A graduate of the Université de Montréal and McGill University, her career began at La Presse in 1954 before being made editor-in-chief of Châtelaine magazine in 1960.
Saint-Martin wrote several books and essays, contributed to various art publications and was awarded the Molson Prize in Humanities and Social Sciences from the Canada Council for her work in semiology in 1989.
In 1973, she returned to education, graduating from McGill with a Doctor of Philosophy degree in literature with her dissertation on Samuel Beckett's fictional world.
[2][4] From the 1950s to the 1960s, Saint-Martin got involved in feminist activism, promoting contraception and social rights relating to advancing female equality in society, and defending women intellectuals.
[1][7] Saint-Martin left Châtelaine in 1972 and was appointed director of the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal late that year.
[7] Saint-Martin oversaw more than double the number of visitations to the museum and increased her budget to five times its original amount.
[1][4][7] She won the Molson Prize in Humanities and Social Sciences and with it a $50,000 cheque from the Canada Council for her work in semiology in 1989.
Saint-Martin died from various health problems relating to old age at L'hôpital de Ste-Agathe, Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, on December 11, 2019.
"[5] Lev Manovich of The American Journal of Semiotics wrote that the author "follows the model of formal grammar, where language is described as a set of elements combined according to syntactic rules to form statements.