Marilyn Frye b. 1941

Marilyn Frye is an American radical feminist philosopher, professor emerita at Michigan State University, and one of the most influential feminist analytic philosophers of the late twentieth century. The Politics of Reality, her 1983 essay collection, gave currency to the concept of the bird-cage of oppression, in which interlocking structural barriers, none of which appears decisive on its own, together constitute the reality of women's lives. Her later Willful Virgin and many essays on whiteness, sexuality, and lesbian existence have shaped contemporary feminist analytic philosophy, philosophy of race, and queer theory.

Marilyn Frye was born at Tulsa, Oklahoma, in March 1941 and grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. She took her bachelor's at Stanford in 1963 and her doctorate in philosophy at Cornell in 1969. After teaching at the University of Pittsburgh she joined Michigan State University in 1974, where she was professor of philosophy and of women's, gender, and sexuality studies until her retirement as professor emerita.

Her two books, both collections of essays, are The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (1983) and Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism, 1976–1992 (1992); the central essays — 'Oppression', 'Sexism', 'In and Out of Harm's Way: Arrogance and Love', 'To Be and Be Seen: The Politics of Reality', and 'To See and Be Seen: The Politics of Lesbianism' — have been widely anthologised in feminist and analytic ethics.

Frye's image of oppression as a birdcage in which no single wire by itself prevents flight gave the feminist analysis of structural injustice one of its most-cited metaphors. Her distinction between 'arrogant' and 'loving' perception, her account of male privilege and of the conceptual 'erasure' of lesbian existence, and her defence of feminist separatism as a strategy of self-definition rather than withdrawal made her one of the founding philosophical voices of second-wave Anglo-American feminism.