Maybe I was too young to understand it, or couldn't relate to the story because it was so far away from my observations of my parents’ very happy marriage. I recognise that it’s considered a seminal novel, but it never really spoke to me. I must have been about 14 when I read The Women’s Room. I stepped out of a door, shutting it behind me, into a life where over the next few years I would discover my self, my whole self.Īctivist in women’s movement, rape crisis centres and community organising, Tunbridge Wells The Women’s Room somehow supported me as a woman to say: “No – enough is enough”. The book proclaimed that it would change lives and it did! I can’t exactly recall what the book was actually about – just another women’s book really, one of those big fat books that women read all the time, bought off a shelf in a supermarket or an airport.

Within a year, I managed to get my life together, found an incredible place to live, which when I moved in felt like a gift from life for having been so brave. The very next day I told my partner that I was leaving him, leaving this violent relationship, leaving the fear, the humiliation and the desperate eroding of my self-esteem.Īs soon as the women around me knew that I wanted “out”, they surrounded me with practical support, even putting themselves at risk to do so. When lying down in bed one afternoon, I thought: “Do I want to spend the rest of my life in this violent relationship?” and a voice inside me replied: “NO!”. Not the bit when my legs were trussed up in stirrups by medics, like a Christmas turkey, waiting to be stitched up, but giving birth somehow reconnected me with my body. The birth of my son was incredibly wonderful. At the time I had been living with a male partner who was extremely violent to me.

I was given a copy of The Women’s Room by a woman who lived in a flat downstairs, I read this book that proclaimed to “change lives” when I went into hospital to give birth to my first child. Sometimes life can be like that, the feeling of having lived a number of lives in one life, like a snake shedding its skin and starting renewed.

Another time in my life, almost like another life. It was a long time ago that I read The Women’s Room, nearly 30 years ago now.

The Women's Room by Marilyn French