John Lewis and Andrea Dworkin on a Revolution in Values
John Lewis and Andrea Dworkin on a Revolution in Values
Human sovereignty, dignity, and the reality of women’s rights
We at the Andrea Dworkin Archival Project (ADAP) are thankful to have received a scan of the dialogue between John Lewis and Andrea Dworkin, as printed in On the Issues in fall 1994.
The post at the ADAP Facebook page includes the images of the pages from that piece. The full dialogue between Lewis and Dworkin appears in full text. Their dialogue covers Dworkin’s view of the women’s movement growing from the civil rights movement, what she terms her “personal moral crisis” with nonviolence, and why communal solidarity for women becomes difficult—including women’s collaboration in their oppression.
We find it especially valuable, ending this Women’s History Month, to consider this dialogue, one that has not been collected elsewhere—and may well be unknown to most readers.
Here is the link to the public Facebook post, which can be liked and shared:
https://www.facebook.com/share/xpXqmr7GxyYWL2cN
To situate the dialogue between Lewis and Dworkin, I have written a brief introduction that appears below, somewhat different here than in the ADAP Facebook post. I have also made key selections from it, featuring quotes from both Lewis and Dworkin. As noted, the full interview can be read, but having some quotes pulled can help in directing the study of this document.
Contrary to portrayals of the modern women’s liberation movement as being “white feminist,” including certain writers dishonestly using Dworkin as an example of “white feminism,” her dialogue with Lewis demonstrates her understanding of the interrelatedness of the struggles against sexism, racism, and militarism. Of course, Dworkin’s admiration for Lewis and the civil rights movement and her early involvement, during her youth, with the War Resisters League and the Student Peace Union would not be surprising to those who have closely read her work. The exchange between Lewis and Dworkin serves to reiterate a deeper understanding she had of the links among oppressions—again, evident as far back as Woman Hating, in 1974, though certainly more developed by 1994. In fact, Dworkin had written:
Feminism and the struggle for Black liberation were parts of a compelling whole. That whole was called, ingenuously perhaps, the struggle for human rights. The fact is that consciousness, once experienced, cannot be denied.1
The introduction of Dworkin’s Woman Hating notes that “all women are not necessarily in a state of primary emergency as women.”2 Jewish women, Native women, and Black women primarily experience anti-Semitic, colonialist, and racist oppression. As Dworkin terms it, “the identity of primary emergency,” typically race, shapes the woman’s experience within her group with men.3 Nevertheless, the minority woman remains oppressed by men within her respective group, even as both share in their condition: a minority within a minority. Despite the complexity of Dworkin’s analysis, it appears obsessively misrepresented as her privileging sex over race à la “white feminism.” In “summarizing” what she sees as Dworkin’s analysis of male violence against women, Anne Gray Fischer, assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas, writes, “Race, along with many other categories of difference, played a minor role in the scope and severity of women’s vulnerability to violence.”4 However, even Dworkin’s early analysis in Woman Hating, as referenced above, easily disputes Fischer’s mischaracterization of her thought—among other issues in Fischer’s misreading of second-wave feminism.
On violence, Dworkin notes the cultural devaluing of women into sex commodities, which, three decades later, has festered into sprawling, profitable empires of illusion—much of which she foresaw. Women become images to buy under what Dworkin describes as “an attitude that women are almost subhuman”—what can seem like an unending sexual nightmare. A group of people understood as commodities for purchase becomes seen as less than human—piece by piece, to be purchased on the market. Men, Dworkin explains, come to believe “they have a right to control women, to control access to women’s bodies, on a visceral level” (p. 22). What is a woman to do but question nonviolence when the law does not work for women—and when the law overlooks, if not protects, male violence against women?
