The Mudsill, Vol. 1, No. 1
January 1, 2021
Welcome, reader, to the first number of The Mudsill, a magazine by common folk for common folk.
Here is a quick preview of the excellent contributions to this issue.
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—L.D. Burnett, Editor
In Context, writer James P. Withers argues that Frederick Douglass should be regarded as America’s greatest voice for justice, not because his words wrought change in his own lifetime, but because they still serve as moral anchors for those who seek to bring about change today.
In Comment, textile artist and writer Darcy Falk offers part memoir, part meditation on trains, rivers, the crush of crowds, and the direction of democracy on the move and on the march.
In Craft, we are pleased to present two works of art. We have featured Ravynn K. Stringfield’s “Galaxy Dreams” as our cover image for this number, a beautiful image to grace the first day of 2021. This is Ms. Stringfield’s first published artwork. We also have original artwork by Jake Kepins, “a lapsed academic who likes to paint,” he says of himself. This work, executed in April 2020, conveys the muddled, atomized movement of time in this year that has both come to a standstill and steamrolled us all.
In Critique, historian Claire Potter reviews the first full-length biography of feminist scholar and activist Andrea Dworkin. This is a first-rate review of an important new book and we are delighted to publish it here at The Mudsill.
Thank you to Claire for offering to forego any payment for their contribution; their generosity has allowed us to bring you two works of visual art in this number.
Please share our magazine with your friends!
Frederick Douglass: America’s Constant Voice
by James P. Withers
Years ago, in a 19th century American literature class, the professor asked us which writer best represented America. Classmates offered various names of people we had studied: Emerson, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman. I suggested Frederick Douglass; we had read his 1845 Narrative. There was respectful silence; no one else took up the cause for the Maryland native. The conversation moved on. My peers weren’t indifferent to Douglass’ talents, but choosing him as the voice for our raucous, contradictory, and bewitching united land? That was a step too far.
The Republican’s monumental reputation is no longer confined to the imagination of a dull graduate student. According to a 2019 New York Times article, former President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground Productions, is working on a Douglass biopic for Netflix. The movie is based on David Blight’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In the past five years, scholars have published well-received studies about the abolitionist. In 2017 Leigh Fought, a LeMoyne College history professor, released Women in the World of Frederick Douglass. A year earlier, University of Maryland professor Robert S. Levine published The Lives of Frederick Douglass. Finally, in 2015, John Stauffer, Celeste-Marie Bernier, and Zoe Trodd came out with Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century's Most Photographed American.
Hopefully all of this attention won’t dull Douglass’s edges. His written arguments can’t be easily processed by our media maw because his words are immune to pithy sound bites or character limits. Douglass was, from his early preaching days in New Bedford, Massachusetts to his last speech in 1895, a lecture and word man, sometimes stumping, but always writing, for freedom. His staying power remains the black ink on the white page, which can’t be smoothed over. My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass’ second memoir, closes with this line (emphasis added):
“…Never forgetting my own humble origin, nor refusing, while Heaven lends me ability, to use my voice, my pen, or my vote, to advocate the great and primary work of the universal and unconditional emancipation of my entire race.”
Douglass’ tragedy and, by extension, the tragedy of African-American history is that his voice, pen, and vote rarely moved state power. Douglass’ calls for equality were met with indifference when directly heard by the White House. Twice.
In a 2009 interview on the NPR program “Tell Me More” John Stauffer of Harvard, who also wrote Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, talks about an 1863 meeting between the two men. Douglass visited the White House because he was upset “with the war effort. He was specifically frustrated by the fact that the Lincoln administration was paying black soldiers half of what white soldiers were being paid [and] not being promoted for valiant service.”
The abolitionist had no appointment, but stood in a long line. He showed his card and was immediately taken to the president’s office.
The two met and disagreed on policy (Rick Beard’s Military Times article notes that in March 1865 “Congress pass[ed] legislation granting full retroactive pay to all black units”). Yet, as the Harvard professor points out, they were able to forge a connection because they each saw their own reflection in the other.“The main reason that they bonded,” Stauffer said to host Michel Martin, “is because they both recognized in each other great self-made men. Douglass rose up from a slave to become one of the most famous black men in the world. Lincoln rises up from nothing.”
