Books: May 2025

Right-Wing Women — Andrea Dworkin

⭐⭐ Right-Wing Women got billed as an analysis of women on the right by the firebrand feminist Andrea Dworkin. But the book is much broader, also delving into Dworkin’s broader feminist framework, social value in a gendered society, abortion, reproductive technologies, and so on. There’s actually not a ton here on “right-wing women” as such.

This was my first time reading her work directly. Dworkin’s style is to make big, sharp claims; she is machine-gunning ideas; she is sarcastic, angry, funny; when she’s really going, it’s great.

The standouts are the first chapter, “The Promise of the Ultra-Right,” and the chapter on abortion. Her take on right-wing women is that they, like left-wing feminists, are acutely aware of the violence and domination inherent to relationships with men, and so seek a compromised (false) safety in marriage and control over reproduction. As Dworkin writes, “the Right promises to put enforceable constraints on male aggression, thus simplifying survival for women.” She looks at specific anti-feminist women of the era, whom I had known little about and found fascinating.

Dworkin’s takedown of the counterculture in the abortion chapter is particularly brutal and effective, maybe the best part of the book: “[sexual liberation] did not free women. Its purpose – it turned out – was to free men to use women without bourgeois constraints.” Here she is writing directly from experience about the abuse and dismissive treatment of women in the radical organizations of this period.

Aside from these chapters, however, the writing is rough. Truly a slog. The repetition is clearly for rhetorical effect and I could imagine it working in a speech, but not as a book. The content is also less interesting later on.