Faith & Spirit Quote by Andrea Dworkin

Dworkin reaches for an old cosmology to expose a modern one: the “flat earth” women are trained to live on isn’t ignorance, it’s social design. The edge is where punishment waits - ridicule, economic precarity, sexual violence, ostracism, the thousand small “don’t”s that make ambition feel like trespassing. By choosing a metaphor associated with disproven certainty, she implies that patriarchy survives by marketing itself as physics: natural, inevitable, not worth testing.

The line “Some of us have ventured out nevertheless” does quiet but crucial work. It turns feminism from theory into field report. The proof isn’t abstract liberation; it’s bodies and lives that stepped outside prescribed limits and didn’t instantly implode. That “so far” matters, too. It admits the risk is real. Women don’t fall because the world is safe; they fall because someone pushes. Dworkin’s voice, often caricatured as absolutist, is here unusually calibrated: defiant without pretending the terrain isn’t hostile.

Then comes the pivot to “faith,” a word that startles in a political argument. She’s not endorsing blind optimism; she’s naming the emotional technology required when the system offers no guarantees. “My feminist faith” frames solidarity as a discipline - a chosen belief sustained by evidence and necessity. Contextually, this is Dworkin in the late 20th-century backlash era, when “post-feminism” was being sold as progress. Her intent is to insist the edge is a lie, and the only way to prove it is collective trespass.