Léontine Zanta


Léontine Zanta was a French philosopher, feminist and novelist. One of the first two women to gain a doctorate in France, and the first to do so in philosophy, Zanta "was an intellectual celebrity in her day, active in journalism and in the feminist movement of the 1920s."

Life

Zanta was born in Mâcon. Her doctoral thesis, defended in May 1914, was on the 16th-century revival of Stoicism. She never secured a position in higher education, and became a journalist and writer, publishing several novels.
She maintained a correspondence with Teilhard de Chardin.
In the late 1920s she received the Legion of Honour. Simone de Beauvoir remembered being inspired by her example as a woman philosopher.

Works