseph Chaikin in The Presence of
the Actor: “The medical-economic reality in this country is
emblematic of the System which literally chooses who is to
survive. I renounce my government for its inequitable economic system. ”*1 Others, I must point out to you, had and have less than we did. Others who were not my mother but
* Notes start on p. 113.
who were in her situation did and do die. I too renounce this
government because the poor die, and they are not only the
victims of heart disease, or kidney disease, or cancer— they
are the victims of a system which says a visit to the doctor is
$25 and an operation is $5, 000.
When I was twelve, my mother emerged from her heart
surgery and the stroke that had robbed her of speech. There
she was, a mother, standing up and giving orders. We had a
very hard time with each other. I didn’t know who she was, or
what she wanted from me. She didn’t know who I was, but she
had definite ideas about who I should be. She had, I thought, a