Woman Hating Read Free

But I have not been successful in reinventing the language.
    This work was not done in isolation. It owes much to others. I thank my sisters who everywhere are standing
    up, for themselves, against oppression. I thank my sisters, the women who are searching into our common past, writing it so that we can know it and be proud. I thank my sisters, these particular women whose work has contributed so much to my own consciousness and resolve —Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, Shulamith Firestone, Judith Malina, and Jill Johnston.
    I also thank those others who have, through their books and lives, taught me so much —in particular, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Daniel Berrigan, Jean Genet, Huey P. Newton, Julian Beck, and Timothy Leary.
    I thank my friends in Amsterdam who were family for the writing of much of this book and who helped me in very hard times.
    I thank Mel Clay who believed in this book from its most obscure beginnings, the editors ofSuckand in particular Susan Janssen, Deborah Rogers, Martin Duberman, and Elaine Markson who has been wonderful to me. I thank Marian Skedgell for her help and kindness. I thank Brian Murphy who tried to tell me a long time ago that O was an oppressed person. Chapter 3 is dedicated to Brian.
    I thank Karen Malpede and Garland Harris for their support and help. I thank Joan Schenkar for pushing me a little further than I was willing, or able, to go.
    I thank Grace Paley, Karl Bissinger, Kathleen Norris, and Muriel Rukeyser. Without their love and friendship this work would never have been done. Without their examples of strength and commitment, I do not know who I would be, or how.
    I thank my brother Mark and my sister-in-law Carolfor their friendship, warmth, and trust. And I thank my parents, Sylvia and Harry Dworkin, for their devotion and support through all these years, which must have seemed to them interminable, when their daughter was learning her craft. I thank them for raising me with real caring and tenderness, for believing in me so that I could learn to believe in myself.
    Andrea Dworkin
New York City July 1973  

PART ONE
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    THE FAIRY TALES
     
You cannot be free if you are contained within a fiction.
    Julian Beck,The Life of the Theatre
     

Once upon a time there was a wicked witch and her name was
Lilith
Eve
Hagar
Jezebel
Delilah
Pandora
Jahi
Tamar
    and there was a wicked witch and she was also called goddess and her name was
Kali
Fatima
Artemis
Hera
Isis
Mary
Ishtar
    and there was a wicked witch and she was also called queen and her name was
Bathsheba
Vashti
Cleopatra
Helen
Salome
Elizabeth
Clytemnestra
Medea
    and there was a wicked witch and she was also called witch and her name was 
Joan
Circe
Morgan le Fay
Tiamat
Maria Leonza
Medusa
    and they had this in common: that they were feared, hated, desired, and worshiped.
    When one enters the world of fairy tale one seeks with difficulty for the actual place where legend and history part. One wants to locate the precise moment when fiction penetrates into the psyche as reality, and history begins to mirror it. Or vice versa. Women live in fairy tale as magical figures, as beauty, danger, innocence, malice, and greed . In the personae of the fairy tale —the wicked witch, the beautiful princess, the heroic prince —we find what the culture would have us know about who we are.
    The point is that we have not formed that ancient world —it has formed us. We ingested it as children whole, had its values and consciousness imprinted on our minds as cultural absolutes long before we were in fact men and women. We have taken the fairy tales of childhood with us into maturity, chewed but still lying in the stomach, as real identity. Between Snow-white and her heroic prince, our two great fictions, we never did have much of a chance. At some point, the Great Divide took place: they (the boys) dreamed of mounting the Great Steed and buying Snow-white from the dwarfs; we (the girls) aspired to become that object of every