Significantly, near the end of her dialogue with Lewis, Dworkin identifies a key difference between the situations of women and Black people. “The way women are situated in society is almost exactly the opposite of the way African-Americans were to white people,” Dworkin says, “which is to say, we’re not segregated—in a sense we are almost forcibly integrated” (p. 57). Woman lacking a room of her own, space without a man’s occupation enforced upon her, structures women’s subordination. Under coverture, marriage functioned as the man’s identity “covering” the woman, as he defined her “existence”—a nonbeing that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in 1848, termed as women being “civilly dead”—through man’s identity over woman. Women must have self-definition for women’s rights to be definable in concrete terms beyond abstraction.
Though useful in highlighting sexist and racist oppression functioning as caste systems, analogies between sexism and racism have missed the key difference of expression. “While race-hate has been expressed through forced segregation,” Dworkin writes, “woman-hate is expressed through forced closeness, which makes punishment swift, easy, and sure.”5 Women not having a right to single-sex spaces, including rape crisis shelters, is the forced closeness of woman hating functioning as usual. There is no living concept of women’s rights without human sovereignty and dignity for women. In the absence of these most vital qualities, the very notion of women’s rights becomes null—dead.
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John Lewis and Andrea Dworkin, “Towards a Revolution of Values,” by Merle Hoffman, On the Issues, Fall 1994, 20-23, 55-59. https://ontheissuesmagazine.com/feminism/oti-dialogue-congressman-john-lewis-and-andrea-dworkin-towards-a-revolution-in-values.
Selections from “Towards a Revolution in Values”
DWORKIN: John, I don’t have too many heroes but you are one to me. I remember reading about you on the Freedom Rides when I was a teenager. Then I became active with the War Resisters League and the Student Peace Union and knew people there who had worked with you. I thought you were really brave. There are so many political issues now around violence that I deal with—and the women’s movement really owes so much to the civil rights movement—that I thought we could talk about violence as a political issue. (p. 21)
LEWIS: When my mother or father would try to kill a chicken for a meal, or try to sell one, it made me very, very sad. I would protest, I wouldn’t eat, I wouldn’t talk to my parents, I would go on a strike. I think that was my first introduction to nonviolence, not just toward human beings, but to the creatures of our environment. You don’t go out just killing or harming people, animals, or things. (p. 21)
DWORKIN: For me, this [the philosophy of nonviolence] is a question of tremendous personal moral crisis. I have believed in and followed the path of nonviolence for a very long time, from the time when I was young, partly influenced by you and by the way that your courage spoke to me when I was a teenager, and with many other pacifists, standing up against the Vietnam War.
In the last ten years, I have had a real crisis around this issue of violence and I can’t come to terms with it. I see women being raped on a level of frequency and with a kind of sadism that is increasingly horrible. And I see women being beaten in their own homes, so that for us it’s not even a question of “Are the streets safe?” because most of us are killed in our own homes. And I see an almost complete devaluation of the worth of women—on the marketplace, through pornography, through prostitution and an attitude that women are almost subhuman—and a belief that men seem to have that they have a right to control women, to control access to women’s bodies, on a visceral level. It has become impossible for me to tolerate the way the law is not working for women, not operating on behalf of women.
I have come to believe that the only way to stop a rapist, a wife beater, may be to kill him. If the society does not react to the violence that women experience as if it’s an emergency, then a woman has to find a way to stop that man herself.
