The extraordinary life and work of a brilliant feminist intellectual.

The second female professor at the Collège de France, Françoise Héritier became the inaugural chair of Comparative Studies of African Societies in 1983. A former student of Claude Lévi-Strauss, she began her career in 1958 with several missions to Western Africa, especially the Upper Volta (today's Burkina Faso).
A specialist in issues of kinship, marriage, family, and relationships between the sexes, her research focused particularly on the study of the universal foundations of male domination. Deeply ommitted to the fight against discrimination, in the last thirty years of her life she participated in institutional reflections on great societal debates.