Approximately three years later, in 1866, Douglass met with another self-made man. He and a number of African-American community leaders sat down with President Andrew Johnson. The group hoped Lincoln’s successor would push for enfranchisement. The Tennessee politician was not prepared for such a dialogue with Black men. Instead he lectured, ending with a suggestion of emigration for the country’s African-American population. His harangue was taken down and is found in the Library of America’s Reconstruction: Voices from America's First Great Struggle for Racial Equality. Johnson, a former slave owner, called himself the “Moses of colored people.” He turned to Douglass, the author of two autobiographies describing a childhood in bondage, and asked if he “ever lived on a plantation.” After Douglass responded, the president added this:
“When you would look over and see a man who had large family, struggling hard upon a poor piece of land, you thought a great deal less of him than you did of your own master’s negro, didn’t you?”
The group left the White House, dissatisfied and perplexed. Douglass penned a public letter, taking Johnson to task. Nothing made the advocate’s ink more acerbic than the theory African-Americans were better off leaving the country. He smashed the president’s suggestion to bits.
…The worst enemy of the nation could not cast upon its fair name a greater infamy than to suppose that Negroes could be tolerated among them in a state of the most degrading slavery and oppression, and must be cast away, driven into exile, for no other cause than having been freed from their chains.
It’s easy to take a former slave owner to task for rank incivility, but what’s important to note is Douglass’ words on these occasions failed to move either Oval Office occupant. Lincoln was sympathetic but, as Stauffer noted to NPR, “even at the end of his life he had a hard time envisioning an America in which Blacks lived as full equals.” For Johnson, equality for African-Americans meant degradation for whites. When the Democrat looked at the former enslaved community he saw only mortal enemies.
“Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap,” Blight notes Johnson was overheard muttering as the men left the room. “I know that damned Douglass; he’s just like any n*****, and would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”
So what can we learn from Douglass when his arguments did not triumph? What are we to do when the country fails to live up to its preening pride in the mythology of liberty? Like him, we must have faith in, and defend, our votes, pens, and voices. These are anchors in a country that seems perplexed, annoyed, and distressed at any historical memory that isn’t triumphant or joyful.
It’s an exhausting avocation to speak, write, and mobilize against the whitewashing of history. However, it is essential because a stubborn freedom fable only fades with a measured examination of what was. This is Douglass’ strength and the best of the African-American human rights tradition. While his 1852 speech, ”What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” is often quoted as a charged counter to the Declaration of Independence, his 1876 speech at the Freedman’s Memorial in Washington, DC. is a more potent example of Douglass showing the flaws of the country’s freedom narrative while offering a path out of the morass of romance.
The occasion at which Douglass spoke was a ceremony for the unveiling of a statue honoring Lincoln and emancipation. The work of art depicted the former president standing over a kneeling African-American man whose shackles had been broken. Douglass, the keynote speaker, addressed approximately 25,000. The nation’s power brokers were in the audience, including President Ulysses S. Grant. Ever the Union man, Douglass’s own sons served in the famed 54th Massachusetts Voluntary Infantry Regiment, he reminded the audience that the Civil War made such a gathering possible.
Harmless, beautiful, proper, and praiseworthy as this demonstration is, I cannot forget that no such demonstration would have been tolerated here twenty years ago. The spirit of slavery and barbarism, which still lingers to blight and destroy in some dark and distant parts of our country, would have made our assembling here the signal and excuse for opening upon us all the flood-gates of wrath and violence. That we are here in peace today is a compliment and a credit to American civilization, and a prophecy of still greater national enlightenment and progress in the future
He remembered the past “to place more distinctly in front the gratifying and glorious change which has come both to our white fellow-citizens and ourselves.” Prologue matters. No glorious yesterdays without contradictions or failings. Douglass had no use for myth and fantasy. The reformer reminded his hearers how Lincoln, the man who treated him like an equal, was tardy on black equality.
