The central objective of Dworkin's work is analyzing Western society, culture, and politics through the prism of men's sexual violence against women in a patriarchal context.

She wrote on a wide range of topics including the lives of Joan of Arc,[1] Margaret Papandreou,[2] and Nicole Brown Simpson;[3] she analyzed the literature of Charlotte Brontë,[4] Jean Rhys,[5] Leo Tolstoy, Marquis de Sade, Kōbō Abe, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, and Isaac Bashevis Singer;[6] she brought her own radical feminist perspective to her examination of subjects historically written or described from men's point of view, including fairy tales, homosexuality,[7] lesbianism,[8] virginity,[9] antisemitism, the State of Israel,[10] the Holocaust, biological superiority,[11] and racism.

Her father was the grandson of a Russian Jew who fled Russia when he was 15 years old in order to escape military service, and her mother was the child of Jewish immigrants from Hungary.

[23] Though she described her Jewish household as being in many ways dominated by the memory of the Holocaust, it nonetheless provided a happy childhood until she reached the age of nine, when an unknown man molested her in a movie theater.

When Dworkin was ten, her family moved from the city to the suburbs of Cherry Hill, New Jersey (then known as Delaware Township), which she later wrote she "experienced as being kidnapped by aliens and taken to a penal colony".

She was particularly influenced by Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Henry Miller, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Che Guevara, and the Beat poets, especially Allen Ginsberg,[27] and has included among writers she "admired most" Jean Genet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron.

[31] After writing to the Commissioner of Corrections Anna Cross, Dworkin testified that the doctors in the House of Detention gave her an internal examination which was so rough that she bled for days afterwards.

[34] Soon after testifying before the grand jury, Dworkin left Bennington College on the ocean liner Castel Felice to live in Greece and to pursue her writing.

Soon after, she says that de Bruin began to abuse her severely, punching and kicking her, burning her with cigarettes, beating her on her legs with a wooden beam, and banging her head against the floor until he knocked her unconscious.

[44] Ricki Abrams, a feminist and fellow expatriate, sheltered Dworkin in her home and helped her find places to stay on houseboats, a communal farm, and in deserted buildings.

[46] She and Abrams began to work together on "early pieces and fragments" of a radical feminist text on the hatred of women in culture and history,[47] including a completed draft of a chapter on the pornographic counterculture magazine Suck, which was published by a group of fellow expatriates in the Netherlands.

Also that same month, Dworkin published articles in the New Statesman[67] and in The Guardian,[68] stating that one or more men had raped her in her hotel room in Paris the previous year, putting GHB in her drink to disable her.

Her articles ignited public controversy[69] when writers such as Catherine Bennett[44] and Julia Gracen[70] published doubts about her account, polarizing opinion between skeptics and supporters such as Catharine MacKinnon, Katharine Viner,[71] and Gloria Steinem.

[73][71][80] In February 1976, she took a leading role in organizing public pickets of Snuff in New York City and, during the fall, joined Adrienne Rich, Grace Paley, Gloria Steinem, Shere Hite, Lois Gould, Barbara Deming, Karla Jay, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Robin Morgan, and Susan Brownmiller in attempts to form a radical feminist antipornography group.

After the press conference, Dworkin, MacKinnon, Gloria Steinem, and Boreman began discussing the possibility of using federal civil rights law to seek damages from Traynor and the makers of Deep Throat.

The law was passed twice by the Minneapolis city council, but vetoed both times by Mayor Don Fraser, who considered the wording of the ordinance to be too vague.

[88] Another version of the ordinance passed in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1984, but was overturned as unconstitutional under the First Amendment by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the case American Booksellers v. Hudnut.

[98] Dworkin also submitted into evidence a copy of Boreman's book Ordeal, as an example of the abuses that she hoped to remedy, saying "The only thing atypical about Linda is that she has had the courage to make a public fight against what has happened to her.

[103] In 1992, the Supreme Court of Canada made a ruling in R. v. Butler which incorporated some elements of Dworkin and MacKinnon's legal work on pornography into the existing Canadian obscenity law.

[104] The Court's decision cited extensively from briefs prepared by the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), with the support and participation of Catharine MacKinnon.

Dworkin's exploration exists in a Western literary lineage that includes Orlando: A Biography, by Virginia Woolf, and Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy.

She identifies factors which influenced the chapter: 'years of reading Freud and trying to figure out abstractly what all this was about'... [A]t the time Woman Hating was written, [there were] roots in the counterculture and the sexual liberation movement.

For instance, Cathy Young says that statements such as "intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women" are reasonably summarized as "all sex is rape".

"[122] In 1997, Dworkin published a collection of her speeches and articles from the 1990s in Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War on Women, including a long autobiographical essay on her life as a writer, and articles on violence against women, pornography, prostitution, Nicole Brown Simpson, the use of rape during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Montreal massacre, Israel, and the gender politics of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

[77] Reviewing Life and Death in The New Republic, philosopher Martha Nussbaum criticizes voices in contemporary feminism for denouncing Catharine MacKinnon and Dworkin as "man-haters", and argues that First Amendment critiques of Dworkin's civil ordinance proposal against pornography "are not saying anything intellectually respectable", for the First Amendment "has never covered all speech: bribery, threats, extortionate offers, misleading advertising, perjury, and unlicensed medical advice are all unprotected."

Nevertheless, Nussbaum opposes the adoption of Dworkin's pornography ordinance because it (1) fails to distinguish between moral and legal violations, (2) fails to demonstrate a causal relationship between pornography and specific harm, (3) holds a creator of printed images or words responsible for others' behavior, (4) grants censorial power to the judiciary (which may be directed against feminist scholarship), and (5) erases the contextual considerations within which sex takes place.

More broadly, Nussbaum faults Dworkin for (1) occluding economic injustice through an "obsessive focus on sexual subordination", (2) reproducing objectification in reducing her interlocutors to their abuse, and (3) refusing reconciliation in favor of "violent extralegal resistance against male violence.

It is a first-person narrative, detailing violence and abuse; Susie Bright has claimed that it amounts to a modern feminist rewriting of one of the Marquis de Sade's most famous works, Juliette.

Her analysis and writing influenced and inspired the work of contemporary feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon,[131] Gloria Steinem,[132] John Stoltenberg,[81] Nikki Craft,[133] Susan Cole,[134] and Amy Elman.

[137] Dworkin's uncompromising positions and forceful style of writing and speaking, described by Robert Campbell as "apocalyptic",[138] earned her frequent comparisons to other speakers such as Malcolm X (by Robin Morgan,[81] Susie Bright,[125] and others).