Andrea Dworkin: Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

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,

Sadie 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