Françoise d'Eaubonne was a French feminist, who introduced the term ecofeminism in 1974.
Background
Her father was member of the religious Sillon movement and anarchist sympathiser, her mother a child of a Carlist revolutionary. Her childhood in Toulouse was marked by the physical decay of her father, due to the gas he had been exposed to in the trenches during the war in 1914.
Career
When she was at the age of 16, the Spanish Civil War broke out. Three years later she witnessed the arrival of the Republicans in exile. Between the age of 20 and 25 she endured the privations of the time.
In a railway station in Paris the Liberation, the end of the war met her in the form of freed Jews returning from the camps. Later she would express her feelings in this period of her life with the meaningful title "Chienne de Jeunesse". Such a childhood together with a hypersensitive personality made her look at the world critically and formed her into a militant radical and feminist.
In her literary and militant life she came across a number of people of influence in the 20th century, like Colette, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau and many more. Following her motto, "Not a day without a line", Françoise d'Eaubonne wrote more than 50 works, from Colonnes de l'âme (poetry, 1942) to L'Évangile de Véronique (essay, 2003). She also wrote science fiction novels, like L'échiquier du temps and Rêve de feu, Le sous-marin de l'espace.
Biographies:
La vie passionnée d'Arthur Rimbaud, 1957
La vie passionnée de Verlaine, 1959
Une femme témoin de son siècle, Germaine de Staël, 1966
La couronne de sable, vie d'Isabelle Eberhardt, 1967
L'éventail de fer ou la vie de Qiu Jin, 1977
Moi, Kristine, reine de Suède, 1979
L'impératrice rouge : moi, Jiang King, veuve Mao, 1981
L'Amazone Sombre : vie d'Antoinette Lix, 1983
Louise Michel la Canaque, 1985
Une femme nommée Castor, 1986
Les scandaleuses, 1990
L'évangile de Véronique, 2000
Essays:
Le complexe de Diane, érotisme ou féminisme, 1951
Y a-t-il encore des hommes?, 1964
Eros minoritaire, 1970
Le féminisme ou la mort, 1974
Les femmes avant le patriarcat, 1976
Contre violence ou résistance à l'état, 1978
Histoire de l'art et lutte des sexes, 1978
Écologie, féminisme : révolution ou mutation ?, 1978
S comme Sectes, 1982
La femme russe, 1988
Féminin et philosophie : une allergie historique, 1997
La liseuse et la lyre, 1997
Le sexocide des sorcières, 1999
Poems:
Columns of the soul, 1942
Rutten, 1951
Neither place nor meter, 1981.
Politics
She coined the term ecofeminism in her book Le féminisme ou la mort in 1974. Her historical novel Comme un vol de gerfauts (1947) was translated into English as A Flight of Falcons, and extracts from her essay 'Feminism or Death' appeared in the 1974 anthology New French Feminisms.
Membership
Former member of the French Communist Party, in 1971 she co-founded the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire (FHAR), a homosexual revolutionary movement.