If Obeying Men Is Right, I Want To Be Wrong: A Book Review of Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women by Jocelyn Crawley 

Radical feminist books are powerful because they consistently articulate truths that women rarely hear in any sector of society. Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women is filled with many of these truths, including her speculation that prolific writer Virginia Woolf probably knew that “at the heart of the male system there is a profound contempt for anything in women that is individual, that is independent of the class definition or function, that cannot finally be perceived and justified as incidental to motherhood” (147). Dworkin’s speculations regarding Woolf’s awareness of how patriarchy limits women is important because, like many other radical thinkers, Woolf went on to begin conceptualizing and discussing the importance of women developing their own autonomy and work-life spaces in texts such as A Room of One’s Own. In so doing, she began working towards solutions to the problems patriarchy created for women, thereby creating the conditions confluent with the liberation of female people. Despite the revolutionary work of writers like Woolf, however, patriarchy has been unrelenting in its insistence on defining women in context of their subservient positions to men as well as their domestic responsibilities. In the face of male supremacy’s persistence, critics of patriarchy have continued to identify its core tenets as problematic with specific emphasis on the fallacious belief that women are not independent, autonomous beings with their own thoughts and feelings but rather exist to support and please men. In Right-Wing Women, Dworkin recognizes these realities and several other important feminist truths while centralizing the role that women who ideologically align themselves with the conservative Right play in perpetuating patriarchal practices that divide and demean women.  

For many years, radical feminists have utilized the term “sex-based oppression” to define the type of domination that women experience at the hands of men. This sex-based oppression involves understanding that the oppression women experience results from the material reality of their female bodies. This materiality includes things like the capacity to reproduce and physical vulnerability to rape. These aspects of materiality function as the source from which the oppression of women springs as men exploit female bodies for reproductive and sexual labor. In drawing awareness to this, Dworkin asserts that “Noxious male philosophers from all disciplines have, for centuries, maintained that women follow a biological imperative derived directly from their reproductive capacities that translates necessarily into narrow lives, small minds, and a rather meanspirited puritanism” (13). The key here is that the oppression of women involves the placing of limitations on female people such that they lead parochial lives and, rather than cultivating the expansive consciousness we commonly associate with intellectual growth, instead experience the shrinking of their cognitive capacities. These realities all unfold in the context of excessive morality (puritanism) that is accompanied by bad attitudes. What fun to be female. 

As Dworkin’s text unfolds with palpable lucidity, she continues to outline the hellish tenets of the patriarchal world all female people live in while simultaneously depicting the specifically ineffective responses that right-wing women have when faced with male domination in all of its ugly forms. At one point, she helps us see that the majority of women suppress their own awareness of the fact that nothing they do will enable them to escape the god-like authority of androcentrism. This is the case because, as many feminists and even non-feminists have pointed out, women are not considered people within patriarchy. In articulating this idea, Dworkin notes that

The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neithermen nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence (20,21)

In considering Dworkin’s claim carefully, the reader might come to understand that male domination’s tool of objectifying women does not exist accidentally or incidentally. Rather, it is an intentional aspect of patriarchy because men in power understand that when individuals are continually represented as lacking autonomy and independent identities, it will seem logical to ignore their suffering or immerse them in it. Objects don’t feel, and objects certainly don’t think about how they feel. According to this paradoxical patriarchal logic, a woman hurt by men isn’t actually hurting.   

After outlining the basic problem that women experience in light of the fact that patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet, Dworkin explains what is particularly egregious about the way that right-wing women respond to their material conditions under male domination. She notes that 

Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. They know that they are valued for their sex— their sex organs and their reproductive capacity—and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“femininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love.” Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. They see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime.(69)

Although Dworkin finds many things awry with right-wing women, it seems that the most pernicious problem is their complicity with patriarchy. While centrist and leftist women at least pretend to resist the regime of male supremacy, it seems that right-wing women are unrelenting in their adherence to all of its abhorrent tenets. Thus whether the men in their lives ask them to pretend to be stupid, appropriate a stance of docile obedience, robotically reproduce, cry in private rather than publicly acknowledging their pain, wear one of the patriarchy’s uniforms for women (in this case, conservative clothing), or pledge allegiance to a male God, the right-wing woman’s response is a resounding “Yes, Master.” No dissidence, no dissent. Just yes. It is, for many, scary in the way that witnessing a sentient, infinitely complex human being reduced to a mechanized robot is frightening. This is not to suggest that all right-wing women are in agreement regarding how they should think and behave, nor is it to imply that women of the right do not possess forms of agency and subjectivity which reveal the presence of their individuality within a patriarchal world which seeks to annihilate it. But, as Dworkin seems to imply throughout the text, it is to suggest that women of the right have higher rates of conspicuous, slavish conformance to the patriarchy than female people with other ideological allegiances. 

