Talk:Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Does Dworkin really call for the creation of "a nation state for women"?[edit]

Thank you, Solar-Wind, for creating this article. I am reading the book now, and it doesn't appear that Dworkin in the book "called for the establishment of a women's homeland as a response to the oppression of women, just as the Zionist movement had established a state for Jews", which is what you claim in the article.

The Guardian interview attributes this position to Dworkin, but it never gives a direct quotation of Dworkin actually saying that. The interview indicates that the place in the book where Dworkin says that women should have their own state is the last chapter, but I read the last chapter, and she does not say that anywhere in it.

Thus it seems that the Guardian interview phenomenally misrepresents Dworkin's views. Unless you can find a quote from the book in which Dworkin states that women should have their own state, I think you need to delete the attribution of that claim to her from the article. – Herzen (talk) 03:21, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I looked at another secondary source you cite, PSR, and that gives a page number (p. 336) supporting this description of Dworkin's position: "Dworkin proposes a female state that would function in many ways like a welfare state where efforts are made to secure food, shelter, health care, education, and political rights for all women.11" (However, that is in the Epilogue, not in the last chapter that the Guardian interviewer said that Dworkin referred to.) The closest I can find there to a passage calling for a "female state" is this:
One needs the rulership and political autonomy of women: the eventual taking over of public policy and civil power. One needs fair treatment of the male minority. One needs to revisit the principles of eighteenth-century political thinkers and philosophers with clarity about what is missing: principles and practices that did not speak to the honor and dignity of women as citizens.
This does not call for the creation of a female state analogous to the Jewish state at all, but for women fighting for control of existing states, which they have a right to have, since they are in the majority.
I really don't see how two secondary sources can misunderstand so badly what an author has written, but since this Wikipedia article is about the book, not its reception, the point I made in my original post stands. – Herzen (talk) 04:08, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]