Marriage Quote by Andrea Dworkin

Dworkin writes like she is ripping the wallpaper off a room everyone has agreed not to inspect. The line isn’t aimed at individual husbands so much as at the institution’s origin story: the idea that marriage is naturally romantic, consensual, and privately negotiated. By dragging “rape” back to its older legal meaning of abduction and “marriage by capture,” she forces the reader to see how law and custom once treated women less as participants than as objects of transfer. The rhetorical move is deliberate provocation: if the foundation is coercive, then the modern ceremony can’t be assumed innocent just because it’s draped in white fabric and personal choice.

The subtext is about time. “Not only use of but possession of” turns sex into a property relation, and “extend in time” recasts marriage as a long contract of access. She’s not arguing that every marriage is literally rape; she’s arguing that marriage historically encoded male entitlement, and that traces of that entitlement survive in norms around duty, jealousy, surnames, economic dependence, and the expectation that women accommodate.

Context matters: Dworkin is writing from late-20th-century radical feminism, amid battles over domestic violence, marital rape exemptions, pornography, and the legal system’s chronic skepticism toward women’s testimony. Her intent is to deny the reader the comfort of “but that was then.” By collapsing the distance between origin and present, she makes a moral claim: institutions don’t just evolve; they carry forward their original power arrangements unless deliberately dismantled.