Françoise d'Eaubonne

Françoise d'Eaubonne (March 12 1920 in Paris - August 3 2005 in Paris) was a French feminist, who introduced the term "ecofeminism" ("écologie-féminisme", "éco-féminisme" or "écoféminisme") 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 communist party of France, in 1971 she co-founded the "FHAR", 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.

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). 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". She also wrote science fiction novels, like "L'échiquier du temps" and "Rêve de feu".