Françoise d'Eaubonne

Who was Françoise d'Eaubonne?

Françoise d'Eaubonne was a French feminist, who introduced the term ecofeminism in 1974.

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. 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 train station in Paris the Liberation, the end of the war met her in 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. Former member of the French Communist Party, in 1971 she co-founded the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire, a homosexual revolutionary movement. She coined the term ecofeminism in her book Le féminisme ou la mort in 1974. 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.