Liste Femanzen Marilyn French (Liste Femanzen)

Oberkellner , Sunday, 02.02.2014, 11:18 (vor 3735 Tagen)

F120 Marilyn French USA - geboren am 21.11.1929 in New York, gestorben am 02.05.2009 ebenda – amerikanische Schriftstellerin - http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/pictures/2009/5/5/1241512065059/Marilyn-French-001.jpg

Er war ein Bastard wie alle Männer. Sie können nichts dafür, sie werden dazu erzogen, Bastarde zu sein. Wir werden dazu erzogen, Engel zu sein, damit sie Bastarde sein können.

Ein Mann kann einfach ablehnen, Frauen in gutbezahlte Jobs einzustellen, soviel oder mehr Arbeit von Frauen wie von Männern herauszupressen, ihnen aber weniger bezahlen, oder Frauen respektlos am Arbeitsplatz oder zu Hause behandeln. Er kann sich weigern, ein von ihm gezeugtes Kind zu unterstützen oder verlangen, dass die Frau, mit der er lebt, ihn bedient wie eine Sklavin. Er kann die Frau schlagen oder töten, die er zu lieben behauptet; er kann Frauen vergewaltigen, ob Partner, Bekannte, oder Fremde, er kann seine Töchter, Nichten, Stiefkinder oder die Kinder der Frau, die er zu lieben behauptet, vergewaltigen oder sexuell mißbrauchen. Die weit überwiegende Mehrheit aller Männer auf der Welt tut eines oder meh-rere dieser Dinge.

Meine Gefühle sind das Ergebnis meiner Erfahrungen. Ich habe wenig Sympathie für sie. Wie ein Jude, der gerade aus Dachau freigekommen ist, sehe ich den hübschen Jungen Nazisoldaten mit einer Kugel im Bauch, sich vor Schmerzen krümmend, niedersinken, und ich schaue nur kurz und gehe weiter. Ich muss nicht mal mit der Achsel zucken. Es geht mich einfach nichts an. Männer sind Nazis, durch und durch. Ihr Tod ist also historisch gerecht. Eine der in den siebziger Jahren weltweit einflussreichsten Feministinnen, Marilyn French, ist am Samstag in New York gestorben. French wurde bekannt durch Zitate wie "Alle Männer sind Vergewaltiger, und das ist alles, was sie sind. Sie vergewaltigen uns mit ihren Augen, ihren Gesetzen und ihren Vorschriften." Während French sich später damit rechtfertigte, diese und andere Aussagen seien lediglich von der Hauptfigur ihres bekanntesten Romans getätigt worden, und ein Autor müsse nicht unbedingt mit den Ansichten seiner Figuren übereinstimmen, decken sich diese Sätze doch sehr mit denen aus Frenchs politischen Schriften. Auch darin sah sie Vergewaltiger als ausführende Organe der Männergesellschaft an sich: "Solange einige Männer körperliche Gewalt anwenden, um Frauen zu unterdrücken, brauchen das nicht alle Männer zu tun. Das Wissen, dass dies einige Männer tun, reicht aus, um alle Frauen einzuschüchtern. Ein Mann kann die Frau schlagen oder töten, die er behauptet zu lieben, er kann Frauen vergewaltigen, er kann seine Töchter sexuell missbrauchen … DIE GROSSE MEHRHEIT DER MÄNNER AUF DIESER WELT TUT EINES ODER MEHRERE DIESER DINGE." (Einige weitere Zitate Frenchs hat die amerikanische Conservapedia mit Quellenangabe zusammengestellt.)

Frenchs bekanntestes Buch, "The Women's Room", verkaufte mehr als 20 Millionen Exemplare und wurde in 20 Sprachen übersetzt. Als ihr Lebensziel definierte French, einem Nachruf in der New York Times zufolge, die gesamte gesellschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Struktur der westlichen Zivilisation zu verändern, sie zu einer feministischen Welt zu machen.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/marilynfre108276.html

http://genderama.blogspot.com/2009/05/marilyn-french-im-alter-von-79-jahren.html

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday 13 May 2009

Our obituary of the writer Marilyn French included a mention of her history of women, From Eve to Dawn, which conflated two editions of the work. We said it was published in four volumes in 2002; in fact the 2002 edition, published by McArthur & Company, was in three volumes. A more recent edition, published last year by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, ran to four volumes.

The US writer and academic Marilyn French, who has died aged 79, is best known for her debut novel, The Women's Room. It was published in 1977, when she was almost 50, and captured the mood of the time, selling more than 20m worldwide. French went on to write more novels, including The Bleeding Heart (1980), and substantial non-fiction works on patriarchy and women's history. But none of her later books enjoyed the success of The Women's Room.

The novel's best-known line - "All men are rapists, and that's all they are" - has not been an easy legacy for the next three decades of feminism. Spoken in anger by one of the book's most radical characters, a woman whose daughter has been gang-raped, it entered the popular lexicon and is often cited, wrongly, as one of the tenets of modern feminism. French's own daughter had been raped and she was an angry writer, a fact she acknowledged in an interview with the Independent two years ago, although she also insisted that she liked men. "I've always said I like men very much," she once told the Guardian.

