Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

by Andrea Dworkin

  exceptions: Ms. and Mother Jones.

  In the years following the publication of Woman Hating,

  it began to be regarded as a feminist classic. The honor in

  this will only be apparent to those who value Mary

  Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication o f the Rights o f Women or

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible. It was a great

  honor. Feminists alone were responsible for the survival of

  Woman Hating. Feminists occupied the offices of Woman

  * After Our Blood was published, I went to this same weekly to beg—yes,

  beg—for some attention to the book, which was dying. The male writer

  whose “release” had been threatened by “Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality’ ” asked to meet me. He told me, over and over, how very beautiful Our Blood was. “You know—urn—um, ” I said, “that—urn, urn—That

  Speech is in Our Blood—you know, the one you wrote about. ” “So

  beautiful, ” he said, “so beautiful. ” The editor-in-chief of the weekly

  wrote me that Our Blood was so fine, so moving. But Our Blood did not

  get any help, not even a mention, in those pages.

  Hating's publisher to demand that the book be published in

  paper. Phyllis Chesler contacted feminist writers of reputation all over the country to ask for written statements of support for the book. Those writers responded with astonishing generosity. Feminist newspapers reported the suppression of the book. Feminists who worked in bookstores scavenged distributors’ warehouses for copies of the book and wrote over and over to the publisher to demand

  the book. Women’s studies programs began using it.

  Women passed the book from hand to hand, bought second

  and third and fourth copies to give friends whenever they

  could find it. Even though the publisher of Woman Hating

  had told me it was “mediocre, ” the pressure finally resulted

  in a paperback edition in 1976: 2500 leftover unbound

  copies were bound in paper and distributed, sort of.

  Problems with distribution continued, and bookstores,

  which reported selling the book steadily when it was in

  stock, had to wait months for orders to be filled. Woman

  Hating is now in its fifth tiny paperback printing. The book

  is not another piece of lost women’s literature only because

  feminists would not give it up. In a way this story is

  heartening, because it shows what activism can accomplish,

  even in the Yahoo land of Amerikan publishing.

  But I had nowhere to go, no way to continue as a writer.

  So I went on the road—to women’s groups who passed a hat

  for me at the end of my talk, to schools where feminist

  students fought to get me a hundred dollars or so, to

  conferences where women sold T-shirts to pay me. I spent

  weeks or months writing a talk. I took long, dreary bus rides

  to do what appeared to be only an evening’s work and slept

  wherever there was room. Being an insomniac, I did not

  sleep much. Women shared their homes, their food, their

  hearts with me, and I met women in every circumstance,

  nice women and mean women, brave women and terrified

  women. And the women I met had suffered every crime,

  every indignity: and I listened. “The Rape Atrocity and the

  Boy Next D oor” (in this volume) always elicited the same

  responses: I heard about rape after rape; women’s lives

  passed before me, rape after rape; women who had been

  raped in homes, in cars, on beaches, in alleys, in classrooms, by one man, by two men, by five men, by eight men, hit, drugged, knifed, tom , women who had been sleeping,

  women who had been with their children, women who had

  been out for a walk or shopping or going to school or going

  home from school or in their offices working or in factories

  or in stockrooms, young women, girls, old women, thin

  women, fat women, housewives, secretaries, hookers,

  teachers, students. I simply could not bear it. So I stopped

  giving the speech. I thought I would die from it. I learned

  what I had to know, and more than I could stand to know.

  My life on the road was an exhausting mixture of good

  and bad, the ridiculous and the sublime. One fairly typical

  example: I gave the last lecture in Our Blood (“The Root

  Cause, ” my favorite) on my twenty-ninth birthday. I had

  written it as a birthday present to myself. The lecture was

  sponsored by a Boston-based political collective. They were

  supposed to provide transportation and housing for me and,

  because it was my birthday and I wanted my family with me,

  my friend and our dog. I had offered to come another time

  but they wanted me then— en famille. One collective

  member drove to New York in the most horrible thunderstorm I have ever seen to pick us up and drive us back to Boston. The other cars on the road were blurs of red light

  here and there. The driver was exhausted, it was impossible

  to see; and the driver did not like my political views. He

  kept asking me about various psychoanalytic theories, none

  of which I had the good sense to appreciate. I kept trying to

  change the subject—he kept insisting that I tell him what I

  thought of so-and-so—every time I got so cornered that I

  had to answer, he slammed his foot down on the gas pedal.

