Barbara Bick says she is neither journalist nor historian. Despite what she says, she looks at the worlds she encounters with the curiosity of a journalist, the eye of a historian — and always with the passion of a feminist. Rarely has she taken a trip — and she has been to many places most of us never get to — where she does not ask about and seek out the local women. How do they live? How are they faring?

At nearly 84 years of age, this lifelong resident of Washington, D.C. — and now year-round resident of Vineyard Haven — has transformed some of her travels into a book, Walking the Precipice: Witness To the Rise of The Taliban in Afghanistan (The Feminist Press, 2009).

It is her first published book and she is justly proud of it.

Written in memoir form, this look at a predominantly Muslim country in which women have at times been bracingly free, and recently under the Taliban, brutally enslaved, is for Barbara Bick the culmination of a remarkable life as a social and political activist, a constant mover in the cause for peace and civil and human rights.

A native of Washington, D.C., she tells of walking a picket line in front of the White House when she was 10, guided by her mother, “demanding support for the democratically elected Republican government of Spain.” The “history of the Spanish Civil War and the world’s response to it would resonate in my experience of Afghanistan,” she writes.

In one of two dedications, she refers to her mother, Lillian Colodny Lichtenstein as “a wise, beautiful woman whose activist life was circumscribed by societal parameters.”

Raised in the heady atmosphere of determined world changers whose passion was mitigated by their status as women, Barbara Bick would not be so circumscribed.

She was a founding member of the Women’s Strike for Peace in 1961 — the first major anti-nuclear peace movement, whose activities were especially prominent in the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Wanting to make a difference beyond protesting, she became an associate of the Institute for Policy Studies, an influential Washington think tank during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and a board member of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research for over a decade. In the 1980s, she was codirector and editor of the National Conference of State and Local Public Policies.

It was also her personal life that moved her to made a difference. Her daughter Kathrine was 16 when she developed schizophrenia. Medications to limit the effects of the disease did not exist then and Barbara, in the other dedication of her book, describes a “brilliant, insatiable reader, a loving woman whose life was tragically distorted by mental illness.” Out of that sorrow, she became an advocate for the mentally ill. She was founding president of Friends of St. Elizabeth’s, the historic federal psychiatric hospital in Washington, and was appointed to the D.C. State Mental Health Planning Council by three Washington mayors. In 1990, an article she wrote about the relationship with her daughter, Love and Resentment, was published in the New York Times Magazine.

A close friend of the late New York congresswoman, the outspoken Bella Abzug, the two feminists traveled together to many places in the world not on the list of must-sees for most tourists, taking part in activities to help women.

Her involvement with Afghanistan came about almost serendipitously. In 1990, her 65th year, she writes, “I began to think about one last, unforgettable journey . . .” At a reception, she met a woman she had known from her work years before in the peace movement. The woman surprised Barbara by abruptly inviting her to come to Afghanistan — she and another person were going on an invitation from a women’s peace group there. Far from her last great adventure, she became intensely involved with the country, particularly after the Taliban came to power and women were literally imprisoned inside their burqas and their bodies. If a woman’s finger showed, it might be cut off. If she spoke with an unrelated man, she might be stoned to death. Women could have no education. In the ensuing years, she looked for ways to bring the plight of the Afghan women to the attention of the American people and government. She worked with the feminist majority, whose leader, Ellie Smeal was making the case that the gender separation in Afghanistan was equivalent to apartheid. Barbara gave a fund-raiser on the Vineyard in 1999; the speaker was a young, brilliant Afghan woman who talked about how the Taliban’s vision repressed women so completely.

Few were paying attention. The Clinton administration tacitly accepted the Taliban.

Ultimately, seeking out activists among the large Afghan community in northern Virginia, Barbara connected with Nasrine Gross, an Afghani married to an American, who shared her goal of helping Afghan women by educating the public abroad. And so it happened that in 2001, at 76, Barbara was again in Afghanistan, in the camp of the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban group fighting to regain control of the country. It was intended to be a fact-finding trip. But two days prior to 9/11, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the resistance, was assassinated in the compound where Barbara was staying. Chaos ensued and Barbara needed to leave. But there was no means to get her out immediately. On Sept. 13 her friends in the compound literally pushed her onto an evacuating helicopter, her clothes stuffed quickly into a bag. With no outside communication, Barbara did not know about the events of Sept. 11 until she saw the burning towers on a television in Dushanbe.

Barbara, indefatigable, returned to Kabul in 2003 to witness the debate on a new constitution. It was “a time of great hope for a transformation of Afghan society and the liberation of women,” she said.

When she returned, Barbara set to work on the book which had stirred in her for years.

Walking the Precipice is unique, she thinks, because it is the only published personal account by an American who was in Afghanistan under Communist rule, investigating the lives of women under the Northern Alliance.

Beyond politics, she has a gift for making small spaces into places of charm and beauty. She became an Island seasonal resident in the early 1980s, turning a small, ordinary house on Owen Park into a magical, colorful cottage open to the light and the Sound.

And now for the sad denouement: Barbara was recently diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease. She had been experiencing muscular degeneration since 2004, but all of the specialists she saw did not diagnose it. In December, she went to a young neurologist at Beth Israel in Boston, Dr. Rachel Nardin, who hoped she would find the cause of Barbara’s condition — and keep it at bay. Two weeks ago, Dr. Nardin told Barbara that she was so very sorry, it was ALS. A life span for the disease is about five years; Barbara is in her fifth year.

She is no longer able to navigate in the Owen Park house and sold it a summer ago. With her son and daughter in law, Robby and Jenni Bick, she bought another house in Vineyard Haven, with a handicapped accessible apartment. In June she left Washington forever, to live here with Robby, Jenni and their three children, Rosie, Rayne and Lily.

But fate must not trifle with Barbara Bick. At the time of this writing, she was off on a bitter cold night, to see Milk at the Capawock. She’d been to the opera there a few days earlier. She wants to know how Obama will fare in the years to come. She wants to know the fate of the blighted people of Palestine and Israel. And she intends to speak on her book as long as she is able ­— envisioning the summer when more people will be here and she can talk about one of the many causes so near and dear to her mind and heart: the women of Afghanistan.

Barbara Bick will speak about her book at the Vineyard Haven Public Library on Wednesday, Feb. 4 at 3 p.m.