Jacqueline Feldman

Jacqueline Feldman was born on 8 August 1936 in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. Her parents were secular Polish Jewish immigrants who had moved to Paris from Łódź at the end of the 1920s, and her father worked as a tailor. She had an older sister, born in 1932.

During the Second World War the family left Paris for Noirétable, a small town of fewer than 2,000 inhabitants in the Forez, in order to escape Nazi persecution. The town lay in the unoccupied zone until 1942, and the family survived there before returning to Paris after the war. Feldman later worked as a witness and historian for Noirétable and the Loire department as a way of expressing her gratitude to the village.

Feldman obtained a post at the CNRS in 1956 and was sent to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, where she began a doctorate in theoretical physics under the American Danish physicist Ben Roy Mottelson. Her 1961 paper on approximations of the nuclear pairing force was cited by Mottelson in his Nobel lecture in 1975. Her doctoral thesis was published in 1963. She then worked as a physicist at the Norwegian Institute of Technology from 1963 to 1964 and at CERN from 1964 to 1967.

In 1968 she moved from theoretical physics to sociology. She had long been interested in the subject, the events of May 1968 strengthened that interest, and CNRS sociologists needed colleagues with strong mathematical training. Having worked in both the natural and the social sciences, she wrote on the epistemology of science, on objectivity and subjectivity in research, and on the Sokal affair. She also studied taboos around sexuality, feminism and women in science.

In the 1970s she criticised scientism in anonymous articles for the review Impascience (1975 to 1977), where she worked alongside Françoise Laborie. Her book La sexualité du Petit Larousse, ou le jeu du dictionnaire (1980) traced changing sexual taboos through editions of the dictionary from 1905 to 1979. She also published Voyage mal poli à travers les savoirs et la science (1980). She was a research director at the CNRS until her retirement in 2001, after which she continued to publish, including work on Condorcet and social mathematics and, in 2020, a biography of Françoise Laborie.

In autumn 1967 Feldman and Anne Zelensky founded the group FMA, originally standing for Féminin, Masculin, Avenir (Feminine, Masculine, Future). Unlike other early groups, FMA admitted both men and women and aimed at new relations between the sexes, with sexuality an important part of its debates. During the occupation of the Sorbonne in May 1968, Feldman and Zelensky organised the only meeting held there on the condition of women. After May 1968 the group became women only and was renamed Féminisme, Marxisme, Action. In 1970 FMA was one of the founding groups of the Mouvement de libération des femmes. Feldman later wrote her own testimony of those beginnings, De FMA au MLF, published in the journal Clio in 2009.

In Copenhagen Feldman met the physicist Hallstein Høgåsen. They married in 1961 and had two children, a son born in 1962 and a daughter born in 1963. The couple divorced in 1975. She described herself as a non religious Jew and reflected on that identity in her writing. Politically engaged throughout her life, she supported Algerian independence around 1960 and took part in the movements of May 1968 for the rights of women and workers. In later years she divided her time between Paris and Hyères.

Jacqueline Feldman died in Hyères, in the Var department, on 26 June 2026, at the age of 89. A death notice appeared in Var Matin. The cause of her death has not been made public. She was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

Feldman is remembered as one of the founders of the modern feminist movement in France, through FMA and its part in the creation of the MLF, and as a scientist who crossed from nuclear physics into sociology and brought a rare double perspective to debates about what makes knowledge scientific. Her writing on the history of the women's movement, on sexuality and on the place of women in science forms part of the written record of the early French women's movement, and her late campaigning for the right to choose the end of one's life continued a lifetime of public engagement.