Léontine Zanta (14 February 1872 – 15 June 1942) 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."[1]

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.[1]

She maintained a correspondence with Teilhard de Chardin.[2]

In the late 1920s she received the Legion of Honour. Simone de Beauvoir remembered being inspired by her example as a woman philosopher.[1]

Works

• La renaissance du stoïcisme au XVIe siècle, 1914.
• (ed. with intro.) La traduction française du manuel d'Epictète d'André de Rivaudeau au XVIe siècle, 1914.
• Psychologie du féminisme, 1922
• La part du feu, 1927
• Sainte-Odile, 1931

References

Further reading

• Robert Garric, "Introduction", in Teilhard de Chardin, Letters to Léontine Zanta, trans. Bernard Wall. London: Collins, 1969. ^{[ISBN missing]}
• Henri Maleprade, Léontine Zanta, vertueuse aventurière du féminisme, Paris: Rive droite, 1997. ^{[ISBN missing]}
• Annabelle Bonnet, Léontine Zanta – Histoire oubliée de la première docteure française en philosophie, Préface de Geneviève Fraisse, Paris: L'Harmattan, Collection logiques sociales, 2021. ^{[ISBN missing]}

External links

• Works by Léontine Zanta at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)