While Dworkin’s analysis of right-wing women is acute and includes her enunciation of their awareness that “they are worth more in the home than outside it,” this book is not confined to detailed summaries of how conservative female people respond to issues of workplace equity and whether participation in the cult of domesticity is ideal. Additionally, she provides readers with concrete definitions of patriarchal concepts, thereby enabling us to clearly and critically think about what men are asking us to do, be, and feel rather than allowing us to independently be human. For example, Dworkin defines femininity as “the apparent acceptance of sex on male terms with goodwill and demonstrable good faith, in the form of ritualized obsequiousness” (80, 81). The key here is that participation in femininity means that one is no longer operating independently and autonomously, meaning that the patriarchy has already accomplished its primary purpose of diminishing female existence to the realm of non-subjectivity. Additionally, the ritual nature of performing femininity places women back in the realm of the mechanized robot and, in deploying the term obsequiousness, Dworkin emphasizes that we are not only to act in the ways that men want, but to do so with eager enthusiasm. I read this as service with a slavish, subordinated, sexualized smile. Moreover, I read it as a performance that, in being prescribed by the patriarchy, is performed for its male members. 

Although the title of the text is Right-Wing Women and involves explaining the personal and political inefficacies of members of this group, Dworkin also takes time to reveal the hypocrisy and woman-hating practices of the Left. Specifically, she explains that sexual exploitation is a core tenet of the Male Left’s ideological system. This core tenet, she argues, gains traction and legitimacy through “social movements” like the sexual revolution. Men of the left, she says, promote abortion rights for women in order to ensure that they can gain sexual access to female bodies given that, if abortion were not readily accessible to women at all times, “fucking would not be available to men on demand” (95). Within the framework of a sexual revolution whose success was predicated on women having abortion rights is men wanting to have access to intercourse in a highly specific way. This way, Dworkin says, involves men accessing “lots of girls who wanted it all the time outside marriage, free, giving it away” (95). 

In reading Dworkin’s assessments regarding abortion rights, the antithetical attitudes that many members of the Left and Right have regarding sex become apparent even as the role that both ideological camps play in treating women as sexualized objects gains lucidity. Men and women of the Right contextualize intercourse within a religious framework which makes it sacred and only acceptable within a heterosexual marriage (with it being understood by many that some male partners will seek excess erotic stimulation that is not satisfied within the monogamous relationship through pornography and/or prostitution); conversely, female and male people of the Left frequently think of sex as something that should be given away freely. The Right abhors abortion as a part of its framework of reverencing God as author of life and the female body as the realm through which the family name is perpetuated; the Left insists that this religious rhetoric is anachronistic and must be replaced with acknowledgment of the right that women have to bodily agency as well as the role that the abortion plays in making unlimited free sex a possibility.

In addition to providing readers with multiple frameworks through which to conceptualize the role that right-wing women play in upholding the patriarchy, Dworkin offers us several lenses through which to understand how male domination works. At one point, she notes that there are two models through which female people are sexually controlled and socially used: the brothel model and the farming model. As with much of her discourse in the text, these models help the reader view male domination through the lens of sex-based oppression by demonstrating how female people, within patriarchy, provide either sexual or reproductive labor. In explaining the two models, Dworkin notes that 

The brothel model relates to prostitution, narrowly defined; women collected together for the purposes of sex with men; women whose function is explicitly nonreproductive, almost antireproductive; sex animals in heat or pretending, showing themselves for sex, prancing around or posed for sex. The farming model relates to motherhood, women as a class planted with the male seed and harvested; women used for the fruit they bear, like trees; women who run the gamut from prized cows to mangy dogs, from highbred horses to sad beasts of burden (174)

Here, the binary-based logic of male domination surfaces as we see that men view women either as those who provide sex in nonreproductive capacities or reproduce in contexts where the sex that precedes reproduction is apparently nonsexual. Although not mentioned here, Dworkin’s articulation  of the brothel/farm model could coincide with another binary-based modality purported by the patriarchy: the madonna/whore syndrome. In this case, one might argue that, within the patriarchal matrix, the “whores” are herded into the brothel model while the “madonnas” have passionless sex for the purpose of procreating. As is the case with anything patriarchy offers, what is being offered is awful.

One knows she is reading a radical feminist text when the writer unequivocally states that every ideological domain of reality except those that are explicitly feminist is capable of expressing antagonism towards women. Dworkin does this very thing in the final chapter of her book, noting that “Antifeminism is the politics of contempt for women as a class…This is true whether the opposition is from the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, the Eagle Forum, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Communist Party, the Democrats, or the Republicans” (197). It’s good to know that contempt for women can and does come from everywhere. The truth will set us free to develop our own radical and/or separatist communities where we are free to devise new, liberatory ways of being and knowing. 

As always, people who do not like hearing the truth about patriarchy will probably not enjoy exposure to the radical feminist views of Andrea Dworkin.. Conversely, individuals who wish to speak to power and exchange Orwellian patriarchal reversals for accurate interpretations of reality will likely enjoy this book. Irrespective of one’s preexisting views regarding women and patriarchy, Right-Wing Women is a timely text to read or reread now that the reactionary politics of the Right have resurfaced with disorienting resilience.

Jocelyn is a 40-year-old radical feminist who believes that male violence is the most egregious problem on the planet, particularly concerning manifestations of sexual violence against women and girls. When not writing about radical feminist topics, Jocelyn enjoys yoga and building community with like-minded individuals who are sick of patriarchy precluding us from having nice things.