In the West, where modern feminism had begun in the nineteenth century, a new phase of that movement took shape during the 1960s and after. Moving well beyond the earlier focus on suffrage and property rights, “second-wave” feminists gave voice to a wide range of new issues. Some continued Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s emphasis on “equal rights” with a focus now on the home and housework, discrimination in the workplace, access to education, and political involvement. “Socialist feminists” looked to the workings of capitalist economies and their class inequalities as the basis of women’s oppression. Still others turned the spotlight on cultural issues—media portrayal of women, sexuality and the family, reproductive rights, lesbianism, violence against women, pornography, and prostitution. Among the spokespersons for this cultural critique of patriarchy was the American writer Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005). In a speech at the University of Toronto in 1995, she spelled out her understanding of the achievements and continuing tasks of modern feminism.

ANDREA DWORKIN

“Remember, Resist, Do Not Comply”

1995

Iwant us to think about far we have come politically.

We have named force as such when it is used against us. . . . It used to be a legal right, for instance, that men had in marriage. They could force their wives to have intercourse and it was not called force or rape; it was called desire or love. We have challenged the old ideology of sexual conquest as a natural game in which women are targets and men are conquering heroes. . . . We have identified rape; we have identified incest; we have identified battery; we have identified prostitution; we have identified pornography—as crimes against women, as means of exploiting women, as ways of hurting women that are systematic and supported by the practices of the societies in which we live. We have identified sexual exploitation as abuse. We have identified objectification and turning women into commodities for sale as dehumanizing, deeply dehumanizing. . . . We have identified patterns of violence that take place in intimate relationships. We know now that most rape is not committed by the dangerous and predatory stranger but by the dangerous and predatory boyfriend, lover, friend, husband, neighbor, the man we are closest to, not the man who is farthest away.

What remains to be done? . . . We need to end rape . . . , incest . . . , battery . . . , prostitution, and . . . pornography. That means that we need to refuse to accept that these are natural phenomena that just happen because some guy is having a bad day. . . .

In my view, we need to concentrate on the perpetrators of crimes against women instead of asking ourselves over and over and over again, why did that happen to her? . . . There is no women’s movement if it does not include the women who are being hurt and the women who have the least. The women’s movement has to take on the family systems in our countries. . . .

We have to take on prostitution as an issue. . . . Most prostituted women in the West are incest victims who ran away from home, who have been raped, who are pimped when they are still children—raped, homeless, poor, abandoned children. We have to take on poverty: not in the liberal sense of heartfelt concern but in the concrete sense, in the real world. We have to take on what it means to stand up for women who have nothing because when women have nothing, it’s real nothing: no homes, no food, no shelter, often no ability to read.

Now, I know, in this room, some of you are the women I have been talking about. . . . I am going to ask you to use every single thing you can remember about what was done to you—how it was done, where, by whom, when, and, if you know, why—to begin to tear male dominance to pieces, to pull it apart, to vandalize it, to destabilize it. . . . I have to ask you to resist, not to comply, to destroy the power men have over women, to refuse to accept it, to abhor it, and to do whatever is necessary, despite its cost to you, to change it.