Thus She Is

When Benoîte Groult published Thus She Is (originally Ainsi soit-elle) in 1975, the International Women’s Year, she didn’t just write a book; she detonated a cultural explosive in French society. The title itself is a blasphemous pun on the traditional Catholic prayer ending “Amen” (French: Ainsi soit-il, literally “So be it [He]”), daringly reclaiming the final word of creation for the feminine (Elle). The book became an instant phenomenon, selling over a million copies and serving as the definitive manifesto for a generation. Groult, a bourgeois intellectual who came to feminism later in life at age 55, wrote with the zeal of a convert and the precision of a seasoned observer, proving that it is never too late to wake up to injustice. Until then, she had been known primarily as a novelist and journalist, part of the Parisian literary establishment. Her awakening to feminism came not through academic theory but through lived experience—watching her daughters struggle with the same constraints she had faced, recognizing that nothing fundamental had changed for women despite surface progress.

Her indictment of misogyny is global, visceral, and unsparing. Most shockingly for the time, Groult dedicated substantial portions of the text to the horrors of female genital mutilation (FGM), or “excision.” She was one of the first mainstream Western writers to expose these brutal practices to a general audience, refusing to hide behind cultural relativism. By detailing these rituals designed to control female sexuality—the infibulation, the cutting, the stitching shut of young girls—she illustrated the extreme lengths to which patriarchal possessiveness would go to police the female body. She argued that the universal hatred of the female sex manifests in different ways across cultures, but the root—the desire to degrade and control—is the same. The bound feet of Chinese women, the chastity belts of medieval Europe, the surgical mutilations of Africa and the Middle East: all are variations on a single theme. The female body is considered dangerous, unclean, a threat to male honor that must be contained. Groult connected these “exotic” practices to the everyday violence suffered by French women, insisting that the difference was one of degree, not of kind.

Groult drew a direct line from this physical violence to the symbolic violence of language. With the sensitivity of a writer who had spent her life wrestling with words, she launched a blistering attack on the French language’s refusal to feminize prestigious job titles. She argued that the linguistic erasure of women—forcing them to adopt male titles like “Madame le Ministre” or “Madame le Docteur”—was a deliberate tool to keep them invisible in the spheres of power. The Académie française, that august guardian of linguistic purity, had for centuries resisted feminization, claiming grammatical rules were neutral and natural. Groult exposed this as a lie: grammar is politics by other means. If a word for a female doctor or judge or president doesn’t exist, then neither does the concept; the woman in that role becomes an anomaly, an intruder borrowing a man’s costume. For Groult, if women cannot be named, they cannot be seen. This linguistic activism became a cornerstone of her legacy. She would continue this fight for decades, eventually seeing official changes in French administrative language, though the battle is still not won.

Beyond these political issues, Groult dissected the psychological conditioning of women as “pleasers.” From the cradle, she argued, girls are trained to smile, to be pretty, to be nice, to submit—and above all, to view themselves through the approving or disapproving male gaze. A woman’s value is located in her desirability to men; her ambitions, her intellect, her anger are threats to this primary function. The good woman is the pleasing woman, the agreeable woman, the woman who takes up as little space as possible. Groult analyzed how this training produces a particular kind of female psychology: self-doubt, constant comparison to other women, the sublimation of one’s own desires in service of others. Women are taught to be grateful for attention, to fear being “too much,” to apologize for existing. The book is a deafening call for women to stop pleasing and start living, urging them to transition from objects of male desire to subjects of their own lives.

Woven throughout the book is a reclamation of “Herstory”—the buried history of women’s resistance. Groult resurrected forgotten pioneers like Olympe de Gouges, the 18th-century revolutionary who wrote the “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen” in response to the male-only “Declaration of the Rights of Man” during the French Revolution. De Gouges was guillotined in 1793, not only for her political alliances but for her audacity in claiming rights for women. For over a century, her name was erased from French history books, her contribution forgotten. Groult brought her back, along with countless other women artists, scientists, and activists whose work had been attributed to men or simply consigned to oblivion. She demonstrated that women have always fought back, always created, always resisted—but their history has been systematically erased by the victors who write the textbooks.

Groult also offered a devastating analysis of marriage, sexuality, and the double standard. She exposed how the institution of marriage, ostensibly a contract between equals, has historically been a transfer of property—the woman—from father to husband. The virgin bride, the faithful wife, the mourning widow: these are not romantic ideals but mechanisms of control. Meanwhile, male infidelity is tacitly accepted, even celebrated as a sign of virility, while a woman’s is grounds for social, economic, and sometimes physical destruction. Groult examined how even “liberated” modern sexuality often recapitulated old patterns of dominance and submission, with women still expected to perform desire rather than experience it, to be the objects of fantasy rather than the subjects of their own pleasure.

The book’s reception was explosive. It was attacked by conservatives as vulgar and man-hating. It was dismissed by some on the left as bourgeois reformism. But for hundreds of thousands of women, it was a revelation. Letters poured in from readers who said the book had changed their lives, had given words to experiences they had never been able to articulate. Groult became a public figure, a spokesperson for the new French feminism alongside figures like Simone de Beauvoir, though her style was less philosophical and more viscerally accessible. She would continue writing and advocating for women’s rights until her death in 2016 at the age of 96.

Decades later, Ainsi soit-elle remains a vibrant, angry, and necessary testament. The issues Groult raised—bodily autonomy, linguistic representation, the burden of pleasing, the erasure of women’s history—are far from resolved. In an era of renewed attacks on reproductive rights, of online harassment designed to silence women, of continued resistance to gender-inclusive language, Groult’s voice rings as clear as ever. The book reminds us that freedom is never given, but must be constantly won. It is not enough to be “not sexist”; one must be actively feminist. And it is never too late to begin.