In 1987, when Andrea Dworkin appeared on the Phil Donahue Show to promote the publication of her book Intercourse, a woman in the audience asked her, with a mixture of incredulity, concern and contempt: ‘What tragic thing happened in your life that made you feel this way?’ The audience hooted with laughter. Dworkin laughed for a moment too, in exasperation, and then turned...
Like many of the prominent feminists of her generation, Andrea Dworkin was a woman of abundant intellectual and creative gifts. And, as with many of the other brilliant women of her generation, the shape those gifts would take, and the uses to which they would be put, was largely determined by a confrontation with male supremacy and the emerging battle against it.