Her most significant work in later life was From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women. Gloria Steinem, a close friend, compared the impact of the book on the discussion surrounding women’s rights to the one that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man had had on racial equality 25 years earlier.

Her first and best-known novel, The Women's Room, released in 1977, sold more than 20 million copies and was translated into 20 languages. “My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world,” she once declared. She survived cancer and later died from heart failure at age 79, on May 2, 2009, in Manhattan.įrench took issue with the expectations of married women in the post-World War II era and become a leading, if controversial, opinionmaker on gender issues who decried the patriarchal society she saw around her. This experience was the basis for her book A Season in Hell: A Memoir (1998). French's first book was a thesis on James Joyce.įrench was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 1992. This quote has often been incorrectly attributed to Marilyn French herself. At one point in the book the character Val says 'all men are rapists'. The novel portrays the details of the lives of women at this time and the feminist movement of this era in the United States. For instance, one of her first non-fiction works, Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals (1985), is an historical examination of the effects of patriarchy on the world.įrench's 1977 novel The Women's Room follows the lives of Mira and her friends in 1950s and 1960s America, including Val, a militant radical feminist. In her work, French asserted that women's oppression is an intrinsic part of the male-dominated global culture. She was an English instructor at Hofstra from 1964 to 1968 and was an assistant professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 1972 to 1976. She later attended Harvard University, where she earned a Ph.D in 1972. French Jr., in 1950 the couple divorced in 1967. She also received a master's degree in English in 1964 from Hofstra. She received a bachelor's degree from Hofstra University (then Hofstra College) in 1951, and studied philosophy and English literature.

Charles Edwards, an engineer, and Isabel Hazz Edwards, a department store clerk.

Beyond Power by Marilyn French