From the first, she had feminist leanings. She read Ms. “whenever I could get my hands on it.” And she developed a healthy respect for the Australian edition of Family Circle, which, she said, “honored women who chose to stay home without stigmatizing those who chose not to.” Family Circle, owned by the New York Times Company, was also one of the fastest growing publishing properties in the 1970s. Ms. Yates set her sites on a job there. And in 1979 she became the first woman on Family Circle’s Australian sales team.

Mr. Southam, her boss there, says she was an instant success. “I remember suggesting that someone should get an advertiser to insert a calendar in the December issue,” he said. “Within 48 hours, Sandra sold the concept to the Rice Board. She’s like that, extremely quick to understand opportunities, make decisions, and act on them.

She is like that personally, too, it seems. In November 1980, Michael Skinner, a partner in a media representative firm, was visiting a friend at Family Circle and met Ms. Yates. The following April, they were married.

Soon after, Fairfax offered her the job of advertising sales manager of The Sun, its afternoon Sydney newspaper. “I loved Family Circle, but no woman had ever had a job at an Australian daily,” Ms. Yates recalled. “How could I say no?” It meant another bout with male chauvinism. (“There was me, my female secretary and 30 men”), but she stuck it out.

A year later, she moved to Fairfax’s consumer magazine division, and a few years after that she was made deputy chief executive. Then in 1984, she was sent to New York for 10 days, to study whether Fairfax should be publishing magazines in the United States.

Two things happened to Ms. Yates on that trip. She fell in love with New York City, and she got the idea for Sassy.

American teen-agers, to her mind, needed a magazine like Dolly, one that would discuss issues like sex, fashion or suicide without cloaking him in euphemisms, one that would take a tone, in her words, of “hey guys, we’re in this together.”

“The teen magazines here,” she said, “were like Good Housekeeping for teen-agers, speaking with parental voices and looking like they were suspended in aspic.”

Not surprisingly, Midge Richardson, editor in chief of Seventeen – by far the teen leader – sees that as a ridiculous characterization. “We educate as well as entertain, but if we aren’t addressing teen-agers in a way they could accept, we’d be out of business,” she said.

Maybe so, but Ms. Yates left New York certain that a Dolly-type magazine would fly in this market. And in March of last year, after Dolly did well in focus groups with American teenagers, Ms. Yates got approval – and a budget – to move to New York and start Sassy.

Only one obstacle remained: Persuading her husband, who could not legally work in the United States, and the two children to move halfway across the world. It turned out to be easier than Ms. Yates expected. “Michael viewed it as an incredible adventure.”

Mr. Skinner, who refers to his current role as “director of support services,” insists “it was no big deal – I feel like I’m on holiday, getting to read all the newspapers and magazines you have here.” As for the rest of the family, Mr. Skinner says that Matthew is, 15, misses surfing, but is fine. Anne Nicholson, Ms. Yates’s 20-year-old daughter, work’s in Sassy’s production department.

Once settled in New York, Ms. Yates hired Ms. Pratt, who was associate editor of the now-defunct Teenage magazine, to run Sassy. “She looked funky and I knew she was perfect – everyone else had looked so preppy,” said Ms. Yates.

Under Fairfax, Ms., now 16-years-old, is covering politics, which it had been unable to do under its not-for-profit status. And it is stressing what Ms. Yates’s calls “tougher” pieces that come off the news.

Ms. Yates’s vision of Ms. is of a magazine that competes more with general-interest news magazines than with women’s publications. “Ms. needed more pragmatism, because the days of storming the barricades are over,” she said. “But it will never run how-to pieces like how to ask for a raise. It will discuss the impact of foreign events on women.”

Already her mind is spinning to the future, as though the Ms. and Sassy finance were a done deal. She is thinking in terms of future startups – maybe “an adult Sassy, a magazine that admits that life can be difficult, but is worth it.” Acquisitions? Ms. Yates’s colleagues are right about her preference for bluntness rather than diplomacy. “I know startups are difficult,” she said. “But there’s not much here I aspire to own.”