Andrea Dworkin - The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

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The Vow

It was a tender conversation. The woman who had helped me

most in Amsterdam, Ricki Abrams, sat with me and we held

hands. I was going to go back to New York. I talked with

Ricki about how she had saved my life; I thanked her. I talked

with Ricki about having prostituted and having been homeles . Back then I never talked about these parts of my own life.

I talked with her about bringing what I had learned into the

fight for women’s freedom. I talked with her about my fierce

commitment to the women’s movement and feminism. I

talked to her about how grateful I was to the women’s movement - to the women who had been organizing and talking and shouting and writing, making women both visible and

loved by each other. I talked with her about the book she and

I had started together and that I was going to finish alone,

Woman Hating. We had shown a draft of the chapter on Suck ,

a counterculture pornography magazine, to those who ran the

magazine, ex-pats like ourselves, from the same generation,

with the same commitment to civil rights and, we thought,

human dignity. They cut us cold. Ricki could not stand it. I

could. There’s one thing about surviving prostitution - it takes

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a hell of a lot to scare you. My husband was a hel of a lot, and

he taught me real fear; the idiots at Suck were not much of

anything. Writing had become more important to me than the

ir itability of wannabe pimps.

Sit ing with Ricki, talking with Ricki, I made a vow to her:

that I would use everything I knew, including from prostitution, to make the women’s movement stronger and bet er; that I'd give my life to the movement and for the movement.

I promised to be honor-bound to the well-being of women,

to do anything necessary for that well-being. I promised to

live and to die if need be for women. I made that vow some

thirty years ago, and I have not betrayed it yet.

I took two laundry bags fil ed with manuscripts, books, and

some clothes, the Afghan sheepskin coat I had as a legacy

from my marriage, an airplane ticket given me by a junkie,

and some money I had stolen, and I went back to New York

City. Living hand to mouth, sleeping on floors or in closetsized rooms, I began working on Woman Hating . I had up to four jobs at a time. Every other day I would take $7 out of

a checking account. I ate at happy hours in bars. Any money

I had I would first tithe to the Black Panther Party in Oakland,

California. Huey Newton sent me his poems before he shot

and killed a teenage prostitute, the event that caused him to

flee the United States. Since I didn’t believe that the police

had framed him, one might say that a rift had opened

between him and me. But I still kept sending money for

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Heartbreak

the breakfast and literacy programs sponsored by the Black

Panthers.

I went to demonstrations as often as I could. The Three

Marias of Portugal had written a feminist book that got them

jailed. I demonstrated in their behalf. I went to prolesbian and

antiapartheid demonstrations.

One of my part-time jobs was organizing against the

Vietnam War, the backdrop to most of my life as a young

adult. In Amsterdam my husband and I had helped deserters

from the U. S. military hide on their way to Sweden. Vietnam

had been shaping my life since I was eighteen and was sent to

the Women’s House of Detention. The poet Muriel Rukeyser,

who also worked against the war, hired me as her assistant.

Muriel had a long and distinguished life of rebellion, including the birth of a son out of wedlock in an age darker than any I had experienced. He was now a draft resister in Canada.

With another woman, Garland Har is, I organized a conference that brought together artists and intellectuals against the war. Robert Lifton, Susan Sontag, and Daniel Ellsberg

participated. With director Andre Gregory I helped organize

a special night on which al the theaters and theater companies

in Manhattan would donate their money to help rebuild a

hospital in North Vietnam that U. S. bombs had leveled. I was

not real y able to face the chasm between the left and feminism even though I gloried in the essays in Sisterhood Is Powerful that exposed the sexism of the left. I couldn’t stop

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working against the war or, for instance, apartheid just because

the men on the left: were pigs. I became part of a consciousness-

raising group, but even that had its roots in the Speaking

Bitterness sessions in communist China. I worked hard. One

of my mentors, the writer Grace Paley, who had helped me

when I got out of the Women’s House of Detention, helped

me again - this time to get an apartment. It was on the Lower

East Side, in an old tenement building. The toilet was in the

hall and the bathtub was in the kitchen. I had a desk, a chair,

and a $12 foam-rubber mattress. I bought one fork, one spoon,

one knife, one plate, one bowl. I was determined to learn to

live without men.

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My Last Leftist

Meeting

There were only seven of us. I was the menial, a part-time

of ice worker. The movie director Emile D’Antonio seemed to

lead the meeting by sheer force of personality. There were

three women, including myself. That translated into six

eminents, two of whom were women. Our goal was to find

the next project for celebrities organized against the war in a

group cal ed Redress. The idea of the group was 100 percent

Amerikan: famous people organized to fight the war, their

names having more pull than those of professional politicians

or ordinary citizens. It was a time when fame was not dissociated from accomplishment: most of our members had earned through achievement whatever fame they had. But the