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Right-Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin | Jews and Homosexuals | Chapter 4
Posted May 4, 2024 by Unicorn in FeministBooks

Welcome to another discussion post for Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females by Andrea Dworkin.

In this post, we are discussing Chapter 4 Jews and Homosexuals.

Share your thoughts on this chapter in the comments. (Feel free to also share thoughts and suggestions on the discussion post and bookclub structure itself.)

Anyone who hasn't read the book but wants to give input on the topics discussed are welcome to as well! (I recommend mentioning that you haven't read the chapter in your post, so people are aware of that when replying.)

Readers are welcome to join in at anytime. Find a free copy of the book at frauenkultur.co.uk.

See you Saturday June 1st for Chapter 5!

Previous Discussion Posts

6 comments

zuubatMay 5, 2024

I read the book ages ago, but one scene really stood out. That’s where she is being pursued by a mob of women on an anti-Semitic tirade. She reported it as being the most frightening experience of her years of political activism.

Haworthia_LadyMay 5, 2024

The scene she described where they were about to have her "accidentally fall" off the balcony was terrifying.

[Deleted]May 4, 2024

I am curious about this chapter. Dworkin was never one of my go-to feminist reads but I am curious what she has to say bc I've been thinking about this a lot: why we never talk about how central Jewish women's intellectual and emotional labor was/is to feminism, esp radical feminism. I saw a great talk about this--about how our cultural differences (I am Jewish) contribute to a culture of speaking out and standing up for ourselves--from a religion steeped in debate and argument (vs dogmatic, unquestioning 'faith' in the 'word of god' --replace with the word 'man' here) to the stereotype of the J.A.P., which is a gentile narrative to contain and denigrate the cultural value of women w/in Judaism.

I mean, look at this list! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_feminists I would add Barbra Streisand to it (watch Up the Sandbox for a 70s feminist film). [full disclosure: I find B.S. of this period maybe the most gorgeous woman I have ever seen and am just a wee bit in love with her]

Nearly every notable feminist is on this list.

Dressed2K1llMay 5, 2024

Her book Scapegoat; The Jews, Israel and Women’s Liberation is Phenomenal.

In fact, I am due to re-read it.

I have it in hardcover but it’s available online for free https://archive.org/details/scapegoatjewsisr0000dwor

Unicorn [OP]May 7, 2024

In this chapter, Dworkin goes into a lot about Judaism and Christianity. It was so disturbing to read the parts about how she tried to interview people from Mississippi and Utah; the open KKK member from Mississippi was awful, and the conservative Utah women nearly having Dworkin pushed off a balcony railing was frightening. The anti-semitism these groups of people only displayed towards Dworkin was quite shocking to me.

A Mississippi woman explained to me that as a Christian woman she was in a superior position, and that this superior position was not to be traded for an equal position.

This reminds me of The Master's Tools Will Not Dismantle The Master's House.

Lots of analyzing of the Bible. This chapter taught me that Paul sucks. Though I'm not surprised that Bible writers suck, I already assume them all to be misogynistic authoritarian men.

I also learned about right-wing Jewish people, which was interesting:

It has been brilliant strategy on the part of the Christian Right in the United States to welcome the participation of Jews, to support the state of Israel, and to use pedestal anti-Semitism: rather than being ground under stomping boots, Jews loyal in their right-wing values are being lifted up onto a pedestal—where the footing is always precarious, as women know.

Dworkin wraps up the chapter, focusing it back on women:

Women are interchangeable as sex objects; women are slightly less disposable as mothers. The only dignity and value women get is as mothers: it is a compromised dignity and a low value, but it is all that is offered to women as women. [...] [H]aving children is the one social contribution credited to women—it is the bedrock of women’s social worth. [...] One perception is particularly chilling: without the children, I am not worth much. The recognition is actually more dramatic than that, much more chilling: without the children, I am not.

I liked this quote:

“All this talk, for and against and about babies, ” wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “is by men. One would think the men bore the babies, nursed the babies, reared the babies.... The women bear and rear the children. The men kill them. Then they say: ‘We are running short of children—make some more. ’”

Dworkin concludes the chapter on why she thinks right-wing women oppose homosexuality:

In sorrow or not, bearing babies is what women can do that men need—really need, no handjob can substitute here; and homosexuality makes women afraid, irrationally, passionately afraid, of extinction: of being unnecessary as a class, as women, to men who destroy whatever they do not need and whose impulses toward women are murderous anyway.

Good catch. I haven't thought about that chapter in a while.