"The trade-offs, the payoffs, sometimes actual blackmail and bribery," she added. "I was good at holding the politicians' feet to the fire, in private and in public, to excoriate them, to move their constituents, but from a basis of principle. That I can do. I have good practical instincts on where dominant structures are vulnerable. This requires a high tolerance for risk and conflict."
Andrea Rita Dworkin was born Sept. 26, 1946, in Camden, N.J., and raised in what became Cherry Hill, N.J. She helped care for her ill mother and was shuffled among other relatives. Her father was a guidance counselor and post office employee, so pro-labor that he once refused a management job there.
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Her early desire was to be a Greenwich Village artist, and she made frequent trips to New York, paying her bus fare, she said, by finding "some stupid man . . . and basically exchange sex for money."
She studied at Bennington College in Vermont, where she lobbied the administration to allow men to spend the night in women's dorms. But she later likened the school to "the archetypical brothel," where female students were practically given to prominent guest speakers.
After Bennington, she spent several years in Europe and briefly married a man she described as a Dutch anarchist and flower child who also burned her with cigarettes and beat her, she said.
She also worked as a waitress, teacher, receptionist, salesclerk, factory worker and assistant to poet Muriel Rukeyser, who encouraged her literary aspirations.
Her earliest titles were largely ignored by reviewers but assured her a steady income through speaking engagements. By many accounts, she was a galvanizing presence at feminist and anti-pornography rallies.
Ms. Dworkin's later books included "Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel and Women's Liberation" (2000), which asked whether women should have their own country, just as the Jews received theirs.
She wrote two novels that had clusters of admirers around the globe. The response prompted her to quip that her fictions were "easier to find in English in Nigeria than in the U.S."
She and her companion of 30 years, John Stoltenberg, married in 1998. Both were gay, and they called each other life partners. She accompanied him to Washington from New York last year for his job as managing editor of AARP magazine. He is her only immediate survivor.
