In the documentary film on her life and ideas, "Je ne suis pas féministe, mais..." ("I am not a feminist, but...") Delphy describes an early feminist consciousness in observing her parents: though running the pharmacy was labor-intensive for both of them, when they came home at lunch, Delphy noticed her father putting his feet up to rest and read the newspaper while her mother was obliged to cook a midday meal and then do the dishes before they both returned to work.

In a television interview in 1985, she described a period of her life when she routinely prefaced comments with, "Je ne suis pas féministe, mais..." (the phrase from which the film draws its title).

Returning to France, Delphy was interested in pursuing a dissertation project on women, but she describes in Je ne suis pas féministe, mais... meeting resistance to the topic in her then-advisor Pierre Bourdieu, who told Delphy that there was no one to advise such a project because no one researches women (though French sociologists like Andrée Michel had already published significant research).

While pursuing fieldwork, "I realized there was a whole set of goods that absolutely did not pass through the marketplace," with much of women's economic contributions functioning as unpaid labor, in contrast to the wage labor that was central to theories of capitalist oppression (that is, the capitalist class extracts the value between the wages they pay workers and the actual value of what the workers produce).

[7] In response to this, Delphy confronted and addressed the reaction of many French feminists who support the law, criticizing this stance as hypocritical and racist.

[9] Delphy analyzes inequalities between men and women as rooted in a material economic basis, specifically the domestic relations of production.

[citation needed] Against Essentialism and the so-called "French Feminism" Delphy challenges the biological essentialist view of gender, even when it comes from the women's movement.