LEWIS: There has been so much violence against women in particular because our society is so male-oriented, and male-dominated. You know male chauvinism was at its worst during the early days of the civil rights movement. But during the latter part of the movement, we started trying to practice what we were preaching. If you preached equality, you have to live by your creed. Without women, the early movement would have been like a bird without wings, really. And women didn’t get a lot of credit. (pp. 21-22)
DWORKIN: I now think of myself as a failed pacifist, a lapsed pacifist. I see situation after situation where women are almost wrong not to use violence, not to stop the man in his tracks. He won’t stop himself and the legal system won’t stop him. Society leaves the woman isolated, to deal with his aggression, on her own, through whatever means she can manage. (p. 22)
LEWIS: Too many males in our society see women only in that light. That they’re something to be used and abused. We have to change that mind set. We need something very radical. What’s happening in American society is that we have almost become immune. (p. 23)
DWORKIN: Yes. There’s a level of desensitization, to pain, to other people’s suffering, and the acceptance of dehumanization. When people are put in an inferior status in society they need to be dehumanized, otherwise people can’t feel superior to them. I mean that’s part of that process of hating people and making them subjugated. It seems that a sense of superiority and a feeling that the woman is an object is part of what men need to be with women sexually. So the fight for humanizing—women’s assertions of humanity, in the society—is always taken as some kind of personal intimate sexual feuding with men. And the concept of equality between men and women—and that equality can be real and not just social policy, but also in personal and intimate relationships—doesn’t even seem to register in the minds of most people. It’s very frustrating.
You have a political movement that is so worried about making men more angry. Women are already being punished so much in their personal lives, or when they walk down the street, or by the unofficial curfew of not being able to go out after dark. The thought of making men angrier is something that keeps women from asserting our rights. I used to think that women who have been raped should get little buttons saying, “I have done my national service. Leave me alone.”
HOFFMAN: Or a button saying: “I’ve been incested. I have given already.”
DWORKIN: Yes, and this is the one day that I would like to sit on this bench and read this book and not be bothered. I only get one day in my lifetime, this is it, today, now. So, please, today leave me alone.
HOFFMAN: When anyone can trespass your boundaries, you are not perceived as an individual with human dignity. The definition of masculinity continues to be one that’s laden with violence; it’s sometimes laden with misogyny. How do you change that? (p. 23)
DWORKIN: I think the civil rights movement showed the world that the concept of human dignity is not an abstract idea. It has to be real when you walk into a public place, it has to be real in the way that you can make your living. It has to be real in the way that people talk to you; it has to be real in a way that affects your self-regard. The classic civil rights struggle was around the ways in which African-Americans were excluded from the body politic in the US and were excluded from the experience of human dignity.
LEWIS: Right. We were visible, but invisible. And that’s the way women have been treated. Blacks, African-Americans, became objects in a sense, to be used, to be abused. Women are subjected to that same status in American society. As participants in the civil rights movement, we African Americans had to make ourselves visible. During the 1960’s, there was a lot of dirt and filth under the American rug, in the cracks and in the corner—and people didn’t see it. So we had to do something. By dramatizing the evil of segregation and racial discrimination, by dramatizing the denial of human dignity, we made ourselves visible and then you had the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and that type of thing. Now in 1994, as we move toward the 21st century; women have to become more visible. They have to bring the dirt out of the bedroom, out of the closet, and let people see it. So, we are no longer invisible.
DWORKIN: And the visibility includes, then, the fact that when somebody goes into court and says, “I have been hurt in this and this and this way,” they suddenly also have speech that’s visible. So I thank you for your support of the ordinance, because it does seem to me that there is an apathy developing out of some kind of fear. People seem terribly afraid of change. They seem terrified—they seem to feel things can only get worse. That nothing can ever get better. That nothing is ever a chance for those who have been hurt to say the ways in which they have been hurt and to try to get the society to redress the grievance.
And I really believe that the most marginalized women in our society are those who are or who have been in prostitution, who are usually kids who have run away from home, who were sexually abused as children, and who, of course, come from poverty, not from wealth. This is the population that the pornographers exploit, primarily, in making their product.
And then their product gets used on women, especially in the home, which is this dangerous place for women to be. And so, we have no homes. I mean, we’re kind of the ultimate homeless population. You look to the law to set the standard for the kind of human community you want to create. What equality is going to be. What it is that you absolutely do not have a right to subject other people to. (p. 55)
DWORKIN: But there’s a difference between violence that’s public and violence that’s private. The shock of violence to women in the home, for instance, is that it takes place in the home.
