Wittig held various visiting professorships in the U.S. Wittig eventually left France and her role at the forefront of its women’s movement “when straight women took over the French feminist movement” and pushed lesbians like Wittig to the margins, Balen said. In one of its protests, the group caused a massive public outcry when it attempted to place a wreath for “the unknown female soldier” at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Sally Beauman, writing in the New York Review of Books, called it “the first imaginative work of fiction in which the battle between the sexes is fought in Women’s Liberation terms.”Īround the time of the release of “Les Guerilleres,” Wittig took her philosophy to the streets by helping to found a group called Feministes Revolutionnaires. “Les Guerilleres,” published in 1969, concerns women warriors who triumph over male domination after waging fierce combat. Wittig wrote her next novel in the form of a series of prose poems. “In both form and content,” the New York Times Book Review wrote, “ ‘The Opoponax’ is a revolutionary story.” Mary McCarthy, writing in New Statesman, said it brought “a new insight into childhood and the educative process.” Written from the perspective of a child, it has minimal punctuation, short sentences and a time frame that is always in the present to capture the way a child perceives reality.Ĭritics hailed it as a pivotal and provocative work. The book won France’s highest literary honor, the Prix Medicis. She was in her late 20s when she wrote her first novel, “L’Opoponax,” which was published in France in 1964 and in English two years later.

Les Guerilleres by Monique Wittig