The feminist movement lost a leading voice over the weekend.

Marilyn French, the feminist writer from Queens, NY, who is said to have "captured the quest of the modern feminist movement" in her highly acclaimed 1977 novel "The Women’s Room," died from heart failure over the weekend at the age of 79.

French also wrote books and essays with a common theme of male subjugation of women. Other works include "Her Mother’s Daughter," a semi-autobiographical exploration of several generations of women in one family; "A Season in Hell", the story of her fight with esophageal cancer (she was a smoker for 40 years); and the four-volume "From Eve to Dawn, A History of Women," published by The Feminist Press, which is about the condition of being a woman in the world, since the beginning of time.

From The New York Times:

With steely views about the treatment of woman and a gift for expressing them on the printed page, Ms. French transformed herself from an academic who quietly bristled at the expectations of married women in the post-World War II era to a leading, if controversial, opinion maker on gender issues who decried the patriarchal society she saw around her. ‘My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world,’ she once declared.

“The Women’s Room” is about a 1950s housewife’s journey of self-discovery after her divorce, and was a global literary sensation. It’s partly based on French’s own departure from an unhappy marriage and helping her daughter deal with the aftermath of being raped. The Chicago Tribune described the book as "a biting social commentary of an emotional world gone silently haywire, ‘The Women’s Room’ is a modern allegory that offers piercing insight into the social norms accepted so blindly and revered so completely."

“It was about the lives of women who were supposed to live the lives of their husbands, supposed to marry an identity rather than become one themselves, to live secondary lives,” close friend Gloria Steinem told the Times. “It expressed the experience of a huge number of women and let them know that they were not alone and not crazy.”

Carol Jenkins, president of the Women’s Media Center, called her friend French "one of our leading feminist theorists," adding:

She was dedicated to making sure women understood their compromised position, and that men could see their part in the domination — historically and currently. She denied that made her a man-hater, and never altered her position. Marilyn had witnessed, recorded, interpreted, and predicted the condition of women in the world for most of her life. I can’t say that near the end she was overly optimistic about our progress and our future. But once again, Marilyn left the lasting impression. And, the Goddess knows, she tried."