LEWIS: And it’s somebody that you know, somebody that you trust.
DWORKIN: It takes a great deal of empathy to understand that your public social enemy is acting out of ignorance and is acting out of a kind of spiritual poverty, and that that can be changed. I don’t know what it takes when you are in the one relationship in which you are supposed to be the most known. There is something so impersonal in the experience of being beaten as a wife. And to be denied your own humanity in the most intimate of relationships is devastating. (p. 56)
DWORKIN: The way women are situated in society is almost exactly the opposite of the way African-Americans were to white people, which is to say, we’re not segregated—in a sense we are almost forcibly integrated.
Women run the gamut in personalities, capabilities, and possibilities, but we’re really socialized to compete with each other for men. And to overcome that, to have a communal solidarity is hard. The way we’re socialized, including sexual abuse, breaks us into pieces inside. We try to fix it but maybe fixing is not what we need to do. Maybe we need to let all the broken parts sort of shake around a little and make a little bit of noise.
Many women believe that they are being hurt because the person who is hurting them has been insufficiently loved and that if that person is loved enough, that person will stop—and that’s not the case. Why doesn’t this country commit real resources to making women’s lives safe? Is it that many of the men who control those resources still have this contempt toward women?
We are visible, but not seen. (p. 57)
LEWIS: I think we have to reveal a coalition that transcends sex, race, class, all of them. Because there are people in America that are being dehumanized. And we have to find a way to dramatize it so people can see it, people can feel it. They felt Selma. The American people couldn’t stand seeing innocent people being trampled with horses and beaten with night sticks. And we have to find a way, even in Congress, even in the White House, the city halls, the state capitols, the board rooms, to sensitize, to make people feel it in their guts.
I think we have to organize and keep organizing. We don’t rally anymore. We don’t rock any more. We don’t march anymore. We don’t stir up hell anymore. This country is too quiet and the world is passing us by. We need to agitate.
DWORKIN: I think that the dignity of the people in South Africa, and the dignity of the leadership there, the magnanimity of their souls, has been a real lesson for all of us who thought that it’s not possible to remain deeply human when being so horribly oppressed. I feel that the women’s movement came directly out of the civil rights movement, sometimes in opposition to the male chauvinism of the civil rights movement, but also that it continues with the same goals that the civil rights movement had. Very inadequate sometimes, in being able to say what those goals are, with very impoverished means to confront society in a way that will make our meaning clear.
But I also find myself in a women’s movement that refuses to do what is necessary. It wants to settle for the few gains for the few professional woman that made them. Still, the women’s movement now is certainly an international movement.
HOFFMAN: Oh, absolutely.
DWORKIN: Yet in every country of the world, we see women who really think it’s all right to have women on street corners selling themselves. They insist on defining that for us as an example of choice, instead of it being an example of what happens when you have been deprived of human sovereignty from the time you were a child. And that causes me great despair. But I think that what the Congressman is saying is very important and I just hope that women will listen. Because you don’t make change without sacrifice.
LEWIS: Frederick Douglass said that in 1857: “There can be no progress without agitation.” You’ve got to make some noise, you got to be willing to move. You cannot get lost. You cannot stay still. You have to have hope and you got to stay in motion. You cannot become bitter, you cannot become hostile. Women have got to continue to push. Life is a constant struggle. It shouldn’t be. But it is a constant struggle.
I speak a great deal about the beloved community. And it’s not here yet, maybe it’s in the process, but it’s going to take more than one year, a few years. It may take a lifetime, but we’ve all got to continue to work on it. (pp. 57-58)
Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality (New York: Plume, 1974), 18.
Dworkin, Woman Hating, 23.
Dworkin, Woman Hating, 24.
Anne Gray Fischer, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification (Chapel Hill: The University of Carolina Press, 2022), 174.
Andrea Dworkin, “In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson,” 1994-1995, Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 49.