Andrea Dworkin, a lesbian feminist who saw pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights and a direct cause of rape and violence, died April 9 in her Washington, D.C., home at the age of 58, AP reported. She had been battling several ailments, including osteoarthritis, for years. The Washington Post reported that Dworkin also had suffered several falls after recent knee surgery.
The Arizona Central reported that Dworkin wrote openly about the experiences as a prostitute, rape victim, and battered wife and that those writings and situations led her to become a crusader against pornography and violence against women as well as a lightning rod for the feminist movement. Dworkin’s first book, Woman Hating, was published when she was 27. The Post item reported that Dworkin even used terms such as ‘gynocide’ to describe a cultural holocaust against women. She was adored by many who found in her writings and lectures a refreshing rebelliousness, but was criticized by others, most notably novelist Anne Tyler. Perhaps Dworkin’s best-known title is Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981).
About that time, she teamed with legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon to advocate for having pornography ruled a violation of women’s civil rights. Their crusade began on behalf of Linda Lovelace, the porn actress who starred in Deep Throat and whose best-selling memoir about exploitation, Ordeal, had just been published. Dworkin and MacKinnon eventually helped to draft a 1983 law that defined pornography as a civil-rights violation against women, Dworkin’s agent, Elaine Markson, told the Associated Press.
Dworkin’s sole immediate survivor is John Stoltenberg, the Post reported. According to the Central, Dworkin and Stoltenberg, who were both gay, began living together in 1974 and married in 1998. The Post stated that she accompanied him to Washington from New York last year for his job as managing editor of AARP magazine.