Dworkin, Andrea, 1946–2019, American feminist writer and activist, b. Camden, N.J., B.A. Bennington College, 1968. A fierce opponent of pornography and of violence against women, she is best known for Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality (1988), written in collaboration with feminist lawyer Catharine A. MacKinnon. Also with MacKinnon, she drafted an ordinance that defined pornography as sex descrimination and allowed women who were sexually assaulted to sue makers and distributors of pornography if it could be proved to be a cause of the assault. Adopted by some cities, it ultimately was ruled unconstitutional. Many of her other books, which include Woman Hating (1974), Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), Intercourse (1987), and Letters from a War Zone (1989), are feminist theory, but she also wrote the memoir Heartbreak (2002), the autobiographical novels Ice and Fire (1986) and Mercy (1991), short stories, and poetry.
See selections of her work ed. by J. Fateman and A. Scholder (2019).
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