The novel has other parallels with its author's life, telling the story of Mira Ward, a woman who marries young in the 1950s and goes back to college after her marriage breaks up. At Harvard, Ward discovers friendship and feminism, illustrating the next chapter in the lives of the educated American women whose disappointments had been chronicled more than a decade earlier by French's contemporary Betty Friedan. French described in fiction the frustrations Friedan identified in The Feminine Mystique (1963), and showed how the aspirations of a generation of reluctant housewives were transformed by feminism. The novel spoke not just to French's contemporaries but also their daughters, who passed it hand to hand with the same enthusiasm they had shown four years earlier for Erica Jong's upbeat feminist novel, Fear of Flying.

French was born Marilyn Edwards in New York, the daughter of third generation Polish immigrants. Her father Charles Edwards was an engineer and her mother Isabel worked in a department store, but what Marilyn remembered of her childhood was the grinding poverty of the Depression. Her "unloving" mother scrimped to get her daughter an education, sending her to Hofstra College on Long Island where she studied English and philosophy and graduated in 1951. A year earlier she had married a lawyer, Robert French Jr, and the couple had two children, although the marriage was unhappy. "I saw my mother's life," she told the Independent. "I tried very hard to escape and I ended up in the same trap."

French's experience shaped the bitter view of marriage she expressed in The Women's Room, where Mira's husband eventually dumps her for his mistress. "My husband was a Jekyll and Hyde," she said in the same interview. "Everyone else thought he was the nicest guy in the world but he was a monster at home. Now we would realise he's sick." She doggedly pursued her academic career - she got her master's degree in 1964 and taught English at Hofstra for four years - and finally escaped from the marriage in 1967. French went to Harvard, got her PhD in 1972 and published her first book in 1976. That book, published by Harvard University Press, was a scholarly study of James Joyce's Ulysses, but it was overshadowed a year later by the massive international success of The Women's Room.

Almost overnight, French found herself one of the greats of contemporary American feminism, alongside Jong, Friedan and Ms editor Gloria Steinem, who became a friend. The fact that she came to public attention as a popular novelist may not have been entirely comfortable for a woman who regarded herself as a serious academic, but it expresses a tension at the heart of her work. French was an intellectual whose non-fiction polemics were rigorously researched; she published scholarly works such as Beyond Power: Women, Men & Morals (1985), a 600-page analysis of patriarchy, and the four-volume From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women (2002).

Yet the romanticism which she poured into novels such as The Bleeding Heart seeped into her non-fiction, expressing itself in lyrical passages about a primordial "matricentry". "We were bound to the goddess who was immanent in nature, in the vegetation and the moon, mistress of the animals, who fed us freely - most of the time," she wrote in Beyond Power. French was generous to younger writers; she responded enthusiastically to my book Misogynies, providing a quote which appeared on the cover of subsequent editions, but she would have liked to be as celebrated for her non-fiction as she was for The Women's Room.

Throughout her career, her primary subject was the subjugation of women. She could appear harsh, an impression belied by her warmth in interviews, and she earned a reputation as a misandrist which she seems to have been too battle-scarred to challenge. "They said I was a man-hater, and I never defended myself against that, because I do believe that men are to blame for the condition of women," she told the Guardian.

French was a heavy smoker and in 1992 she was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer and not expected to live. She embarked on a gruelling course of treatment and survived against all the odds, a sequence of events she went on to describe without self-pity in Season in Hell: A Memoir (1998). But the years of the Bush presidency were inimical to feminism and she was unable to find an American publisher for her last novel, In the Name of Friendship, until it was accepted by a Dutch publisher and unexpectedly became a bestseller in the Netherlands. It was published in the US by a small feminist press in 2006.

Towards the end of her life, French was asked what feminism had achieved, sometimes by interviewers who assumed she was disappointed by the reluctance of younger women to adopt the label. She refused to play along, insisting that she admired young feminists who were working with women in Africa, India, South America and "the ghettoes here in the US". There is no doubt she would have liked to see greater improvements in the status of women: "She had higher standards and higher hopes," Steinem told the New York Times. But French expressed her amazement in 2007 at seeing a woman "daring to run for president" in her lifetime, and promised to vote for Hillary Clinton even though she regarded her as "conservative by my standards".

The Women's Room is French's lasting achievement, a testimony to the energy and intellectual ferment of the decade in which it was written. Steinem summed up its impact: "It expressed the experience of a huge number of women and let them know that they were not alone and not crazy."

French is survived by a son, Robert, and a daughter, Jamie.

Fay Weldon writes: Marilyn French was a woman of great courage and dedication to the truth. As a person she was warm and witty, and only as a writer angry, using that anger to change the world.

One morning in 1977, the manuscript of The Women's Room came through my door, with a request for a quote from her publisher. I sat riveted while I read. The phone rang. It was a friend complaining of the way her husband misused her - and he had. "You must read this book," I said. "It will change your life." She did, and it did, and millions of others like her, moving us from a world in which women had no choice about how they lived, to one where they have so much choice it is almost confusing.

The quote I gave was "this book will change your life", and it tore through continents, selling millions of copies, and wherever it went it carried the message: "You do not have to put up with this." The message worked quickly in the western world: in other places it works more slowly, but still it's working. French did a great thing for women.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/05/obituary-marilyn-french

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