As the common longing for a firm moral bedrock intensifies, will Andrea Dworkin's black-and-white brand of political feminism be revived? Jennifer Wallace finds her in optimistic mood.

Gascoigne should be in jail." For Andrea Dworkin, American radical feminist, the case of the Glasgow Rangers midfielder and his alleged battering of his wife is simple. She does not bother about questions of his selection for the England football team nor his reported apologies for his behaviour. "It's only with crimes against women that it's up to the woman to complain," she explains. "The state operates in the interest of the people, and if it is state policy that men are not supposed to beat women, then when a woman is beaten the state makes the arrest and the arrest must be mandatory."

With wife battering and the worrying glamour of violence back in the news, Dworkin's voice has suddenly become relevant again. In the United States, she has entered the O. J. Simpson debate, calling it an "outrage" that Simpson's wife Nicole "was beaten eight times before the police did anything to help her". In Britain, she has criticised the "endless entertainment" of film violence. Flown over here especially for the launch last month of the Leeds Zero Tolerance campaign, which calls for better legislation on rape, and the International Violence, Abuse and Women's Citizenship conference, she seemed, if not exactly on cloud nine, then certainly mildly optimistic. "A lot of men feel almost dispossessed from the sense of masculinity that they thought they had a right to but they have an incredible opportunity to create equality with women", she announced, over a glass of sparkling mineral water. "I think that men should be thrilled that this kind of tyrant's role has been taken away from them."

Dworkin's voguishness and positive attitude are surprising. Notorious for her passionate expose of violence against women since the publication of her first book, Woman Hating, in 1974, she has not in the past been noted for her upbeat tone. The American academic and commentator Camille Paglia, her most vicious critic, has accused her of "wallowing in misery" and sharing with us "her inability to cope with life", while the popular perception in the media is of a large, ugly woman who "hates men and sex".

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One reason for Dworkin's reputation as, according to Paglia, a "clingy sob-sister" is the fact that her feminism owes its origins to personal experience. Although politically active from an early age and with a degree in literature and philosophy at Bennington College, Vermont, it was not until she was battered by her husband in her twenties and was helped by a "strange person who called herself a feminist" that she became interested in the movement. While other young women read the latest books of ideology which began emerging in the late 1960s, she was convinced only by practical detail. "It was," she explains, "you know 'he's going to hit you, he's going to kill you. I'm going to stop that from happening'. And I had a lot of respect for that."

She went on to use her experience to help other women. "I made a list of things I figured into why, in this society, I might be in the situation I was in, and that list became the table of contents for Woman Hating." Communication of pain and oppression was the zeitgeist. Two years after Dworkin's first book, in 1976, the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, which provided the model for this year's Violence, Abuse and Women's Citizenship conference, was focused around what was termed "personal testimony", at which female victims of violence "testified" about their experience in a male-free space.

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But Dworkin moved on from recounting her own experience to collecting the stories of other women's oppression. In particular she became obsessed with what she saw as the violence of pornography. Her extensive research, which culminated in her seminal book Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), involved three years of looking at magazines and books, and venturing, armed with her notebook, into cinemas frequented by thrill-seeking men. The work gave her nightmares and isolated her from friends. "I lived in a world of pictures," she confesses, "women's bodies displayed, women hunched and spread and hanged and pulled and tied and cut."

Pornography, she concluded, was central to the male sexual system, confirming its basis in dominance, force, even hatred of women. She resisted the notion of pornography as representation, arguing not that pornography causes violence against women but that it is violence against women. "Pornography," she explains, "is documentary. It is not a matter of acting. It is not a matter of imitation. It is not a matter of modelling behaviour for other people. What is being done to the woman is really being done to the woman." Even those women who are depicted not suffering torture but simply scantily clad are, for Dworkin, the victims of violence. "The violence," she asserts, "isn't shown in the picture, but the violence is used to get the woman to make the pornography."

So personal testimony was replaced in Dworkin's work by case history. Pornography is filled with lurid detail of blue movie or magazine copy, aiming to turn "the muck of real life" into "something that we define and use rather than letting it define and use us". Dworkin's rage led to practical steps to ban the offence. In 1988, she teamed up with Catherine Mackinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, to explore ways of legislating against pornography. The result was what became known as the Minneapolis Ordinance, a draft bill defining pornography and allocating rights for damages to anyone either hurt in the making of pornography or assaulted as a result of pornography. The draft bill was rejected by government, but managed to show, unlike the British government's difficulty over knives, that definition of pornography - and so legislation against it - was possible.