  I thought that we would probably die from the driver’s

  fatigue and fury and God’s rain. We were an hour late, and

  the jam-packed audience had waited. The acoustics in the

  room were superb, which enhanced not only my own voice

  but the endless howling of my dog, who finally bounded

  through the audience to sit on stage during the question-

  and-answer period. The audience was fabulous: involved,

  serious, challenging. Many of the ideas in the lecture were

  new and, because they directly confronted the political

  nature of male sexuality, enraging. The woman with whom

  we were supposed to stay and who was responsible for our

  trip home was so enraged that she ran out, never to return.

  We were stranded, without money, not knowing where to

  turn. A person can be stranded and get by, even though she

  will be imperiled; two people with a German shepherd and

  no money are in a mess. Finally, a woman whom I knew

  slightly took us all in and loaned us the money to get home.

  Working (and it is demanding, intense, difficult work) and

  traveling in such endlessly improvised circumstances require

  that one develop an affection for low comedy and gross

  melodrama. I never did. Instead I became tired and

  demoralized. And I got even poorer, because no one could

  ever afford to pay me for the time it took to do the writing.

  I did not begin demanding realistic fees, secure accommodations, and safe travel in exchange for my work until after the publication of Our Blood. I had tried intermittently and mostly failed. But now I had to be paid and safe.

  I felt I had really entered middle age. This presented new

  problems for feminist organizers who had little access to the

  material resources in their communities. It also presented

  me with new problems. For a long time I got no work at all,

  so I just got poorer and poorer. It made no sense to anyone

  but me: if you have nothing, and someone offers you


  something, how can you turn it down? But I did, because I

  knew that I would never make a living unless I took a stand.

  I had a fine and growing reputation as a speaker and writer;

  but still, there was no money for me. When I first began to

  ask for fees, I got angry responses from women: how could

  the author of Woman Hating be such a scummy capitalist

  pig, one woman asked in a nearly obscene letter. The letter

  writer was going to live on a farm and have nothing to do

  with rat-shit capitalists and bourgeois feminist creeps. Well,

  I wrote back, I didn’t live on a farm and didn’t want to. I

  bought food in a supermarket and paid rent to a landlord

  and I wanted to write books. I answered all the angry

  letters. I tried to explain the politics of getting the money,

  especially from colleges and universities: the money was

  there; it was hard to get; why should it go to Phyllis Schlafly

  or William F. Buckley, Jr.? I had to live and I had to write.

  Surely my writing m attered, it mattered to them or why did

  they want me: and did they want me to stop writing? I

  needed money to write. I had done the rotten jobs and I

  was living in real, not romantic, poverty. I found that the

  effort to explain really helped—not always, and resentments still surfaced, but enough to make me see that explaining even without finally convincing was worthwhile.

  Even if I didn’t get paid, somebody else might. After a long

  fallow period I began to lecture again. I lectured erratically

  and never made enough to live on, even in what I think of

  as stable poverty, even when my fees were high. Many

  feminist activists did fight for the money and sometimes got

  it. So I managed—friends loaned me money, sometimes

  anonymous donations came in the mail, women handed me

  checks at lectures and refused to let me refuse them,

  feminist writers gave me gifts of money and loaned me

  money, and women fought incredible and bitter battles with

  college administrators and committees and faculties to get

  me hired and paid. The women’s movement kept me alive. I

  did not live well or safely or easily, but I did not stop writing

  either. I remain extremely grateful to those who went the

  distance for me.

  I decided to publish the talks in Our Blood because I was

  desperate for money, the magazines were still closed to me,

  and I was living hand-to-mouth on the road. A book was my

  only chance.

  The editor who decided to publish Our Blood did not

  particularly like my politics, but she did like my prose. I was

  happy to be appreciated as a writer. The company was the

  only unionized publishing house in New York and it also

  had an active women’s group. The women employees were

  universally wonderful to me—vitally interested in feminism,

  moved by my work, conscious and kind. They invited me to

  address the employees of the company on their biennial

  women’s day, shortly before the publication of Our Blood. I

  discussed the systematic presumption of male ownership of

  women’s bodies and labor, the material reality of that

  ownership, the economic degrading of women’s work. (The

  talk was subsequently published in abridged form under the

  title “Phallic Imperialism” in Ms., December 1976. ) Some

  men in suits sat dourly through it, taking notes. That,

  needless to say, was the end of Our Blood. There was one

  other telling event: a highly placed department head threw

  the manuscript of Our Blood at my editor across a room. I

  did not recognize male tenderness, he said. I don’t know

  whether he made the observation before or after he threw

  the manuscript.