“He was preeminently the white man’s President,” Douglass said, “entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.”
The Illinois politician lacked abolitionist credibility, only standing firm against slavery’s expansion not where it was legally permitted. “He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master,” Douglass reminded those assembled to honor the “Great Emancipator,” “and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the Government.”
After the analysis of why Lincoln’s vision of “the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future,” Douglass listed the president’s successes. He started with Lincoln’s opening the armed forces to men of color and ended with the Commander-in-Chief’s defeat of the Confederacy. These successes, when compared to country as a whole, made Lincoln “swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”
He praised the martyr who saved the Union and abolished slavery (two feats that seem so matter-of-course in our 155-year-old rearview mirror), but Douglass knew American memory was fragile. Even 10 years after the end of the Civil War, acolytes of the Confederate States of America were glossing over the war’s cause, slavery, and shapeshifting it instead into a dispute about tariff and taxes. Slavery and Black citizens were pushed off stage, literally and figuratively.
Douglass exhorted the audience not to forget, or fall, for the facile rhetoric of racism (the foundation of the CSA fever dream). “When now it shall be said that the colored man is soulless, that he has no appreciation of benefits or benefactors,” Douglass said, “when the foul reproach of ingratitude is hurled at us, and it is attempted to scourge us beyond the range of human brotherhood, we may calmly point to the monument we have this day erected to the memory of Abraham Lincoln.” To honor and remember Lincoln is to honor, and remember, the cause that started the war: the bondage of 4 million men, women, and children.
Douglass appreciated the country but knew its bad habits and tics, how prone it was to fall for comforting stories (even when the record told something different). The man spent his life prompting the country’s memory, warning constricting freedom dishonored the chronicle of liberty the country still holds so dear.
This is why I remain convinced he is our greatest American thinker.
James P. Withers is a freelance writer. He has covered education in New Rochelle, New York and LGBTQ issues for various publications. He lives in New York City and can be reached on Twitter @JamesWithers3.
Trains, Rivers, and Marching
This is what democracy looks like
by Darcy Falk
Almost four years ago, I took a two-and-a-half day trip on the Southwest Chief and the Capitol Limited. I was bound for Washington, D.C, for the Women’s March. I traveled alone, but with many companions.
Six Amish girls, pre-teens to teens, speaking a mix of German and English played cards at a table in the club car. A young Amish couple and their baby sat with me at another table. The young wife’s eyes widened when I said I was going to Washington, D.C., for the Women’s March. “We vote on our knees,” said the husband.
Paul Simon is singing: We’ve all come to look for America. There’s a theme. “What does this new America look like?” I wrote four years ago. Now I consider how to answer.
Sometimes we moved slowly, incrementally; at other times there were tectonic shifts, earth-shattering in ways we adored or abhorred. Sleight-of-hand moves—“Look over here!”—distracted us while Congressional leadership and departments in the Executive Branch plotted to abolish health care for millions, undermine civil rights, and desecrate the environment for fun and profit.
What we’ve experienced these past four years is a kakistocracy, at the very best, and at worst, a period of deliberate legislative mean-spiritedness not seen in recent years. I don’t know a word for that.
A friend mentioned to me that he was writing a piece about the Declaration of Independence, which ends with this: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” I’m no historical or legal scholar, but I take this to mean that we all are, and always have been, on the same train, and that feels about right to me.
Here’s almost everything I know about trains.
Trains are great generators of white noise. This is good if white noise helps you sleep. Trains and the people inside them also generate plenty of other kinds of noise. Is black noise the opposite of white noise?
You’re never quite still riding a train. That makes it nearly impossible to write legibly on the train even when you try really hard to make it so.
The windows, your main contact with the landscape, are usually dirty, which makes it hard to take decent photographs. I often see things I want to make pictures of. But the constant motion makes it hard to take photos. I do it anyway. At the very least those terrible photos will remind me of things I want to remember.
