Andrea Dworkin, writer and crusading feminist, dead

Andrea Dworkin, the feminist writer and anti-pornography campaigner whose work was a lightning rod for the debate on pornography and censors...

Andrea Dworkin, the feminist writer and anti-pornography campaigner whose work was a lightning rod for the debate on pornography and censorship that raged through the US in the 1980s, died on Saturday at her home in Washington. She was 58.

She died in her sleep, said her husband, John Stoltenberg. The cause of death had not been determined but Stoltenberg said Dworkin had suffered several chronic illnesses in recent years.

With her unruly dark curls and denim overalls, Dworkin was for decades a visible presence on the lecture circuit, at anti-pornography rallies and ‘‘take back the night’’ marches. In speeches and in her books, she returned vocally, passionately and seldom without controversy to the subjects of sex, sexuality and violence against women, themes that to her were inextricably and painfully linked.

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Among her best-known books are Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Intercourse and Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant.

Reviewing Heartbreak in The New York Times Book Review, Laura Miller wrote: ‘‘Dworkin is one of the few remaining specimens of pure countercultural romanticism: fierce, melodramatic and utterly convinced that all truth can be found in her own roiling, untempered emotions.’’

With her first book, Woman Hating, she drew the lines in what she saw as a pitched battle against men’s historical domination of women. She opposed all forms of pornography, which she believed incited violence against women. She was also critical of consensual sex between women and men, which she saw as an act of everyday subjugation in which women were accomplices.

‘‘One of the differences between marriage and prostitution is that in marriage you only have to make a deal with one man,’’ Dworkin wrote in Letters From a War Zone. Marriage, she added, ‘‘is a legal licence to rape’’.

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Andrea Rita Dworkin was born on September 26, 1946, in Camden, NJ, and earned a bachelor’s degree in literature from Bennington College. She moved to Europe, where she married a Dutch political radical. The marriage was abusive, Dworkin said later, and she was divorced after three years. ‘‘I was a battered wife,’’ she told NYT in 1985, ‘‘and pornography entered into it. Both of us read it, and it helped give me the wrong idea of what a woman was supposed to be for a man.’’

To Dworkin, it did not matter that some critics condemned her sweeping anti-pornography stance as a form of censorship. With feminist lawyer Catharine A. MacKinnon, she wrote a municipal ordinance, briefly adopted by several cities in the 1980s, that defined pornography as a form of sex discrimination. (In 1986, the US Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s ruling overturning the ordinance in Indianapolis.)

A writer, editor and a founder of Men Against Pornography who also identifies himself as gay, Stoltenberg is her only immediate survivor. —NYT