Andrea Dworkin - Woman Hating - A Radical Look at Sexuality

mouths, and the grass became bread, we

would still be sad. We live in a system that

manufactures sorrow, spilling it out of its

mill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm,

and we drown down, dead, too soon.

. . . uprising is the reversal of the system, and revolution is the turning of tides.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

The Revolution is not an event that takes

two or three days, in which there is shooting and hanging. It is a long drawn out

process in which new people are created,

capable of renovating society so that the

revolution does not replace one elite with

another, but so that the revolution creates

a new anti-authoritarian structure with

anti-authoritarian people who in their

turn re-organize the society so that it

becomes a non-alienated human society,

free from war, hunger, and exploitation.

Rudi Dutschke

March 7, 1968

You do not teach someone to count only

up to eight. You do not say nine and ten

and beyond do not exist. You give people

everything or they are not able to count at

all. There is a real revolution or none at

all.

Pericles Korovessis, in an interview

in Liberation , June 1973

I N T R O D U C T I O N

This book is an action, a political action where revolution is the goal. It has no other purpose. It is not cerebral wisdom, or academic horseshit, or ideas carved

in granite or destined for immortality. It is part o f a

process and its context is change. It is part o f a planetary movement to restructure community forms and human consciousness so that people have power over

their own lives, participate fully in community, live in

dignity and freedom.

T h e commitment to ending male dominance as the

fundamental psychological, political, and cultural reality o f earth-lived life is the fundamental revolutionary commitment. It is a commitment to transformation o f

the self and transformation o f the social reality on every

level. T h e core o f this book is an analysis o f sexism (that

system o f male dominance), what it is, how it operates

on us and in us. However, I do want to discuss briefly

two problems, tangential to that analysis, but still crucial

to the development o f revolutionary program and consciousness. T h e first is the nature o f the women’s movement as such, and the second has to do with the work o f the writer.

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10

Woman Hating

Until the appearance of the brilliant anthology

Sisterhood Is Powerful and Kate Millett’s extraordinary

book Sexual Politics , women did not think o f themselves

as oppressed people. Most women, it must be admitted,

still do not. But the women’s movement as a radical

liberation movement in Amerika can be dated from the

appearance of those two books. We learn as we reclaim

our herstory that there was a feminist movement which

organized around the attainment of the vote for

women. We learn that those feminists were also ardent

abolitionists. Women “came out” as abolitionists —out

of the closets, kitchens, and bedrooms; into public

meetings, newspapers, and the streets. Two activist

heroes o f the abolitionist movement were Black women,

Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, and they stand

as prototypal revolutionary models.

Those early Amerikan feminists thought that suffrage was the key to participation in Amerikan democracy and that, free and enfranchised, the former slaves would in fact be free and enfranchised. Those women

did not imagine that the vote would be effectively denied Blacks through literacy tests, property qualifications, and vigilante police action by white racists. Nor did they imagine the “separate but equal” doctrine and

the uses to which it would be put.

Feminism and the struggle for Black liberation were

parts of a compelling whole. That whole was called,

ingenuously perhaps, the struggle for human rights.

The fact is that consciousness, once experienced, cannot

be denied. Once women experienced themselves as activists and began to understand the reality and meaning of oppression, they began to articulate a politically

Introduction

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conscious feminism. T h eir focus, their concrete objective, was to attain suffrage for women.

T h e women’s movement formalized itself in 1848 at

Seneca Falls when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia

Mott, both activist abolitionists, called a convention.

T hat convention drafted The Seneca Falls Declaration of

Rights and Sentiments which is to this day an outstanding

feminist declaration.

In struggling for the vote, women developed many

o f the tactics which were used, almost a century later,

in the Civil Rights Movement. In order to change laws,

women had to violate them. In order to change convention, women had to violate it. T h e feminists (suffragettes) were militant political activists who used the tactics o f civil disobedience to achieve their goals.

T h e struggle for the vote began officially with the

Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. It was not until

August 26, 1920, that women were given the vote by the

kindly male electorate. Women did not imagine that the

vote would scarcely touch on, let alone transform, their

own oppressive situations. Nor did they imagine that

the “separate but equal” doctrine would develop as

a tool o f male dominance. Nor did they imagine the

uses to which it would be put.

T here have also been, always, individual feminists —

women who violated the strictures o f the female role,

who challenged male supremacy, who fought for the

right to work, or sexual freedom, or release from the

bondage o f the marriage contract. Those individuals

were often eloquent when they spoke o f the oppression

they suffered as women in their own lives, but other