MARILYN FRENCH, a writer and feminist scholar whose provocative 1977 novel The Women's Roomcaptured the frustration and fury of a generation of women fed up with society's traditional conceptions of their roles, died on Saturday at a New York hospital. She was 79.
Although it received mixed reviews, The Women's Roombecame a feminist classic, selling more than 20 million copies in two dozen languages with a story that spoke powerfully to women seeking liberation from societal norms in the last quarter of the 20th century. It traced the evolution of Mira, a repressed suburban housewife in the 1950s who divorces her brutish husband in the 1960s, goes to Harvard and finds solace in friendship with like-minded women who are seeking to redefine their lives in the midst of sweeping social change.
“It came at the right moment,” said Feminist Press founder Florence Howe, who knew French for 30 years. “It said to women you just have to stop being oppressed, you have to stand up and fight for yourself. Women heard that. Women recognised themselves.”
The novel's most-quoted line – "All men are rapists, and that's all they are," spoken by the protagonist after the near-rape of her daughter – was often erroneously attributed to French herself, giving critics what they thought was proof of the author's man-hating rage. But French said she did not hate men. "What I am opposed to," she told the London Timesa few years ago, "is the notion that men are superior to me." Her protagonist's trajectory mirrored her own. Although the novel was not autobiographical, there was, she said, "nothing in [it] I've not felt."
She was born in New York on November 21st, 1929. She put herself through Hofstra College (now Hofstra University) in New York, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English literature a year after marrying her husband, Robert French, in 1950. He wanted to be a writer, so she worked a series of what she called “paralysing” office jobs to support him; he later became a lawyer.
Her marriage was unhappy and ended in divorce in 1967. By then French was a mother of two and teaching at Hofstra, where she had earned a master’s degree in 1964. She wrote short stories during this time.
Following her divorce, she went to Harvard on a fellowship and in 1972 earned a doctorate in literature with a thesis on James Joyce's Ulysses. For the next four years she taught English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Two events at the time helped radicalise her: reading Kate Millett’s feminist treatise Sexual Politics and the rape of her 18-year-old daughter, Jamie, in 1971.
French championed the prosecution of the rapist, even though the district attorney tried to talk her into dropping the case. The rapist confessed after her daughter testified at the trial. He was convicted and sent to prison.
French went on to write five more novels, including The Bleeding Heart(1980), Her Mother's Daughter(1987), Our Father(1994) and I n the Name of Friendship(2006). Her non-fiction includes Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals(1985) and The War Against Women(1992.)The Feminist Press published her last major work, the four-volume From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, in 2008.– (LA Times-Washington Post service)