It is good to see that the more consequential Dworkin is getting her due in obit pages around the world. Andrea will be remembered for really trying to make a difference in the world. She was crass, reductive, and sometimes wrong. But real feminism is all too rare these days–and I, for one, am grateful that such a woman graced this patriarchal planet.
Posted by Ethan Leib on April 12, 2005 at 10:45 AM
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I agree with everything you say, but Andrea Dworkin is not my number one role model for getting there. On insisting on the link between class and feminism at every turn, I’ve always liked Barbara Ehrenreich, may she live and be well.
So, how many of the male Yale Law School grads were planning on dropping out of the workforce to be fathers and giving their children their wives’ last names? For that matter, I’d be interested to know answers to the following (admittedly indulging in the feminism of the elite & overeducated):
How many of the young “prawfs” around here are men? How many are married (or in long-term hetero relationships)? How many of the married men’s wives followed them to places like Indiana or Georgia so that they could pursue their careers as hotshot “prawfs”? And, how many of the women “prawfs” here are married and have found a (male) partner willing to shlep around the country to facilitate their careers as hotshot prawfesses? Are there prawf couples? Whose career wins (unless you both got tenure-track jobs at Columbia and Fordham at the same time)? Just curious….
Posted by: Ariela | Apr 14, 2005 3:12:04 AM
To be real feminists, we have to be more than liberals. We have to do more than seek pay equity in the work place. We have to want more than a woman’s right to choose to raise her kids instead of work. We have to want more than a bourgeois form of equality. We have to ask whether there are things about marriage and heterosexual sex that keep the patriarchy in place. We have to ask what sorts of activities diminish the possibility of real empowerment. We have to ask whether there are empirical realities associated with pornography that contribute to gender inequality. Only the real feminists push us to ask these questions.
Whenever I’m pressed on the question of real feminism, I can’t resist thinking of a study that was done at perfectly feminist Yale Law School, which found that approximately 60% of the female students were planning on dropping out of the workforce permanently to be mothers — and the same numbers were planning on taking their husband’s name. This is feminism today? Jesus.
Posted by: Ethan Leib | Apr 13, 2005 10:10:05 AM
Oh God. To be “real feminists” do we all still have to hate marriage, heterosexual sex, erotic art, and Israel? I’m sorry that Andrea Dworkin was abused and raped and in a violent marriage, but not sorry enough to sign on to her insistence that the rest of us are experiencing the same things without being aware of it. Likewise, it’s unfortunate that she was raised on a lot of propaganda about Zionism and then found herself horribly disillusioned when she discovered some of the underlying injustices, but I don’t have to share her sense of being “shocked, shocked” when I wasn’t raised on the same unrealistic myths. Am I way off for suggesting that it’s a generational thing? I just can’t relate to her life of repeated rude awakenings (e.g., thought she was marrying a sensitive new-age flower child, turned out he was a wife-beater). Feminists moved on (see Susie Bright’s obit, which I don’t know how to link to) long before she died, and now it’s official.
Posted by: Ariela | Apr 13, 2005 9:55:23 AM