Andrea.

Remembering Andrea Dworkin, 20 Years Later

By Marie O’ Nealle

A Young Andrea Dworkin

Queens, NY - In six days it will be exactly 20 years since Andrea Dworkin's passing in Washington D.C.  Born on September 26, 1946, in Camden, New Jersey, Dworkin was a prominent radical feminist writer and activist known for her critical stance against pornography and advocacy for women’s rights. She would be 79 years old this year. Dworkin began writing at a young age and attended Bennington College in Vermont, graduating with a degree in literature in 1968. During this period, she was arrested at an anti–Vietnam War protest, an experience that exposed her to state violence and cemented her alignment with political dissent. She also lived in the Netherlands, where she endured domestic abuse — an experience that became foundational to her later work on male violence and women’s oppression.

Dworkin published her first book, Woman Hating, in 1974. In it, she outlined the foundational arguments of radical feminism and declared the need to abolish gender roles and institutions that sustained male supremacy. She challenged conventional heterosexual norms and introduced critiques of female objectification that would become central to feminist analysis.  In 1978, she published Pornography: Men Possessing Women, a book that made her a central figure in the anti-pornography feminist movement. In this work, she argued that pornography is not a form of speech but a form of sexual terrorism that conditions and legitimizes violence against women.

In the 1980s, Dworkin began a long-term collaboration with legal scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon. Together, they co-authored model anti-pornography civil rights legislation. This ordinance allowed women to sue pornographers for civil damages on the basis that pornography constituted a violation of their civil rights. The ordinance was adopted in several U.S. cities, including Indianapolis and Minneapolis, though repeatedly struck down in court as unconstitutional. Nonetheless, the legal innovation of framing pornography as a civil rights issue remains a lasting contribution to feminist discourse.


She was also a noted public speaker, giving speeches at universities, rallies, and feminist events across the U.S., U.K., and Canada. She addressed rape, incest, prostitution, war, imperialism, and censorship, consistently identifying the intersections between patriarchy and structural violence. In 1999, she testified before the U.S. Congress during hearings on human trafficking and prostitution, bringing feminist theory into direct conversation with national policy. That same year, she published Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation, where she examined Jewish identity, Zionism, and sex through a radical lens. Her final major publication, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (2002), combined autobiographical reflection with sharp political analysis. It cemented her legacy as both a thinker and a lived embodiment of the struggles she wrote about.