Australian Feminist Studies

ISSN: 0816-4649 (Print) 1465-3303 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cafs20

MARILYN FRENCH (1929–2009)

Zora Simic

To cite this article: Zora Simic (2010) MARILYN FRENCH (1929–2009), Australian Feminist
Studies, 25:65, 257-260, DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2010.504291

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2010.504291

Published online: 31 Aug 2010.

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 OBITUARY

MARILYN FRENCH (1929
2009)

Zora Simic

Marilyn French*writer, academic and, above all, feminist*died of heart failure in

her Manhattan home on 2 May 2009. She was 79 years old, and best known for writing a
novel that was published over 30 years previously, The Women’s Room (1977). French’s
close friend and fellow feminist icon Gloria Steinem later compared the impact of the book
on public discussion about women’s rights to the talk generated about racial equality by
Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man 25 years earlier. Along with I am Woman, Helen Reddy’s
feminist anthem, The Women’s Room also epitomised an era in which feminism was briefly
a pop cultural phenomenon, and popular feminist fiction was not yet an oxymoron. In the
wake of French’s success came other feminist novelists such as Lisa Alther, Marge Piercy,
Alice Walker and Margaret Atwood. The Women’s Room was eventually translated into 20
languages, and sold over 20 million copies, making it possible for French to devote her life
to writing. None of her subsequent publications*including an ambitious four-volume
women’s history of the world*ever made the same impact as her debut novel, but French
never stopped writing. Her last novel, The Love Children, was released posthumously by
independent publishers the Feminist Press in late 2009.
French was born in Brooklyn on 21 November 1929, at the beginning of the Great
Depression. Her parents*Charles Edwards, an engineer, and Isabel Hazz Edwards, a
department store clerk*were third-generation Poles with middle-class aspirations, but
they remained poor ‘as everyone was then’ (Heathcote 2007). French would recall her
mother as ‘unloving’ (Heathcote 2007), though it was Isabel, the dominant parent, who
encouraged her daughter’s education. French graduated from Hofstra College in Long
Island in 1951, with an undergraduate degree in English and philosophy. A year earlier she
had married lawyer Robert French Jr, and by 1953 the couple had two children, son Robert
and daughter Jamie. French would later describe her marriage as ‘absolutely horrible’ and
her husband as a real ‘Jekyll and Hyde. Everyone else thought he was the nicest guy
in the world, but he was a monster at home’ (Heathcote 2007). Their marriage was
paradigmatically pre-women’s liberation: she supported him through law school with ‘a
series of paralysing office jobs’ (Wheatley 2007, 1), while he discouraged her ambitions.
French read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, taught English and started writing short
stories. When the couple divorced in 1967, after 17 years of marriage, they were the first in
their cohort to do so.
If what happened next*freshly divorced, French went to Harvard University,
graduated with a PhD in English and published a well-received monograph on James
Joyce*reads as a classic narrative of white, middle-class women’s liberation, it is at least
partially because French’s rendering of her own experience into fiction in The Women’s
Room was so explosively successful. The story of Mina Ward*the desperately unhappy
suburban housewife and mother who is emancipated through divorce, higher education,
friendship and feminism*clearly paralleled the author’s own transformation, while also

Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 25, No. 65, September 2010

ISSN 0816-4649 print/ISSN 1465-3303 online/10/030257-04
– 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2010.504291
258 OBITUARY

resonating with masses of women who had started to feel the trickle-down effects of
feminism in their own lives. The timing of the novel’s publication could hardly have been
better. As Steinem noted in the wake of French’s death, The Women’s Room

was about the lives of women who were supposed to live the lives of their husbands,
supposed to marry an identity other than themselves, to live secondary lives. It expressed
the experience of a huge number of women and let them know that they were not alone
and crazy. (Owen 2009, 30)

After English novelist Fay Weldon read the manuscript of The Women’s Room she gave it
to a friend who had been complaining about her miserable marriage: ‘She told me it
changed her life, so I put the quote ‘‘This book changes lives’’ on the cover’ (Weldon 2006,
65). Since its publication, the novel has routinely appeared on lists of ‘life-changing’
books, particularly those compiled by female readers who were young mothers when it
was first released. In 2005, ABC movie critic and film producer Margaret Pomeranz recalled
reading the book ‘in the ’70s when I was a mother, inundated with domesticity and
floundering . . . It was such a relief to read The Women’s Room, to feel that a lot of the
internal frustrations I felt in my role as a mother were actually shared by others’
(Pomeranz 2005, 79). In 2004, The Women’s Room was voted no.4 on the list of ‘watershed’
books by a poll of listeners of BBC Radio’s Woman’s Hour, behind Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Yet
because the book’s influence has been so marked amongst an overwhelmingly female
readership of a certain age, some have suggested (perhaps no one more often than
French herself) that the author’s significance as a literary figure has been understated or
ignored. In the wake of her death, Rosemary Sorenson, literary critic with The Australian,
noted that despite ‘being an author of a book that sold 20 million copies and changed
lives, French appears to count less than [J.G.] Ballard [who died in April 2009]’ (Sorenson
2009, 11). In the introduction to Virago’s 30th anniversary edition of The Women’s Room
(2007), French speculated that the reason books such as hers, and Christina Stead’s The
Man Who Loved Children and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook have been ‘so savaged
by male critics’ is because ‘they treat women’s work seriously [or] to put it another way:
under no circumstances may the actual daily occupation of half of the world’s population
be taken seriously’ (French 2007, xiii). Unlike Stead and Lessing, however, French’s fiction
did not eventually enjoy critical recognition, though her next novel The Bleeding Heart
(1980), about a divorced professor trying to balance work with a fulfilling sex life, was a
best-seller.
French’s reputation as a life-changing novelist was matched by her reputation as an
alleged man-hater. Very few of the men in The Women’s Room are drawn sympathetically,
and a line from the book from one of the female characters, Val the radical feminist*‘All
men are rapists, and that’s all they are’ (French 2007, 476)*would come to stand as one of
the most enduring caricatures of 1970s feminism. In a 2007 interview, French recalled that
during book tours ‘every single interviewer was insulting and nasty to me, accusing me of
hating men. I am a heterosexual woman*though many people doubt that*and the book
proved to be a great sacrifice to me’ (Wheatley 2007, 1). French argued that her targets
were not individual men per se, but rather the assumption that ‘men are superior to
women’ and patriarchy itself. The historical origins and enduring evidence of women’s
 OBITUARY 259

