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,
Sadie 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
silly, almost stupid attitude toward the world. By the time I
was twelve I knew that I wanted to be a writer or a lawyer. I
had been raised really without a mother, and so certain ideas
hadn’t reached me. I didn’t want to be a wife, and I didn’t
want to be a mother.
My father had really raised me although I didn’t see a lot of