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"I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to give if she asserts her will." (xiii)
Andrea Dworkin's writings and speeches on feminism, abortion rights, lesbianism, rape, pornography, and prostitution have enormously contributed to the "second wave" women's movement during the 1960s and 1970s. As much as she is loved by "old-school" feminists most likely to be found staffing women's shelters and rape crisis lines, she is as despised and attacked by blatant right-wingers. But her critics include leftists as well: she is often described (not entirely without reason) as "anti-sex" and "essentialist" by a younger generation of progressive women, men, and transfolk who take issue with her generalizing and unforgiving stance against pornography and the sex trade. While Dworkin's work can be read as a denial of the possibility that women's engagement with sex work, porn, and S/M can be fulfilling and self-determined, rather than the result of internalized misogyny, it should not be written off as obsolete. Even her staunchest critics on the left can learn from her, particularly on the topic of the pervasiveness of sexism and sexualized violence in women's lives and in leftist movements. Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant provides glimpses -- albeit awkward and limited ones -- of the life experiences that have informed her activism and her analysis.
The basics
From this book, composed of forty-one short vignettes, I gleaned only the basics about Dworkin's life as a chronological history: she was raised in a middle-class Jewish family, set her apart from her peers by her love of books and music and her anti-authoritarian spirit. She organized with her high school's literati against the removal of Catcher in the Rye from the library's shelves; when the school's subsequent anti-Communist purge of the library missed a copy of Che Guevera's Guerilla Warfare, she devoured it and "planned revolutionary attacks on the local shopping mall." She went on to college where she organized against the war and for on-campus abortion and contraception access. She traveled in Europe, ended up in Holland hanging out with anarchists, married a Provo who battered her, and returned to the U.S. determined to fight for women's...