Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak

178 Pages·1610·2.91 MB·English

Andrea Dworkin
The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant
BOOKS BY ANDREA DWORKIN
Woman Hating
Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics
the new woman’s broken heart: short stories
Pornography: Men Possessing Women
Right-wing Women
Ice and Fire
Intercourse
Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality
(with Catharine A. MacKinnon)
Letters from a War Zone
Mercy
Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings
On the Continuing War Against Women
In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings
(with Catharine A. MacKinnon)
,
Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel and Wrmen’s Liberation
To Ricki Abrams and
Catharine A. MacKinnon
To Ruth and Jackie
Continuum
The Tower Building
11 York Road
London SE1 7NX
www. continuumbooks. com
Copyright © 2002 by Andrea Dworkin
This edition first published 2006 in the UK by Continuum
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-8264-9147-2
Typeset by Continuum
Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd, Cornwall
Je est un autre
Rimbaud
Contents
Preface xi
Music 1 1
Music 2 5
Music 3 7
The Pedophilic Teacher 12
“Silent Night” 18
Plato 22
The High School Library 27
The Bookstore 32
The Fight 36
The Bomb 40
Cuba 1 45
David Smith 48
Contraception 52
Young Americans for Freedom 55
Cuba 2 60
The Grand Jury 62
The Orient Express 66
Easter 69
Knossos 72
Heartbreak
Kazantzakis 74
Discipline 77
The Freighter 80
Strategy 83
Suffer the Little Children 89
Theory 93
The Vow 96
My Last Leftist Meeting 100
Petra Kelly 104
Capitalist Pig 108
One Woman 112
It Takes a Village 117
True Grit 121
Anita 124
Prisons 127
Sister, Can You Spare a Dime? 130
The Women 136
Counting 139
Heartbreak 145
Basics 148
Immoral
155
Memory 158
Acknowledgments 164
X
Preface
I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am
myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to
give if she asserts her will. In the home the question will be
couched in a million cruelties, some subtle, some so egregious
they rival the injuries of organized war.
A woman writer makes herself conspicuous by publishing,
not by writing. Although one could argue - and I would -
that publishing is essential to the development of the writing
itself, there will be exceptions. After all, suppose Max Brod had
burned Kafka’s work as Kafka had wanted? The private writer,
which Kafka was, must be more common among women than
men: few men have Kafka’s stunning self-loathing, but many
women do; then again, there is the obvious - that the public
domain in which the published work lives has been considered
the male domain. In our day, more women publish but many
more do not, and despite the glut of mediocre and worthless
books published each year just in the United States, there
must be a she-Kafka, or more than one, in hiding somewhere,
just as there must be a she-Proust, whose vanity turned robust
when it came to working over so many years on essentially
xi