Although there were frequent periods in their childhood when their mother’s hospitalizations led to the children’s being farmed out separately to various family members, and although, in adulthood, there was an eleven-year period during which they were in contact only by correspondence, the siblings remained very close. Unlike his wife, he enjoyed Andrea’s intelligence and treated her with respect.Īndrea also had an excellent relationship with her brother Mark, who was born in 1949. Although he attended college classes on Saturdays, he never attained the Ph.D. Harry’s devotion to his family led him to work long hours, during the day as a school-teacher (and, later, as an educational counselor at a boys’ academic high school in Philadelphia and at a private school for dropouts trying to get their high-school diplomas) and at night unloading packages at the post office. In contrast with this difficult relationship, Andrea enjoyed a warm and excellent relationship with her “gentle, soft-spoken” father, Harry, the grandson of a Russian Jew who had run away from Russia at the age of fifteen to escape army service. Though there was ultimately an almost complete rift between them, she later wrote admiringly about her mother’s “Herculean strength in the face of pain, sickness, incapacitation, and the unknown.” Intellectually precocious and wildly unconventional in her behavior, Andrea had a love-hate relationship with her mother, whom she adored but by whom she felt repudiated.
Nevertheless, she lived until 1991, when she died, aged seventy-six.
The move, which displeased her, was necessitated by the chronic ill-health of Andrea’s mother, Sylvia, the child of immigrant parents from Hungary, who suffered from a heart disease that resulted from a bout of rheumatic fever contracted in childhood, and who therefore spent frequent periods in hospital or bed-ridden at home. Cherry Hill, which was virtually all-white and, in Dworkin’s view, intellectually arid. The normal pleasures of childhood street play and friendships which she enjoyed in her first-and what she called her “true”-home in a row of brick houses were interrupted when she was ten years old, with the family’s move to Delaware City, a.k.a. Andrea Rita Dworkin, who alleged that “I used everything I know-my life-to show what must be shown, so that it can be faced,” was born on September 26, 1946, in Camden, New Jersey, which she described as a “wild, hard, corrupt city,” but one in which the schools were racially and ethnically mixed.
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