But Dworkin's rage, or her self-confessed "misanthropy", which resulted from the exclusive subject of her study, also led her to the extreme, and many have considered, bizarre conclusion that nearly all heterosexual relationships are contaminated with the violence evident in pornography. "Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice," she asserted trenchantly in Pornography; and in her next book, Intercourse, she maintained that sexual intercourse "remains a means of physiologically making a woman inferior, communicating to her, cell by cell, her own inferior status".

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Paglia's criticism of Dworkin's pessimism, though in many ways valid, has carried little weight. Dworkin snorts in derision when she hears the name Paglia. "Paglia! She's not an academic. I don't know what she is." Most feminists are agreed that Paglia's arguments are merely "reiterations of standard anti-feminist rhetoric from an earlier backlash: that of 1890-1910". But more damaging for Dworkin's reputation have been the criticisms and new ideas of Naomi Wolf, former Rhodes scholar at Oxford and author of the best-selling books The Beauty Myth and Fire With Fire. Wolf protests that Dworkin's doom-laden descriptions of "coercion, invasion and one-sided objectification" in heterosexual relationships just do not match her experience. Dworkin is "obsolete" and not representative of the feelings of most women. Dworkin herself denies that most women are not feminists. "Most women," she says, "put on a good front, and when women talk among ourselves, the most man-hating women you will find are the most apparently normal, conforming women."

Most telling of Wolf's criticisms is the description of Dworkin as a "victim-feminist". Dworkin's vision of "overweening male oppression", she argues, means that she is unhappy about acknowledging that women can be anything other than powerless. Dworkin feels uneasy about acquiring power herself and treats unfairly those women who achieve success in what are regarded as conventional male spheres. She concentrates, in other words, on "female victimisation at the expense of female agency".

There is some truth in this. Repeatedly, Dworkin dwells on her personal struggle as a writer. An appendix to Pornography describes the emotional turmoil she went through in researching the book. And she seems almost to revel in the difficulties she encounters in finding a publisher for her work. She tells me that her latest book, Life and Death, to be published in the US in March, still has no publisher in Britain. It is all, it seems, a conspiracy of "male figures at the top of the publishing hierarchy" who refuse the wishes of their more junior female editors. "It's hard to publish books that in some sense bring people pain," she says sorrowfully. But this pitiful position comes as a mystery to Cathy Gale at the Women's Press, which has published Dworkin's books before. Gale would "love to publish her new book" and an offer has been sent to her agent, who is, apparently, exploring a number of possibilities.

What annoys Dworkin about Wolf and others like her is that they speak for a particular class for whom the acquisition of power is easy and have no concept of the powerlessness of poverty. These women, mostly female academics and lawyers, have, she thinks, "created some kind of protection for themselves and some kind of safety for themselves, and they don't even understand what they are talking about. They don't know what it's like to be poor; they don't know what it's like to be hungry." Dworkin prefers to remain collecting evidence from the street and from the brothel rather than to theorise and advise, shut away in libraries. And this is why she has a long-standing aversion to academics. "When somebody publishes a book," she says, "I want to know who's going to live and who's going to die if we take that book seriously."

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Dworkin's sense of "real life", then, is directly opposed to Wolf's, and it seems as if suddenly that vision is one that is becoming more widely shared. The organised rapes in Bosnia shocked women into realising the continuing powerlessness of women after nearly three decades of the women's movement. Dworkin examines this in Life and Death. And in the present climate of morality and yearning for a return to a collective sense of right and wrong, Dworkin's black-and-white vision and what Paglia calls her "Carry Nation" morality, which aims to intervene to protect people, could gain a new currency.

There are even signs that Dworkin might be developing a more positive outlook. Her next book explores the parallels between the pre-war treatment of Jews and the present treatment of women. It is provisionally called Scapegoating, which ostensibly augurs a continuation of her litany of oppression. But it examines the creation of the state of Israel and considers whether a similar institution for women, which avoids Israel's present faults, might be possible. Dworkin muses: "I'm interested in how the state of Israel changed the political situation of Jews all over the world and what would a political solution be for women. Because the land that we're fighting for is our own bodies. I don't think we want land. I don't think we want an army. We want this kind of sovereignty over our bodies that people essentially associate with state sovereignty. You know, boundaries that are respected, that you can't cross and if you cross them, you need the permission of somebody to cross them." A sort of New Jerusalem for women: now that seems positive, perhaps even utopian.

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Jennifer Wallace is director of studies in English, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.