“Because she did this she made people very nervous and very uncomfortable.” While identifying as a lesbian, Dworkin lived with and married the gay feminist writer John Stoltenberg. “She tried to create more understanding of what the dehumanization of women does to people,” says Marcia Cohn Spiegel, Dworkin’s aunt and herself an activist against domestic violence and the oppression of women. Herself a victim of rape and battery, Dworkin critically charted the boundary between male heterosexuality and male domination of women’s bodies and found it to be very narrow. She became a leader of the “Take Back the Night” movement, which sought safety for women on city streets, and a spokeswoman for the anti-pornography wing of the feminist movement. Dworkin was the author of Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality (1974), Pornography-Men Possessing Women (1981) and Intercourse (1987), among other books. Andrea Dworkin, one of the most radical and polarizing figures of the feminist movement, died on this date in 2005 at age 58.
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