Timetables carry the rule of law on trains. Want to visit the blanket vendor on the platform in Albuquerque and get a sandwich in the café? You have exactly 28 minutes, and they’re not coming back for you if you get distracted and miss re-boarding.
It's a lot easier to sleep on a train when you have an empty seat next to you. Or when you know and love your seatmate. Anything else feels unbearably intimate, like bedding down with an utter stranger. I’ve tried all those options, so I know.
Trains bend the time-space continuum; it seems that no time has passed on “the outside”—which sounds like “train as jail,” which it kind of is if you want to get to where you’re going. Time inside the train slows to a crawl, too. Are we there yet? On my journey four years ago I decided to just give my life over to the experience, to enjoy and to document as much and as well as I could.
Train travel is what democracy looks like. People of all skin colors and religions and socio-economic means ride trains for all sorts of reasons, but the experience of the rich and the poor isn’t that different. We’re all trapped inside, with various levels of entertaining devices and accommodations.
I’m on the Metro in Washington, D.C., in a crush of pink-hatted (mostly) women, many carrying protest signs. We are really doing this. We are feeling our power, many of us for the first time. It is an extraordinary thing to witness and be part of. Successive subway platforms are jammed with more people in pink hats. There seems to be enough space on our train for everyone who wants to travel with us: woman, man, child, white, brown, black, lesbian, trans, queer, grey, whatever. We squeeze in to make room. This is what democracy looks like: no one gets left behind.
Thirty-six hours earlier, when I walked into the splendor of the Great Hall at Chicago’s Union Station and looked around, I saw that our tribe had begun to gather. I spied three women at the other end of a long wooden bench. I didn’t know them then, but I learned their names: Danielle, Joni, and Mary. Those three had been friends for many years; I was a stranger. By some secret signal, we recognized each other. They gathered me (and others) into their embrace and the dynamic of my journey shifted. Later that night that train full of women on their way to Washington pulsed with resolution and anticipation. We told stories about how we got to this place, on this train, with this rush of energy toward this common purpose.
I slept in the window seat next to Danielle. Each time I woke that night and looked out the window, we were next to a river. What river is this? An hour later: Is this the same river, or a different river? I think, We don’t have so many rivers in the West. I’m in unfamiliar territory, a land of many rivers.
We women are like rivers, converging on the capital like a wave, like a flood, like a force of nature or an act of God.
The train carrying our band of nomads arrived in D.C. at 1 p.m. on Inauguration Day, just as the ceremony commenced. “It’s good to be among friends on this darkest of days,” we said. We parted ways, going to our respective lodgings, and promised to stay in touch. (We have.) I made my way to the Metro and stood in line to buy a ticket. I boarded the Red Line to Friendship Heights. There were no friends on that train. I was nervous. My suitcase and backpack branded me as an outlier, as having not attended the inauguration. Two women wearing red hats fawned over a man who had photographed the day’s event with his 10-inch long camera lens. Around me was a sea of blood red hats, red scarves, red coats.
The next day, our band of eight marchers was out the door early. After our Metro ride downtown, we were caught in a less directional crush. We’d been warned that our cell phones wouldn’t work. We’d also been coached by more experienced protestors to write our names and an emergency contact phone number on our forearms with a permanent marker, “just in case.” (In case of what?) We tried hard to stay together, holding hands, making our way through the crowd to where we thought we wanted to be, which turned out not to be the place we wanted. We wound up near the U.S. Capitol reflecting pool where police were chasing young men (mostly) off the scaffolding that had been erected for the inauguration the day before. More were drawn to climb, and the police chased them away, too. We stood a while longer, and watched the crowd.
We eventually headed back into the fray, trying to get closer to the stage. We knew which direction to walk by the roar that pulsed through the crowd. Only those very close to the stage could hear the speakers, but when they cheered, that cheer resonated through the hundreds of thousands of us waiting to march. “Hundreds of thousands” is an extraordinary number.. It could have been easy to feel overwhelmed, but I felt safe. That first Metro ride in on Inauguration Day carried far fewer people, but felt far more threatening.
