Andrea Dworkin: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

it out for a while. Then they sent in a turncoat Jew, a pretty,

gutless teacher, who said that she was Jewish and she sang

“Silent Night" so why didn’t l? It was my first experience with

a female collaborator, or the first one that I remember. They

left me alone in the empty classroom after that. I wasn’t a

religious zealot; I just didn’t like being pushed around, and I

knew about and liked the separation of church and state, and

I knew I wasn’t a Christian and I didn’t worship Jesus. I even

knew that Christians had made something of a habit of killing

Jews, which sealed the deal for me. I was shunned, and one of

my drawings, hung in the hal on a bulletin board, was defaced:

“kike” was written across it. I then had to undergo the excruciating process of get ing some adult to tell me what “kike”

meant. I thought my teachers were fascists in the style of the

Inquisition for wanting me to sing “Silent Night” when they

knew I was Jewish, and I stil think that. What they take from

you in school is eroded slowly, but this was big. I couldn’t

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“Silent Night"

understand how they could try to force me. Transparently,

they could and they did. Force, punishment, exile: so much

adult firepower to use against such a little girl. To this day I

think about this confrontation with authority as the “Silent

Night” Action, and I recommend it. Adults need to be stood

up to by children, period. It’s good for them, the adults, I

mean. Pushing kids around is ugly. The adults need to be

saved from themselves. On the other hand, students should

not, must not shoot teachers. The nobility of rebellion student-

to-teacher requires civil disobedience, not guns, not war -

pedagogy against pedagogy In this context, guns are cowardly

I was, however, in crisis. I had read Gone with the Wind

probably a hundred times, and like Scarlet I was willful. My

problem was the following: abortion was illegal and women

were dying. How could this be changed? Was the best way to

write a book that made you cry your heart out and feel the

suffering of the sick and dying women or to go into court a la

Perry Mason and make an argument so compelling, so truthful and poignant, that people would rise up unable to bear the pain of the status quo? You might say that in some sense I was

fully formed in the sixth grade. My frame of reference was not

expansive - I did not yet know about Danton or Robespier e

or any number of referent points beside Perry Mason - but in

formal terms the dilemma of my life was fully present: law or

literature, literature or law? By the end of that year, I had

decided that they could stop you from going to law school -

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Heartbreak

and would - but no one could keep you from writing because

nobody had to know about it.

It was my mother whose politics were represented by the

abortion theme: she supported legal birth control and legal

abortion long before these were respectable beliefs. I had

learned these prowoman political positions from her, and I

think of her every time I fight for a woman’s reproductive

rights or write a check to the National Abortion Rights

Action League or Planned Parenthood. Our arguments for the

abortion right now might be more politically sophisticated,

but my mother had the heart and politics of a pioneer - only

I didn’t understand that. These were the reproductive politics

I grew up with, and so I did not know that she had taught me

what I presumed was fair and right.

Eventually she would tel me that the worst mistake she had

made in raising me was in teaching me how to read; she had a

mordant sense of humor that she rarely exercised. The public

library in the newly hatched suburb of Delaware Township,

later to become Cherry Hill, was in the police station or next

door to it; and my mother found herself writing notes giving

me permission to take out Lolita or Peyton Place. To her credit

she did write those notes each and every time I wanted to read

a book that was forbidden for children. Or I think it’s to her

credit. I don’t know why later she would not let me see the

film A Summer Place with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue (the

two are teenaged lovers and Sandra gets pregnant) when I had

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“Silent Night”

already read the book. We had a screaming match that lasted

several days. She won, of course. It was the sheer exercise of

parental authority that gave her the victory, and I despised her

for not being able to win the argument on the merits. She’d

blow up at my curiosity or precociousness, and it seemed to

come out of nowhere to me. What she hated wasn’t what I

read or the movies I saw but what I started writing, because

sixth grade was the beginning of writing my own poems.

They’d be small and imitative, but they were piss-perfect,

in-your-face acts of rebellion. The adults could keep lying, but

I wouldn’t. My mother’s real failure was in telling me not to

lie. I had a literalist sense of the meaning of the admonition.

I was a “kike” and would continue to be one: never once have

I sung “Silent Night” nor will I. I recognized that there were

a lot of ways of lying, and pretending that Christmas and Easter

were secular holidays was a big lie, not a small one. Whether

the issue was segregation or abortion, I, the sixth-grader, was

going to deal with it, and my vehicle was going to be truth:

not a global, self-deluded truth, not a truth that only I knew

and that I wanted other people to follow, but the truth that

came from not lying. Like “do no harm, ” not lying is a big one,

a hard discipline, a practice of spartan ethics too often mistaken

for self-righteousness. If put ing my body there when it ought

to be here was required but to do so was to lie, I wasn’t going

to do it. I’d write and I wouldn’t lie. So when self-help writers

tel one to find the child within, I assume they don’t mean me.

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