both. This book is more disciplined, more somber, more
rigorous, and in some ways more impassioned. I am happy
that it will now reach a larger audience, and sorry that it
took so long.
Andrea Dworkin
New York City
March 1981
1
Fem inism , A rt, and My M other S ylvia
I am very happy to be here today. It is no small thing for me
to be here. There are many other places I could be. This is not
what my mother had planned for me.
I want to tell you something about my mother. Her name is
Sylvia. Her father’s name is Spiegel. Her husband’s name is
Dworkin. She is fifty-nine years old, my mother, and just a few
months ago she had a serious heart attack. She is recovered
now and back on her job. She is a secretary in a high school.
She has been a heart patient most of her life, and all of mine.
When she was a child she had rheumatic fever. She says that
her real trouble began when she was pregnant with my brother
Mark and got pneumonia. After that, her life was a misery of
illness. After years of debilitating illness—heart failures, toxic
reactions to the drugs that kept her alive—she underwent
heart surgery, then she suffered a brain clot, a stroke, that
robbed her of speech for a long time. She recovered from the
heart surgery. She recovered from her stroke, although she
still speaks more slowly than she thinks. Then, about eight
years ago she had a heart attack. She recovered. Then, a few
months ago she had a heart attack. She recovered.
My mother was bom in Jersey City, New Jersey, the second
oldest of seven children, two boys, five girls. Her parents,
Sadie and Edward, who were cousins, came from someplace
in Hungary. Her father died before I was bom. Her mother is
now eighty. There is no way of knowing of course if my mother’s heart would have been injured so badly had she been bom into a wealthy family. I suspect not, but I do not know. There
is also of course no way of knowing if she would have received
different medical treatment had she not been a girl. But regardless, it all happened the way it happened, and so she was very ill most of her life. Since she was a girl, no one encouraged her to read books (though she tells me that she used to love to read and does not remember when or why she stopped
reading); no one encouraged her to go to college or asked her
to consider the problems of the world in which she lived. Because her family was poor, she had to work as soon as she finished high school. She worked as a secretary full-time, and
on Saturdays and some evenings she did part-time work as a
“salesgirl” in a department store. Then she married my father.