Over these past four years, our current government has tried to teach us, “Be afraid of each other. Get what you can for yourself. You’re not responsible for anyone else. Take, then take some more. If you’re rich, you deserve more. If you’re poor, sick or different from us, you deserve less, or maybe nothing at all. We know what’s best for you, so shut up and sit down.”
In contrast, at the Women’s March, over and over I heard marchers thank the police who were on duty. We made space for elderly women in sensible shoes, carrying signs that said, “I can’t believe I still have to protest this s***.” Breastfeeding moms carried their small children in front packs into this huge crowd, and it worked. We felt safe. We felt heard.
And then, after hours of standing around, we began to march. We walked and chanted in our biggest voices. We passed the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue, shouting, “Shame! Shame!” Shame because the man who had just been inaugurated as president (and his children) would be making billions, brazenly, blatantly, from that property and other business ventures because he is the president. We shouted, “Welcome to your first day! We are not going away!” Our energy filled the streets and radiated up into the sky.
And yet …
While we were marching, I kept thinking, This is not how things get done in Washington, D.C. We have more work to do when we get home. We now know it’s true; we have work to do every day. Have we been complacent in defending our democracy? Maybe so, but not anymore. We are radical. We are powerful. We are running for office. We are voting. We are donating. We are marching. We are suing. We are writing letters. We are attending meetings. We are demanding answers. We are radical. We are powerful. We are not going away.
This is what democracy looks like: no one gets left behind.
Darcy Falk is a textile artist and writer in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she has lived since 1986. She holds BA degrees in journalism and political science from Ball State University. See more of her artwork and writing at darcyfalk.com.
Galaxy Dreams
by Ravynn K. Stringfield
Ravynn K. Stringfield is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies, a novelist, and an artist. Learn more about her work at ravynnkstringfield.com, or follow her on Twitter @RavynnKaMia.
Still Life with Absurdity
by Jake Kepins
Jake Kepins is an artist who lives near Birmingham, Alabama with his spouse and their family. He creates work across multiple media as the mood strikes him. Jake’s been many things, from a janitor to a sailor to a lapsed academic.
The Return of Andrea Dworkin
Martin Duberman’s biography announces a new chapter for an iconic and controversial feminist
by Claire Potter
Andrea Dworkin is making a comeback. Her work never really went away, but she died in 2005, still writing furiously, but with the lively feminist movement that had created her readership mired in either academic theory or celebrations of female political and corporate firsts. Yet after many years of being disparaged and maligned, often by other feminists and queer people, #MeToo activism has opened the door to a long-overdue recognition of Dworkin's contributions to how we understand the politics of sex and gender.
Perhaps this says less about Americans' capacity to change their minds and more about the ability of powerful writing to succeed eventually. And it is powerful writing. Dworkin's prose seizes even a hostile reader by the throat and refuses to let go. For example, in "Whores," a chapter of her 1981 book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Dworkin introduces a material analysis of women's oppression with this trenchant thought: "The metaphysics of male sexual domination is that women are whores." You could teach a whole seminar without exploring that idea entirely, and Dworkin drops a similarly radical observation every couple of pages.
I have always believed that part of the hostility that Dworkin aroused had something to do with a clarity of mind that terrified people who shy away from difficult and dangerous thoughts . Dworkin's critics often characterized theories of sex and gender as reductive or essentialist. In fact, they were extraordinarily complex thoughts distilled to their essence and articulated so clearly that anyone could understand them. Dworkin's intellect was formed in her struggle to come to terms with a family member's memory of the Holocaust. It was formed by her own early sexual abuse by a stranger in a movie theater. It matured in the crucible of the 1960s anti-war movement, a violent intimate relationship, and an intensive study of violent pornography. Her ideas about justice were crystalline and urgent. She could not be bullied out of them. And that infuriated the academics who ridiculed her ideas and marginalized her work in women and gender studies programs.
