THE author, lecturer and radical feminist Andrea Dworkin was one of those writers whose own life provided a ceaseless supply of polemical and literary material. With probability-defying regularity, she herself fell victim to the violence, misogyny and bias that supplied the primary theme of her speeches and more than a dozen books.

Growing up as a Jew in New Jersey, she refused to sing Christmas carols in elementary school and had an ugly anti-Semitic slur scrawled on her classroom art work. At 18 she was arrested during an antiwar demonstration and subjected to a body cavity search, at a women’s correctional facility, that left her bleeding for two weeks. (Throughout this ordeal, she said, her tormentors told dirty jokes about women.) As a speaker and writer in the 1970s and 1980s, she was frequently denounced by the literary establishment, who, she theorised, had a vested interest in suppressing her ideas. In 1999, she was drugged and raped, she believed, by a barman and a waiter in a Paris hotel — and even that was not the first time she had been raped. Dworkin filtered these experiences through writing, which she called the quintessentially optimistic occupation. “I would rather fail at that,” she said, “than succeed at anything else.”

With her first book, Woman Hating (1974), she aspired to “destroy patriarchal power at its source” by enumerating historical examples of women’s subjugation, from foot-binding to witch-hunting to the propagation of sex-role mythology in fairy tales. Also in 1974, she moved to tears and tremors a gathering of 1,000 activists at a National Organisation for Women conference on sexuality and became, at the age of 28, a fiery mainstay of the radical lecture circuit, and a cult heroine of women’s studies majors.

Andrea Rita Dworkin was born in 1946 in Camden, New Jersey. Her father, a pro-union, anti-segregationist schoolteacher, was at the moral and emotional centre of her early development. Her mother, too, was forward-thinking. She favoured legal birth control (then not established in the US), and sent Andrea to the library with notes allowing her to withdraw books thought inappropriate by many parents of the day. After Dworkin’s hometown library had censored “socialist” and “indecent” books, Andrea found one that had been overlooked, Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare. “I read it a million times,” Dworkin told an interviewer in 2000. “I’d plan attacks on the local shopping mall.”

In her youth, Dworkin read Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot and the Brontës. And growing up Jewish, she later wrote, informed her views on feminism. “Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognise indifference to human suffering as a fact.”

Dworkin won a scholarship to the progressive Bennington College in Vermont, where she received a BA in 1968. She lived for five years in the Netherlands, where, in 1971, she extricated herself from her marriage to her “abusive” Dutch husband.

Distressed by America’s Vietnam policy and by racism back home, Dworkin stayed on in Europe to write, but had not yet attracted notice when she returned to the US in the early 1970s. In America she supported herself as a waitress, receptionist, factory worker and teacher, before becoming, in her own words, the “worst assistant in the history of the world”, to the poet Muriel Rukeyser. It was with Rukeyser’s encouragement that Dworkin completed Woman Hating.

In 1976 Dworkin published a collection of her essays and speeches, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, followed, in 1981, by Pornography: Men Possessing Women. For the latter, Dworkin had immersed herself in the work of the Marquis de Sade, which caused her to suffer nausea, nightmares and intense pessimism about relations between men and women. The book maintained that “Pornography exists because men despise women, and men despise women in part because pornography exists.” In Punch, a reviewer called Dworkin a “Leon Trotsky of the sex war . . . She writes — dare I say it? — with an aggressive manner, like a man.” But though she won praise as a stylist, many saw Dworkin’s position as a dangerous form of censorship.

In the early 1980s, Dworkin joined the law professor Catharine MacKinnon in developing legislation that would make pornography a form of sexual discrimination, and allow civil action against people who make, sell or distribute it. The group Feminists for Free Expression argued that this crusade only gave credence to the “porn made me do it” excuse for rapists. Local ordinances based on the MacKinnon Bill flourished briefly in some urban centres before being overturned.

In 1983 Dworkin published Right Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females, an analysis of a Reagan-era defection of women from the Democrats to the Republicans. While withholding the Equal Rights Amendment and daycare from women voters, Dworkin asserted, the Republicans seduced them with an offer of protection from male violence through “shelter, safety, rules and love . . . if women are obedient and subservient”.

Her book Intercourse (1987) described the sexual act as “the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women.” Erica Jong called the book thrilling, but the London Review of Books reviled it as “a torrent of filthy abuse . . . against sex and men”. A reviewer in The New York Times was only slightly kinder: “I’m a feminist too — that’s why this nonsense disturbs me so much.”

Her next book was Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women (1998), a collection of essays, speeches and topical commentary. Writing in The Times Literary Supplement, Elaine Feinstein found Dworkin’s case against pornographic depictions of sexual violence “hideously convincing” but argued, given the context of the Holocaust and massacres in Bosnia, that “where human beings suffer such anguish, there seems little point in treating women as a separate category”.

In two novels, Ice and Fire (1986) and Mercy (1990), Dworkin’s female protagonists are both writers who are victims of sexual abuse. The Observer called Ice and Fire an effort to “elevate the temper tantrum to an art form”. But Mercy impressed a New York Times critic as “lyrical and passionate — a cross between the repetition of the early Gertrude Stein and, ironically, the unfettered flights of Henry Miller”. The reviewer added, however, that Dworkin’s positions were sometimes “intolerant . . . and just as brutal as what she protests. Ms Dworkin advocates nothing short of killing men.”

In May 1999, while reading a book on “French literary fascism” and sipping a kir royale in a Paris hotel garden, Dworkin was, according to her later account, slipped some kind of drug by a barman. Back in her room, reeling from the narcotic, she was savagely raped by two hotel staff members, she said. She said she did not report the incident to the authorities because she could not piece together the events of the evening, or even determine what had caused her bruises or injuries. Slowly, she said, she worked out what had happened. In the aftermath of this episode, she fell into a deep, long-term depression, “consumed by grief and horror until I was lucky enough to become numb,” she told the New Statesman in an interview the following year. For the first time in her life, she sought psychotherapy.

In 2000 she published Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel and Women’s Liberation, a study with the premise that the abusive relationship between men and women is analogous to that between Gentiles and Jews. The reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement acknowledged Dworkin’s “undoubted rhetorical strengths” but concluded that the book “is too badly put together, and the social categories she claims to be dealing with are all far too complex, for it to carry conviction”.

An autobiography, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Militant Feminist, appeared in the US in 2002.

Dworkin maintained a deliberately raw appearance, wearing overalls and sneakers and letting her hair fall in an uncombed mane. She suffered longterm obesity and osteoarthritis, and underwent several knee operations.

Identifying herself as a lesbian and a celibate, Dworkin nevertheless shared a home, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with a man. Her long-time “mate,” John Stoltenberg, whom she married in 1998, is the author of two books, Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice and The End of Manhood.

At the time of her death Dworkin was busy on her fourteenth book with the working title Writing America: How Novelists Invented and Gendered a Nation — a study of the contribution by writers such as Ernest Hemingway to American identity.

John Stoltenberg survives her.

Andrea Dworkin, feminist writer, was born September 26, 1946. She died on April 9, 2005, aged 58.