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Marilyn French 1929-2009

All of the wonderful feminist writers I discovered in my teens had an impact on my thinking and attitudes, but Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room was the most accessible. In later years, as a young mother, when I felt the parameters of my life had diminished to the extent summed up by the prominent refrain in the book of life being about “string beans and shit” I'd frequently mutter this phrase under my breath. Too many of us have had our own Norm (the main character’s husband).

After reading The Women’s Room in my late teens, I immediately pressed it upon a couple of male friends advising them that this would explain all the concepts I had been failing to get across to them about feminism. Naively, I assumed that because it contained the truth about so many women’s lives (although I admit we are talking white, middle class, educated, western women), that no one reading it could fail to understand French's stark messages about patriarchy. I had yet to comprehend the depth of (most) men’s and many women’s ability to deny women’s oppression.

20 million copies sold and 20 language translations has to count for something but as noted in the Telegraph’s obituary:
Some felt that her portrayals of men as prime chauvinist beef were unfair, but Marilyn French retorted: "The men are there as women see them and feel them, impediments in women's lives."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/5273331/Marilyn-French.html

Marilyn French has some of the best feminist quips:
"Men are victimised too. But they're not protesting. They're still blaming all their problems on women."

“Men’s need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it,” she wrote in “The War Against Women” (1992).

I reread The Women’s Room a couple of years ago when the book group I attend chose it. It had lost little of its power and I decided to read it again in another ten years, but maybe not, in case still nothing much has changed in the struggle to end women’s oppression.