Yet since she died in 2005, slowly but surely, Dworkin is creeping back into the conversation. Recently, Johana Fateman and Amy Scholder reintroduced younger readers to an edited collection of Dworkin's work, The Last Days at Hot Slit (MIT Press, 2019). More significantly, Dworkin is respectfully cited, without the usual disclaimers, by mainstream feminist journalists like Rebecca Traister. Now, Martin Duberman, a skilled chronicler of lesbian and gay life and author of seven previous biographies, gives us the first full biography of this controversial intellectual, Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary (The New Press, 2020).
Born to working-class parents in Camden, New Jersey, Dworkin was a bookish child. She was raised by a chronically ill, demanding mother and a hard-working father who often worked double shifts at the post office and sometimes a second job to pay for his wife's medical care and educate his children. Dworkin and her brother Mark had decent public school and Hebrew School. At seventeen, Andrea left home to attend artsy Bennington College, then a women's school, where she studied literature and music and had her first sexual relationship with a woman.
Dworkin has written extensively about her parents, but in ways that minimize her struggles with them. For example, in the first essay of Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (1976), she describes Harry Dworkin as a feminist and Sylvia, who supported reproductive freedom, as "proud, strong and honest," a woman whose unhappiness derived from being shoehorned into a role predetermined by patriarchy.
Dworkin's summary glosses over a lot since her struggles with the hyper-critical Sylvia are documented at length in her archive at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard. Sylvia's cruel observations about Andrea's perceived failures occasionally provoked responses whose breathtaking bluntness betray deep wounds. "YOU MUST COME TO KNOW ME AND RESPECT ME AS I AM, NOT AS YOU ARE, NOR AS YOU WANT ME. OTHERWISE WE CAN NEVER TALK HONESTLY," one of these letters lectured Sylvia in all caps.
Perhaps the Dworkins were nascent feminists, but the record suggests otherwise, and Duberman—mistakenly, in my view--defers to his subject on this crucial point. I do not doubt that Harry Dworkin was also a good father and encouraged his daughter's intellectual life, but he was fully complicit in Sylvia's abusive behavior. When Dworkin pushed back against her mother, Harry sided with his wife. In 1965, Dworkin, then a college sophomore, was arrested at an anti-war rally. She sued the city for a "physical exam" at the Women's House of Detention in which a doctor probed her with a speculum so harshly that she bled for days. Neither parent supported her.
Even more unforgivably, five years later, after Dworkin married the abusive Iwan de Bruin in Amsterdam, both parents watched as he beat her mercilessly on a public street. A policeman intervened, but Dworkin's parents did not. According to Duberman, after Iwan stalked off and they returned to her apartment, Andrea "couldn't stop crying and begged her parents to take her back with them to the States. Sylvia told her that her place was with her husband." Incredibly, they went home without her, leaving her to endure months more of abuse until she was able to pry herself loose.
It was in the months after she left Iwan and before she returned to the United States that Andrea, initially in collaboration with a Dutch friend, Ricki Abrams, found feminism and drafted Woman Hating (E.P. Dutton, 1974). This book launched her career as a writer. It was the same year that she met John Stoltenberg at a political meeting. The two feminists – a gay man and a lesbian- fell in love and formed a lifelong partnership.
Stoltenberg also supported and believed in Dworkin's work, having already embraced feminism himself and launched his study of masculinity and the centrality of sexual violence to American manhood. Indeed, one wonders in a sense whether Stoltenberg was the man that Dworkin imagined her father to have been. Stoltenberg's love, compassion, and admiration for her, his loyalty to and belief in her, was limitless and continues to this day as he works to promote her legacy. Duberman adds little to our knowledge of their intellectual collaboration or what Stoltenberg did to sustain their life together.
In New York, Dworkin and Stoltenberg became part of a radical feminist movement that offered a context for Andrea's work and also complicated it by situating her in an intellectual world that could be fractious, competitive, and backbiting. And Dworkin's writing was less sought after than the work of movement stars like Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, Adrienne Rich, and Susan Brownmiller—or even anti-feminists like Phyllis Schlafly. Commercial publishers wanted books about women's liberation, but perhaps not ones that so firmly equated heterosexual intercourse with violence and oppression. Many feminist outlets also disliked Dworkin's ideas, with some publishing collectives refusing to publish women who had published in the "male" media. Such rejections left Dworkin "infuriated," since she then had "no option other than turning to mainstream outlets."
