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Author and feminist Marilyn French dies at 79

Last Updated: Tuesday, May 5, 2009 | 3:55 PM ET

Writer Marilyn French, shown in 1987, sold 20 million copies of her debut novel, The Women's Room.Writer Marilyn French, shown in 1987, sold 20 million copies of her debut novel, The Women's Room. (Marty Lederhandler/Associated Press)

Marilyn French, whose novel The Women's Room is a feminist classic, died Saturday in New York. She was 79.

French died of heart failure, according to Gloria Jacobs of Feminist Press, the New York imprint that published her four-volume study, From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, in 2008.

French's 1977 novel The Women's Room coincided with a wave of women's liberation that swept North America.

"It came at the right moment," Feminist Press founder Florence Howe said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

"It said to women you just have to stop being oppressed, you have to stand up and fight for yourself. Women heard that. Women recognized themselves."

It sold 20 million copies and was widely translated, despite poor reviews.

The story of a 1950s housewife who divorces her husband and goes to Harvard, where she begins to redefine what she wants out of life, it mirrored many of French's own personal experiences.

She always denied it was autobiographical, but said there was ""nothing in [it] I've not felt."

French was born Nov. 21, 1929, in Brooklyn, N.Y., and got an undergraduate degree at Hofstra College before marrying in 1950.

She divorced her husband, Robert French, in 1967 and then attended Harvard, where she earned a PhD.

French said that watching her mother's struggles with an abusive father made her into a feminist.

In the 1970s, French was influenced by Kate Millett's feminist treatise Sexual Politics.

After French's 18-year-old daughter was raped, her experience trying to convince the district attorney to prosecute the rapist helped radicalize her opinions on the way society regards women.

One of the most famous lines of The Women's Room, uttered by the protagonist, is "all men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes."

Anger a 'useful' reaction

Much of French's scholarly work was dedicated to exploring how society treats women and rewriting history to include women's stories.

Her non-fiction works include Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals (1985) and The War Against Women (1992).

French's novels paint a bleak view of relations between the sexes. After The Women's Room, she wrote The Bleeding Heart (1980), Her Mother's Daughter (1987), Our Father (1994) and In the Name of Friendship (2006).

She hailed the many changes in attitudes toward women in the late 20th century, and the changing roles of men, who are now more involved with their families.

But in a 2007 interview with the Independent she said she was still an "angry person," particularly when she saw the plight of women in other countries.

"I don't know if anger is a good thing, but it is useful and I don't know how you can avoid it. You look at the world and it's the only possible reaction," she said.

French also wrote a memoir, A Season in Hell, which chronicled her battle with esophageal cancer in 1992.

Her final novel, The Love Children, is to be published later this year.

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