oppression would be a theme she vigorously pursued in her non-fiction, namely in The
War Against Women (1992), in which she catalogued past and present global sexism to
make the case that since the onset of ‘civilisation’, women’s lives have run ‘downhill ever
since’, and her four-volume From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World (2009),
originally published as three volumes in 2002.
Initially over 10,000 pages long, From Eve to Dawn took her over 15 years to write
and research, during which time French, a long-term heavy smoker, was diagnosed with
oesophageal cancer and given a grim prognosis. This gruelling experience inspired one
of her most personal and critically lauded publications, A Season in Hell: A Memoir (1998).
Eventually, with the assistance of her friend Margaret Atwood, and after 10 years of
trying, French found a Canadian publisher for her history. ‘Patriarchy’, wrote French in
the introduction to the first volume, ‘was the result of revolution, the world’s first [and] it
appears their main objective was to obtain more power over women’ (French 2008, 10).
Novelist Hilary Mantel, reviewing the whole series in the New York Times in April 2009,
despaired that ‘to live within these books is to walk through a vast graveyard where the
dead are not buried yet*atrocity and injustice flow from master to slave, colonialist to
colonized, regardless of gender. There is no subtlety here, no irony, and little
forgiveness’ (Mantel 2009). Yet, as Mantel and other critics also noted, French’s history
concluded on an optimistic note with her documentation of the growth of feminism
internationally.
French’s feminism was uncompromising, enduring and vigilant. In 2007, on the 30th
anniversary of the publication of her most famous book, she wrote: ‘When I was asked, in
1977, what I would wish for The Women’s Room, I said I wished for a world in which no one
would comprehend it because women and men have found a way to live together in
felicity’ (French 2007, xv). Yet, she continued, if women’s lives have got easier in some
ways, ‘the world’s ethos has moved in the opposite direction, towards more hostility
between the sexes. So severe is the situation that I can imagine a time when novels such
as this one will not be published’ (French 2007, xvi). Until the end, said Steinem, French
‘had higher standards and higher hopes’ (Sulzberger and Mitgang 2009).
Marilyn French is survived by her son Robert, and her daughter Jamie.

REFERENCES
FRENCH, MARILYN. 2007. The women’s room. 30th anniversary ed. London: Virago Press.
****. 2009. From Eve to Dawn: A history of women. Vol. I, Origins. New York: Feminist Press.
HEATHCOTE, ELIZABETH. 2007. ‘Yes, I’m still angry.’ The Independent, 29 April [cited 13 April 2010].
Available from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/marilyn-french-yes-
im-still-angry-446709.html
MANTEL, HILARY. 2009. The war against women. New York Review of Books, 30 April [cited 13 April
2010]. Available from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/apr/30/the-war-
against-women/?paginationfalse
OWEN, URSULA. 2009. Hidden voices of the revolution. Canberra Times, 7 June: 30.
Pomeranz, Margaret. 2005. The books that changed me. Sun-Herald, 19 June: 79.
SORENSON, ROSEMARY. 2009. Review of ‘The overflow.’ Weekend Australian, 16 May: 11.
260 OBITUARY

SULZBERGER, A.G.,
and HERBERT MITGANG. 2009. Marilyn French, novelist and champion of feminism,
dies at 79. The New York Times, 4 May [cited 13 April 2010]. Available from http://
www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/arts/04french.html
WELDON, FAY. 2006. The books that changed me. Sun-Herald, 8 January: 65.
WHEATLEY, JANE. 2007. Still burning*Age has not tamed Marilyn French’s anger towards men.
The Australian, 21 April: 1.

Zora Simic is a lecturer in Australian history and convenor of Women’s and Gender Studies
in the School of History and Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. With
Monica Dux, she is the co-author of The Great Feminist Denial (Melbourne University
Press, 2008).