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 anti-war demonstration and subjected to a violent body cavity search, at a women’s correctional facility. (During this ordeal, she later told an interviewer, her prison torturers were telling 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. On a previous occasion her then husband was the perpetrator.

Dworkin filtered these tabloid worthy 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 no more modest a goal than 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 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 America), and sent Andrea to the library with notes allowing her to withdraw books considered 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."

As a youth, Dworkin read Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot and the Bröntes. 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 America 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 and support 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 for many months in the work of the Marquis de Sade, material that caused her to suffer from 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 magazine, 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 critics saw Dworkin’s anti-pornography position as a dangerous form of censorship.

In the early 1980s, Dworkin joined the controversial law professor Catharine Mackinnon in developing legislation that would make pornography a form of sexual discrimination, and allow civil suits 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. Indeed, issues surrounding pornography and censorship still divide feminists. Local ordinances based on the MacKinnon bill flourished briefly in some urban centres before being vetoed or overturned.

In 1983 Dworkin published Right Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females, an analysis of a Reagan-era defection of women from the Democratic to the Republican ticket. 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".

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