Marilyn French, writer, 21 November 1929 - 2 May 2009

Excerpt from Guardian article:

Marilyn French - Feminist writer and academic famed for her groundbreaking novel The Women's Room

"The US writer and academic Marilyn French, who has died aged 79, is best known for her debut novel, The Women's Room. It was published in 1977, when she was almost 50, and captured the mood of the time, selling more than 20m worldwide. French went on to write more novels, including The Bleeding Heart (1980), and substantial non-fiction works on patriarchy and women's history. But none of her later books enjoyed the success of The Women's Room.

The novel's best-known line - "All men are rapists, and that's all they are" - has not been an easy legacy for the next three decades of feminism. Spoken in anger by one of the book's most radical characters, a woman whose daughter has been gang-raped, it entered the popular lexicon and is often cited, wrongly, as one of the tenets of modern feminism."