Dworkin's disappointment about the publishing industry is an important theme: she viewed it as a form of censorship at her worst moments. One problem was that, although Dworkin was a popular speaker on the women's studies circuit, her books sold poorly. When reviewed in major media outlets, they were too often sneered at. Of course, the vast majority of commercial books don't sell well and never have. The small presses that occasionally put out a Dworkin book did not have the resources or clout to promote them appropriately, and many fine books are never reviewed in the mainstream press.
But because her writing was Andrea's principal passion, and the only thing other than speaking that she was willing to do for money, the roller coaster ride of intense work, anticipation, and disappointment was emotionally draining. It also left her and Stoltenberg scrambling for income until he began to take regular editing jobs in the 1990s.
Yet paradoxically, even as she struggled to sell books, Dworkin became an ever-more influential voice in radical feminism. In part, this was because the need for income took her on grueling speaking tours. By the mid-1970s, the anti-rape movement and the turn to fighting violence against women in media and pornography made Dworkin a desirable presence on campus, at demonstrations, and at Take Back the Night speak-outs.
In 1977, Dworkin, Steinem, Brownmiller, and Rich organized an ad in the New York Times that proclaimed the formation of a Women's Anti-Defamation League to fight pornography and media violence, a precursor to Women Against Pornography (WAP). Pornography, recently freed from prosecution as obscenity by series of Supreme Court decisions, was proliferating and becoming fashionable. Although the ad affirmed First Amendment values, it argued that something else was at stake too: pornography, they argued, threatened women's "physical safety and emotional well-being."
Dworkin was a signer, but not a joiner. Even though Pornography: Men Possessing Women became an influential text for the feminist anti-pornography movement, and Dworkin personally organized the demonstrations against the infamous Barnard Conference in 1983, she kept her distance from WAP. Unpaid organizing was something for which she had neither the time, the financial resources, the temperament, nor the energy.
But she was a compelling and persuasive speaker. Dworkin was frequently on the debate stage, as her thinking crystallized around the idea that pornography was the primary instrument for gender subordination. After she and legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon introduced a model legislative ordinance to the Minneapolis city council that would permit anyone harmed by pornography to file a civil suit, Dworkin became well-known outside feminism, too, as politically mixed and conservative groups around the country tried to implement similar ordinances.
She traveled tirelessly to support these efforts, but at a cost. Attacks on Dworkin escalated. They came from feminists and the ACLU, who protested that the model ordinance would promote censorship. They came from gay men, who viewed banning explicit materials as an attack on their sexual liberation. And, of course, they came from pornographers, who helped to fund the lawsuits that ultimately sidelined the ordinance and published ugly, demeaning cartoons of its authors.
Sadly, the anti-pornography struggle also accelerated attacks on what Dworkin cared about most, her writing. By 1988, as Duberman notes, after five books, Dworkin was "increasingly well-known, thanks to a trail of brutal, demeaning reviews, more as a figure of derision than esteem." Intercourse, a theoretical argument about the penetrative act that defined heterosexuality, was published in England that year and was for a short time on the London Sunday Times bestseller list. In 1991, the ACLU – which had joined a lawsuit against the ordinance –gratuitously labeled Dworkin "Bigot of the year."
Not surprisingly, as her health and reputation declined in the 1990s, Dworkin receded from view. The radical feminism of her youth had given way to a new generation of women who, often without reading her, perceived Dworkin as antithetical to the sexual freedoms they hoped to enjoy in a nation where gender equality was said to be settled. Dworkin found it challenging to travel, and, although she continued to write, she struggled to find publishers willing to distribute and promote her work. In 1999, a solo trip to Paris intended to give her a break ended in her assertion that she had been drugged and raped by a hotel staff member. Incredibly, her account of this trauma was seized upon by others to discredit her further. This required discounting what everyone who knew Dworkin or understood her work knew: she was a person of great moral convictions, who believed that living an ethical life demanded complete honesty.
