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."
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 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. Henri Maleprade, Léontine Zanta, vertueuse aventurière du féminisme, Paris: Rive droite, 1997. Annabelle Bonnet, Léontine Zanta – Histoire oubliée de la première docteure française en philosophie, Préface de Geneviève Fraisse, Paris: L'Harmattan, Collection logiques sociales, 2021.
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