Eva Figes | Feminist writer, 80

Eva Figes, 80, a refugee from Nazi Germany who became an acclaimed novelist, memoirist, and critic best known for a feminist treatise,

Patriarchal Attitudes,

died Aug. 28 of heart failure at her London home.

Ms. Figes was 38, divorced, and raising two children when she felt moved to write a blistering indictment of women's standing in society and what she viewed as the inequality of marriage.

She had been a novelist to that point, but the experience of petty discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere inspired her anger.

Her book was published in 1970, within months of two other feminist polemics, Germaine Greer's Female Eunuch and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, and together they injected feminist ideas into the national conversation.

- N.Y. Times News Service