Motherhood Quote by Andrea Dworkin

Dworkin takes a scalpel to the comforting liberal story that gender is just identity plus choice. By flipping the famous existentialist line, she insists that "woman" isn’t a natural category waiting to be expressed; it’s a social product manufactured under pressure. The verb "made" does heavy work here: it implies labor, design, and coercion. Someone is doing the making, and the raw material is a human being.

The most brutal turn is the claim that, in this process, "her humanity is destroyed". Dworkin isn’t offering a gentle critique of stereotypes; she’s describing a kind of cultural demolition where a person is stripped of subjecthood and reissued as a function. That’s why the quote speeds into caricature: "mother of the earth, slut of the universe". The extremes are the point. Patriarchy doesn’t merely split women into saint and whore; it turns them into cosmic signage, metaphors so oversized they crowd out interior life. The rhetoric is intentionally hyperbolic because the system she’s indicting is totalizing: it colonizes even language, making it easier to talk about women as symbols than to confront them as agents.

Context matters: Dworkin wrote amid late-20th-century feminist battles over pornography, sexual violence, and the politics of "choice". Her argument needles a culture that congratulates itself for celebrating women while still policing the boundaries of acceptable femininity. "Forbidden" lands as the quiet horror at the end: not simply discouraged, but structurally blocked. The outrage is ethical and strategic: if womanhood is a fabrication, it can be unfabricated, but not without naming the machinery that profits from the fiction.