But with that comes a danger.
"If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers? It won't be the Bad Feminists like me," she writes.
She also returns to the case of Steven Galloway, a former University of British Columbia (UBC) creative writing professor who was fired in 2016.
The results of a months-long investigation were never released and the faculty association later said there was no evidence to support all but one of the allegations.
She accuses her opponents of a rush to judgement. Her point is that failure to respect everyone's rights, she says, risks introducing a new form of tyranny (of the sort that often follows revolution and the race to ideological purity).
"Are these Good Feminists fair-minded people? If not, they are just feeding into the very old narrative that holds women to be incapable of fairness or of considered judgment, and they are giving the opponents of women yet another reason to deny them positions of decision-making in the world," she writes.
Her words provoked outrage among online commentators, who perceived a powerful figure failing to show solidarity with less powerful women.
Erika Thorkelson, a graduate of the UBC creative writing course, wrote on Twitter: "If Margaret Atwood would like to stop warring among women, she should stop declaring war against younger, less powerful women and start listening."
She also identified a divide with an older general of women who had developed tactics for self-preservation.
Others seized on a passage in which she had discussed witch hunts, Stalinists and purges to illustrate how an allegation is not the same as conviction, except under totalitarian regimes.
