Jane Fonda: I had to be a single woman to fully embrace feminism

“For me, the personal [journey] meant becoming a single woman, no longer silencing my voice, slowly becoming the subject of my own life.”

The 78-year-old Oscar-winning actress said she tried to be 'perfect' for her three husbands (Rex Features)

Jane Fonda has said that she needed to be a single woman to fully become a feminist in her personal life as well as her professional one, after three marriages and a long career as an actress.

Writing in Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter, Ms Fonda, the 78-year-old star of hit Netflix series "Grace and Frankie", said it took 30 years for her to really appreciate the power of feminism and what it meant for her.

“The journey is both external and internal, political and personal,” she said. ”For me, the personal meant becoming a single woman, no longer silencing my voice, slowly becoming the subject of my own life.”

The two-time Oscar-winning actress said that her relationships with men often came about as a result of her low self-esteem, her need for validation and to be “perfect”.

Ms Fonda has given candid interviews about her eating disorder, her difficult relationship with her daughter and her string of troubled marriages before - she said her third husband Ted Turner didn’t like her “to talk too much” - but rarely has she spoken about how important it was for her to be single, and in the later stages of life.

“[…] I instinctively chose men who would never notice [my eating disorder] because of their own addictions and “issues.” Ah, but they were interesting, charismatic, alpha men, and they validated me,” she said.

The actress admitted she had come a long way since 1970, when the then 33-year-old wrote in her diary: ““Don’t understand the Women’s Liberation Movement. There are more important things to have a movement for, it seems to me. To focus on women’s issues is diversionary when so much wrong is being done in the world.”

She wrote in Lenny Letter: “I had gone from believing that women’s issues were a distraction, mere ancillary problems to be addressed after everything else had been taken care of, to the realization that women are the issue, the core issue."

The actress is also no stranger to controversy. She was heavily rebuked for her role as an anti-war activist who criticized the American involvement in the Vietnam War, earning her the nickname “Hanoi Jane“.

“It hurts me and it will to my grave that I made a huge, huge mistake that made a lot of people think I was against the soldiers,” she said in January this year.