Françoise d'Eaubonne

Françoise d'Eaubonne (12 March 1920 in Paris – 3 August 2005 in Paris) was a French feminist, who introduced the term "ecofeminism" ("écologie-féminisme", "éco-féminisme", or "écoféminisme") in 1974.

Her mother was a child of a Carlist revolutionary. Her father was a member of the religious Sillon movement and an anarchist sympathiser. 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 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. A former member of the French Communist Party, in 1971, she co-founded the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire (FHAR), a homosexual revolutionary movement. Also that year, she signed the Manifesto of the 343 declaring she had an abortion. She is considered the founder of the ecological and social movement of ecofeminism. She created the Ecology-Feminism (Ecologie-Feminisme) Center in Paris in 1972. In 1974 she published her book Le féminisme ou la mort (Feminism or Death) where she first coined the term ecofeminism. In the book she speaks of a special connection women share with nature and encourages women's environmental activism. She cites toxic masculinity as the cause of population growth, pollution, and other destructive influences on the environment. Many scholars shared d'Eaubonne's view on women's inherent connection to nature. These scholars include Sherry Ortner, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Susan Griffin, and Carolyn Merchant. In her literary and militant life, she came across a number of people of influence in the 20th century, like Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, 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, Le sous-marin de l'espace.