  Our Blood was published in cloth in 1976. The only

  review of it in a major periodical was in Ms. many months

  after the book was out of bookstores. It was a rave.

  Otherwise, the book was ignored: but purposefully, maliciously. Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and Karen DeCrow tried to review the book to no avail. I contacted

  nearly a hundred feminist writers, activists, editors. A large

  majority made countless efforts to have the book reviewed.

  Some managed to publish reviews in feminist publications,

  but even those who frequently published elsewhere were

  unable to place reviews. No one was able to break the larger

  silence.

  Our Blood was sent to virtually every paperback publisher in the United States, sometimes more than once, over a period of years. None would publish it. Therefore, it is

  with great joy, and a shaky sense of victory, that I welcome

  its publication in this edition. I have a special love for this

  book. Most feminists I know who have read Our Blood

  have taken me aside at one time or another to tell me that

  they have a special affection and respect for it. There is, I

  believe, something quite beautiful and unique about it.

  Perhaps that is because it was written for a human voice.

  Perhaps it is because I had to fight so hard to say what is in

  it. Perhaps it is because Our Blood has touched so many

  women’s lives directly: it has been said over and over again

  to real women and the experience of saying the words has

  informed the writing of them. Woman Hating was written

  by a younger writer, one more reckless and more hopeful

  both. This book is more disciplined, more somber, more

  rigorous, and in some ways more impassioned. I am happy

  that it will now reach a larger audience, and sorry that it

  took so long.

  Andrea Dworkin

  New York City

  March 1981

  1

  Fem inism , A rt, and My M other S ylvia

  I am very happy to be here today. It is no small thing for me

  to be here. There are many other places I could be. This is not

  what my mother had planned for me.

  I want to tell you something about my mother. Her name is

  Sylvia. Her father’s name is Spiegel. Her husband’s name is

  Dworkin. She is fifty-nine years old, my mother, and just a few

  months ago she had a serious heart attack. She is recovered

  now and back on her job. She is a secretary in a high school.

  She has been a heart patient most of her life, and all of mine.

  When she was a child she had rheumatic fever. She says that

  her real trouble began when she was pregnant with my brother

  Mark and got pneumonia. After that, her life was a misery of

  illness. After years of debilitating illness—heart failures, toxic

  reactions to the drugs that kept her alive—she underwent

  Delivered at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, April 16, 1974.

  heart surgery, then she suffered a brain clot, a stroke, that

  robbed her of speech for a long time. She recovered from the

  heart surgery. She recovered from her stroke, although she

  still speaks more slowly than she thinks. Then, about eight

  years ago she had a heart attack. She recovered. Then, a few

  months ago she had a heart attack. She recovered.

  My mother was bom in Jersey City, New Jersey, the second

  oldest of seven children, two boys, five girls. Her parents,

  Sadi
e and Edward, who were cousins, came from someplace

  in Hungary. Her father died before I was bom. Her mother is

  now eighty. There is no way of knowing of course if my mother’s heart would have been injured so badly had she been bom into a wealthy family. I suspect not, but I do not know. There

  is also of course no way of knowing if she would have received

  different medical treatment had she not been a girl. But regardless, it all happened the way it happened, and so she was very ill most of her life. Since she was a girl, no one encouraged her to read books (though she tells me that she used to love to read and does not remember when or why she stopped

  reading); no one encouraged her to go to college or asked her

  to consider the problems of the world in which she lived. Because her family was poor, she had to work as soon as she finished high school. She worked as a secretary full-time, and

  on Saturdays and some evenings she did part-time work as a

  “salesgirl” in a department store. Then she married my father.

  My father was a school teacher and he also worked nights

  in the post office because he had medical bills to pay. He had

  to keep my mother alive, and he had two children to support

  as well. I say along with Joseph Chaikin in The Presence of

  the Actor: “The medical-economic reality in this country is

  emblematic of the System which literally chooses who is to

  survive. I renounce my government for its inequitable economic system. ”*1 Others, I must point out to you, had and have less than we did. Others who were not my mother but

  * Notes start on p. 113.

  who were in her situation did and do die. I too renounce this

  government because the poor die, and they are not only the

  victims of heart disease, or kidney disease, or cancer— they

  are the victims of a system which says a visit to the doctor is

  $25 and an operation is $5, 000.

  When I was twelve, my mother emerged from her heart

  surgery and the stroke that had robbed her of speech. There

  she was, a mother, standing up and giving orders. We had a

  very hard time with each other. I didn’t know who she was, or

  what she wanted from me. She didn’t know who I was, but she

  had definite ideas about who I should be. She had, I thought, a