New York City ? Marilyn French, the writer and feminist whose novel “The Women’s Room” sold more than 20 million copies and transformed her into a leading figure in the women’s movement, has died at 79.

French died of heart failure Saturday at a Manhattan hospital, said Carol Jenkins, a friend and president of New York’s Women’s Media Center.

She was an academic in 1977 when “The Women’s Room,” her first novel, was published. Her aim, she said, was “to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world.”

The landmark novel, which was translated into 20 languages, details the journey to independence of a 1950s housewife who gets divorced and goes to graduate school. The book mirrored aspects of French’s own life experiences, including the rape of her daughter.

She was called anti-male after a character in the novel says: “All men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.”