In a characteristic tone of ferocious overstatement - one that brought her admirers and detractors, adulation but also mockery - Andrea Dworkin said the aim of her first book, Woman Hating (1974), was "to destroy patriarchal power at its source". Her polemical writings and campaigns against pornography made the war between the sexes viscerally real; she gave no quarter and expected none in return.
Dworkin grew up in Camden, New Jersey (a "horrible, awful, stupid suburb"). Her family was Jewish, which prompted her first act of activism when she refused to sing Christmas carols at elementary school. In later life she spoke warmly of her socialist father's influence over her outlook; despite her reputation as a man-hater, he was one of several men with whom she formed close emotional attachments.
But she also suffered at the hands of men. As an 18-year-old literature student, she was arrested at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in New York and sent to a detention centre where she was medically assaulted during a body cavity search. (Her exposure of her treatment in the press led to the centre's closure.) In 1968 she moved to Amsterdam and married a Dutch anarchist, who abused and beat her mercilessly for three years.
Her books in the 1970s won her a cult following as an angry voice at the extreme fringes of the feminist movement. In Woman Hating -a diatribe against misogynist cultural practices ranging from Chinese foot-binding to medieval European witch-hunts - she spoke of "gynocide": an organised suppression of women by men, a form of female Holocaust.
She became more widely known, to the point of notoriety, for her opposition to pornography. Taking up the case of Linda Marchiano, who as Linda Lovelace had been forced against her will to make the film Deep Throat, Dworkin agitated with some success for the law to be changed to allow victims of pornography to sue pornographers. She also wrote a book, Pornography, in which she posited a vicious circle of degradation: "Pornography exists because men despise women, and men despise women in part because pornography exists."
This nihilistic sense of the irremediable nature of male violence against women was widely criticised, not least in the feminist movement itself. She was accused of promoting censorship and reviled for supporting vigilantism ("I really believe a woman has the right to execute a man who has raped her," she once stated). According to Camille Paglia, she "turned a garish history of mental instability into feminist grand opera". Her appearance - overweight, unkempt, dungaree-clad - was jeered at, though her lack of personal vanity was also a reproof to the generation of liberal "lipstick feminists" whose sexual ecumenicism Dworkin abhorred.
Although fiercely uncompromising, Dworkin was not without contradictions. She described herself as a lesbian but in 1998 married her long-time companion John Stoltenberg, who survives her. Latterly she suffered ill-health, and was also deeply hurt when her account of being raped in a Parisian hotel in 1999 was publicly doubted.
"I know male power inside out, with knowledge of it gained by this female body," she once wrote. "I dare to confront it in my writing because of the audacity I learnt from male writers. I learnt to confront it in life from living feminists, writers and activists both, who lived political lives not bounded by either female frailty or male ruthlessness; instead animated by the luminous self-respect and militant compassion I still hope to achieve."
