Sandra Yates still remembers her first encounter with male chauvinism. She was 26 years old and had just bought a copy of “The Female Eunuch,” Germaine Greer’s feminist book. “Someone, I suspect one of my brothers, ripped the cover off,” Ms. Yates recalled. “It was my first hint that anyone would resent the idea that men and women are equal.”

She remembers her second and third run-ins, too. She was 28 years old and trying to bring up two children on a secretary’s salary in Brisbane, Australia. A television station offered her a job selling air time in Melbourne, but “the Melbourne manager refused to have any women working for him,” Ms. Yates said. She went to Sydney instead and worked for a man that made it clear that “he would never promote a woman.”

Today, at 40, Ms. Yates can laugh at the episodes. The former boss in Sydney eventually went bankrupt. She, on the other hand, became one of Australia’s leading executive women and foremost feminists. Soon, she maybe an arbiter of feminist thought for hundreds of thousands of American women and girls.

Ms. Yates’s Matilda Publishing Inc., a company so new the ink is hardly dry on its incorporation papers, is negotiating to buy Ms. Magazine – America’s oldest but chronically insolvent feminist publication – and Sassy, a new glossy, irreverent magazine for teen-aged girls. A few weeks ago, John Fairfax Ltd., Ms. Yates’s Australian employer, told her that it would sell both publications, and gave her until April 30 to buy them before they accepted other bids.

She will find the cash, industry insiders predict. And, say those who know her, the magazine readers are in for a lively time. “Those magazines will not be mealy-mouthed or spineless,” said John W. Southam, who was Ms. Yates’s boss when she was selling ads for Australia’s edition of Family Circle. “You won’t have any doubt about where they stand, any more than you would have doubts about where Sandra stands.”

“Sandra will not back down from her beliefs,” said Jane Pratt, Sassy’s 25-year-old editor. “Not offending someone is less important to her than standing up for what she believes in.

Spend a few hours with Ms. Yates, and it seems as if her colleagues are understating the case. She has a ready laugh and a penchant for gentle self-mockery. (Sample: “Of course I can sell – anyone who’s persuaded a two-year-old to eat spinach can make a sale.”) But on business and feminism, she is no-nonsense.

“Feminism is not the property of the women’s movement,” she said, smoking Dunhills and sipping Chardonnay during a recent lunch. “It is a state of mind. It is democracy in action. I’m going to prove you can run a business with feminist principles and make money.”

Ms. Yates acknowledges the high failure rate for magazines and the many years it can take for one to turn a profit. But how will her magazines do? “They’ll be profitable in three-and-a-half years,” she stated flatly.

In the coming months, Ms. Yates will need that kind of confidence. When she came to the United States in June as President of Fairfax Publications (U.S.) Ltd., she was armed with an ample budget. Her job: to get Sassy, a magazine patterned after Dolly, Fairfax’s wildly successful Australian magazine, off the ground. Two months later Fairfax bought Ms. Magazine – at the time a not-for-profit publication – and Ms. Yates agreed to oversee its editorial and financial turnaround.

They were eminently do-able tasks. Indeed, Sassy’s premier issue, which came out in mid-February, carried a hefty 55 pages of advertising, which Ms. Yates said was sold at full rate-card price - $6,950 for a one-insert four-color page. The magazine’s first three issues are carrying, on average, about 40 ad pages. Ms. is looking thicker, too, with 36 ad pages per issue, at $12,485 for a one-time color ad.

With both magazines seemingly humming along, Ms. Yates had plenty of time to live the life she was coming to enjoy. She would walk to her Times Square office from her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, get there about 8:30 A.M., break for leisurely lunches (“I find salads extraordinarily tedious”) and leave early enough in the evening to explore Manhattan with her second husband, Michael Skinner. It even seemed she might soon find time to cook, something that Mr. Skinner says she does quite well.

Ms. Yates still does all those things, but at a faster pace. She and a financial adviser, Wilma Jordan, have been busily drawing up 5- and 10- year plans for the magazines to take to potential backers.

Ms. Yates must be asking for tens of millions of dollars. Sassy’s high-fashion photography and glossy paper make it expensive to produce. Ms. Supports a Washington bureau and freelance writers, along with the heavy promotion a magazine turn-around requires. And Ms. Yates will not split up the magazines. She sees them as a package, requiring identical cash infusions now and projected to have about 850,000 readers each by 1993 – almost double the 450,000 readers that Ms. now guarantees its advertisers.

Ms. Yates will not discuss possible investors, except to say that Rupert Murdoch is not among them. “Part of the emotional baggage we carry from Australia is distaste for his newspapers,” she said. But she does say, with characteristic confidence, that “there is sufficient interest from our A list of prospects that I don’t think we’ll have to explore the B list.”

Negotiating with publishing executives seemed a remote possibility in the first half of Ms. Yates life. Born into a farm family in Brisbane in 1947, Sandra Woff was the eldest of four children and the only daughter. She left school at 16. First job, messenger. Second job, typist. She was married at 18, a mother at 20, divorced at 23 (I did the classic thing – went home to mother in high dudgeon”). When she went back to work, it was as a secretary. At 25, she had a son, Matthew. She split up with the child’s father six months later (first taking his name, Yates, in order that Matthew’s name coincide with hers).

The overriding theme of those years was her constant struggle to make ends meet. “I knew if I continued doing secretarial work, I’d be poor for a long time,” Ms. Yates said. So, she jumped at the chance to sell airtime in Sydney. She also became a founding member of the Council for the Single Mother and Her Child and of the Women’s Electoral Lobby (Australia’s equivalent of the National Organization for Women.