Duberman's account of Dworkin's life will be crucial to those discovering her work for the first time. It is less useful for those looking for a book that raises or answers critical questions about her. Huge chunks of text are devoted to direct quotes from Dworkin's letters. As someone who believed that her publishing difficulties and the noxious reviews of her work were an almost deliberate attempt to silence her, she would have appreciated these inclusions. Nevertheless, it means that, inevitably, much of the book is narrated from Dworkin's perspective. Yet she was a lively correspondent, and views from feminists within and outside her circle – Barbara Deming, Karla Jay, Rich, and Brownmiller, among others—would have helped readers understand the complexities of Dworkin's political imagination.
Duberman's analysis of Dworkin's life, writing, and endeavors is also thin. As I indicated earlier, I wish that he had dug more deeply into Dworkin's relationship with both of her parents. Since I have also worked in the Dworkin archives, Duberman's account strengthens a view I have held for some time: Dworkin put more effort into maintaining a relationship with Harry and Sylvia than they did. True, they often gave her money when she needed it. But Sylvia's criticism of her daughter was relentless, Harry did nothing about it, and leaving Andrea in Amsterdam when they knew Iwan was beating her was unforgivable.
Another unexplored theme is the lasting effects of these beatings, which sometimes left her unconscious after Iwan punched her in the face and banged her head against floors and walls. For many years, Dworkin downplayed these experiences, partly out of fear that Iwan could find her and hurt her again. Gradually, she began to write about them, sometimes as fiction: book by book, more details emerged over time.
But it seems reasonable to presume that this experience physically changed Dworkin. Given what we now know about CTE, we can speculate that the violence altered her brain, her body weakened by the furious bursts of adrenaline that accompany intense fear. The lively, adventurous teenager who left Camden to attend an artsy women's college; the woman who sued the city of New York after being raped with a speculum, and then struck out alone to live on Crete and write poetry; the woman who went to Amsterdam, again alone, as an independent journalist– that woman became depressive, fearful, and able to sleep only during the day. She grew layers of flesh and fat that protected her from harm. As Duberman writes, Stoltenberg "vividly remembers that even years after they'd been living together, if he happened to enter Andrea's bedroom while she was asleep, she sometimes awakened and yelled in terror, thinking he was Iwan (both men were blonde and tall.)" By 1999, Dworkin was taking up to twelve pills every day to fight chronic insomnia.
Speaking about these things should not reaffirm a stereotype concocted by Dworkin's enemies: that she was bitter and enraged, a person unacquainted with, and insensitive to, sexual pleasure. By her admission, she was a person who had been badly hurt. But Duberman provides plenty of evidence that Dworkin delighted in sex, even adding a description of how she and Stoltenberg made love. Duberman also notes several times that Dworkin was kind, gentle, and well-liked: my own research affirms this. Yet by driving the narrative with Dworkin's letters, most written in heated moments or interpersonal struggles, Duberman will leave many readers mystified as to why she was well-loved and admired by so many people.
During her lifetime, Dworkin's work was "mostly treated with cruel derision and mockery," Duberman concludes. But "Safely dead, the acclaim consistently denied her during her lifetime was showered on her grave." This is slightly misleading. The people who had always loved and supported Dworkin never abandoned her, and that included the thousands of women whose stories of sexual abuse she had patiently listened to for years. Indeed, many – Brownmiller, Steinem, and Robin Morgan – had been treated just as disparagingly by other radical feminists. They, too, were attacked in print by the corporate pornographers that those who defeated the model ordinance propped up.
But what is also true is that the stories Dworkin told – of male power reinforced by sexual violence, of the refusal to hear women's stories, about why violence against women taught us something about all violence– did outlive her. Young feminists are returning to Dworkin's work with fresh eyes today. We can only hope that Duberman's work becomes a gateway for more young feminists, men, and women, to return to Dworkin's sense of hope that women and men could co-exist and thrive in genuine equality.
Claire Bond Potter is Professor of Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research, and co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar. Their most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020).
A great first issue! Congratulations.