Right-Wing Women: Revisiting Andrea Dworkin’s Radical Feminism

I read Andrew Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women (1983) expecting there to be a timeless interpretation of why some women support the conservative values that are contrary to their self-interest. There was a bit of this in the book, but for the most part Dworkin’s analysis is very context-dependent, and stuck, understandably, in the decade in which it was written. I couldn’t disagree more with this recent blurb attributed to the Guardian and plastered on the back book cover:

‘Her razor-sharp analysis of why so many women are attracted to a politics that despises their rights is more relevant today than ever’

It isn’t relevant — but only because so many of the rights she fought for have been won. Women are in a completely different position to the stay-at-home housewives that she frequently addresses. Her argument is this: Men hate women and violently impose a misogynistic regime on them, which they accept with fearful reluctance:

To waver, whatever the creed of the men around them, is tantamount to rebellion; it is dangerous […] So the woman hangs on, not with the delicacy of a clinging vine, but with a tenacity incredible in its intensity, to the very persons, institutions, and values that demean her…