Political Views and Works
French 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. “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.
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. 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.
Critics accused Marilyn French of being anti-male, frequently citing a female character in The Women’s Room who declares, after her daughter has been raped: “All men are rapists, and that’s all they are."
Her most significant work in later life was the four-volume From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, published by The Feminist Press in 2002 and built around the premise that exclusion from the prevailing intellectual histories denied women their past, present and future. Despite carefully chronicling a long history of oppression, the last volume ends on an optimistic note, said Florence Howe, who recently retired as director of the publishing house. “For the first time women have history,” she said of Ms. French’s work. “The world changed and she helped change it.”
While Ms. French was pleased by significant gains made by women in the three decades since her landmark novel, 'The Women's Room, she was also just as quick to point out lingering deficiencies in gender equality. Marilyn French is mentioned in the lyrics of "The Day Before You Came" by ABBA. The lyric says ..."I must have read a while, the latest one by Marilyn French or something in that style".
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