Marilyn French: 'Yes, I'm still angry'

'I am an angry person. I don't know if anger is a good thing, but it is useful and I don't know how you can avoid it. You look at the world and it's the only possible reaction." Marilyn French, the legendary feminist, is a small woman, frail after a horrendous battle with cancer, and 77 years old. But she is still angry and still capable of getting on her soapbox. The battle, after all, is not over.

"I think we're facing a huge worldwide backlash. I don't think women understand how powerful they are, that they have caused this tremendous fury in men," she says. "In some countries they are willing to kill women to keep them submissive, and in the West they use censorship. Any reference to feminism is censored, we just don't hear about it. It is terrible."

It is 30 years since French's seminal novel, The Women's Room, was published and became a sensation. It sold 20 million copies and reached a mass audience of women who may have been alienated by the intellectual tomes that preceded it, but who greedily consumed the same messages served up in a pot-boiler. "The kind of book that changes lives," says Fay Weldon on the cover, and for once it is true. It may even have changed the world. Radio 4 listeners recently voted it one of their top five "watershed" books of all time.

It is a furious, compelling read, the story of Mira and a group of her women friends whose narrow suburban lives bitterly disappoint and in some cases destroy them. The anger at their lot, at the waste of it all, fizzes off the page. Mira's husband Norm eventually leaves her for another women and she throws herself into an intellectual life, but there is no happy ending and the message is bleak: if you are an independent-minded woman, you will be constrained, or worse.

French says that she is knocked out by how far things have come, and how fast. When she divorced her husband in 1967, she couldn't even get a telephone in her own name. "I am amazed to see in my own lifetime a woman daring to run for president. I don't like Hillary Clinton very much - she is conservative by my standards - but I will vote for her. I don't think she could do a worse job than any of the men who are running!"

Have there been any downsides to the feminist revolution? She considers. "This is not about feminism, but the way feminism was taken in by this society, but I think that women who couldn't do anything when I was young now have to do too much. You want to work? Well, you'll work and raise the children, and do everything in the house. It's just not bearable, and it was not the idea in the first place."

She doesn't blame men - entirely. "A lot of the younger men do seem to help their women out, although I don't know that they take responsibility the way they should." Instead, she points the finger at society and business in particular. "Things could have been set up to help, but they haven't been. When I was young no one expected anyone - woman or man - to work 80, 90 hours a week. It's not human."

French is used to inhuman labour relationships. She grew up in New York during the Depression. Her parents were third-generation Poles, anxious to become middle class but grindingly poor, "as everyone was then". Her mother was "unloving" but struggled to give her daughter a cultural upbringing, scrimping to take her to the opera or up in an aeroplane.

Her childhood made her a feminist. "I saw my mother's life. I tried very hard to escape and I ended up in the same trap. Unending, unpaid work with no pride attached to it. I remember saying to a boy that I was really in love with, that the reason I won't sleep with you is that I don't want to get pregnant accidentally the way my mother did. I don't want to end up on my hands and knees scrubbing the bathroom floor. But there was no alternative for girls but marriage. There were no jobs you could get that you could support yourself independently."

French went to college, but married immediately afterwards. She had a son and daughter she adored but the marriage was a disaster that still haunts her. "My husband was a Jekyll and Hyde. Everyone else thought he was the nicest guy in the world but he was monster at home. Now we would realise he's sick. He was terrible around the children and that's what upset me the most. It went on all weekend, every weekend. Insane."

She stuck it for 17 years, then went back into education, gaining a PhD at Harvard - there are many autobiographical strands in The Woman's Room. One of the most quoted lines is that "all men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes." Yet French insists she likes men. "Most men are on our side. They like their lives better than their fathers' lives. They like being involved with their children. They like having a better relationship with their women."

She vowed never to marry again, but there have been "lots" of romantic relationships along the way, some of them very good. Presently she is single. "I am quite content to be alone. I don't like compromise, I like doing what I want, I have a great many friends and I am very close to my children." She lives in Manhattan and life is full of pleasures. "I go to concerts, I go to the theatre, I go to dinner. I like my life."

She is, she knows, lucky to be alive. In the early Nineties, she was diagnosed with metastasised oesophageal cancer and told that she would soon die. "No one knows why I survived or how I did. They gave me the same treatment they give everyone else but no one else survived. I felt that I had spoken with my body, and I had asked it to do certain things for me - and it did."

The experience changed her fundamentally. "Because it is such a terrifying experience to know you are going to die, it somehow infantilises you. It made me able to take in the love that was being given me, that I knew was all around me but which I hadn't been able to take in before because I hadn't felt loved as a child. It made me a softer person, I think, and that has stayed with me."

Does she feel betrayed by a younger generation of women, and their reluctance to engage with feminism? She disputes that this is the case. "I talk to a lot of young women and every one of them says to me, 'you know they say young women are not feminist, but it is not true, we all are very serious feminists'.

"There are lots of young feminists out there doing work that I admire. Many of them are working with women in Africa, India, South America, or the ghettoes here in the US. It is practical work and it is what we need."

She is still writing - there have been eight novels, plus academic books and political polemics since The Women's Room - and many that didn't make it into print. She tells a story of one publisher who suggested that she make one of her books "more like Bridget Jones". There is little chance of that.

"If you ask me what I believe in today, I believe in feminism. I believe that all human beings are equal. I believe that no one has the right to authority over anyone else. Feminism has to do with everything in the world, a vision of how the world can be. I have great doubts about Utopias, but I just keep on thinking there is a better way to live than the way we live now."

'The Women's Room' is re-released this month by Virago (£9.99)

BIOGRAPHY: Wife, student, teacher, writer

Born: 21 November 1929, New York.

Educated: Hofstra College (now University), Long Island. BA 1951; MA 1964. Harvard University, PhD 1972.

Married in 1950; one son and one daughter. Divorced in 1967.

Career: Taught English at Hofstra University, College of the Holy Cross, Aspen Institute for Humanistic Study and Harvard University. Started writing in 1957, and had critical analysis of James Joyce's "Ulysses" published by Harvard University Press before "The Women's Room" appeared in 1977. Since then she has published eight novels and various academic and political books.