Woman Hating
 | |
| Author | Andrea Dworkin |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Radical feminism, Misogyny, Sexuality |
| Publisher | E. P. Dutton |
Publication date | 1974 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 217 |
| ISBN | 0-525-47423-4 |
| OCLC | 648565982 |
| 301.41/2 | |
| LC Class | HQ |
Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality is a 1974 book by the American radical feminist author and activist Andrea Dworkin.
Background
While Dworkin was living in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, she met Ricki Abrams, a prostitute and a fellow expatriate. Abrams introduced Dworkin to early radical feminist writing from the United States, and Dworkin was especially inspired by Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, and Robin Morgan's Sisterhood is Powerful.[1] She and Abrams began to work together on "early pieces and fragments" of a radical feminist text on the hatred of women in culture and history,[2] including a completed draft of a chapter on the pornographic counterculture magazine Suck, which was published by a group of fellow expatriates in the Netherlands.[3]
Before she left Amsterdam, Dworkin spoke with Abrams about her experiences in the Netherlands, the emerging feminist movement, and the book they had begun to write together. Dworkin agreed to complete the book—which she eventually titled Woman Hating—and publish it when she reached the United States.[4] In her memoirs, Dworkin relates that during that conversation she vowed to dedicate her life to the feminist movement:
Sitting with Ricki, talking with Ricki, I made a vow to her: that I would use everything I knew, including from prostitution, to make the women's movement stronger and better; that I'd give my life to the movement and for the movement. I promised to be honor-bound to the well-being of women, to do anything necessary for that well-being. I promised to live and to die if need be for women. I made that vow some thirty years ago, and I have not betrayed it yet.— Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant, 122.