In 1969, she published what is arguably her most influential work, Les Guérillères, which is today considered a revolutionary and controversial source for feminist and lesbian thinkers around the world.

[4][5] Wittig earned her PhD from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences,[1] after completing a thesis titled "Le Chantier littéraire".

In 1976, Wittig and Zeig left France due to certain MLF members who sought to "paralyse and destroy lesbian groups.

"[7] Wittig's attempts to create a lesbian-specific group within the radical branch of the MLF was met with resistance; "they almost succeeded in completely destroying me, and they have, yes, chased me out of Paris".

With various editorial positions both in France and in the United States, Wittig's works became internationally recognized and were commonly published in both French and English.

She taught a course in materialist thought through Women's Studies programs, wherein her students were immersed in the process of correcting the American translation of The Lesbian Body.

Her ties to de Beauvoir and Sarraute are, however, equally significant, and position her work within a double history of feminism and avant-garde literature of the last half of the twentieth century.

Like Duras and Cixous, she develops her work to a rethinking of women's experience in writing, while her staunch opposition to a notion of "difference" that would be based on sexuality or biology aligns her more with de Beauvoir and Sarraute.

Wittig lauds Djuna Barnes and Marcel Proust for universalizing the feminine by making no gendered difference in the way they describe characters.

She advocated a strong universalist position, saying that the expression of one's identity and the liberation of desire require the abolition of gender categories.

Lesbians are not women (1978).Wittig also developed a critical view of Marxism which obstructed feminist struggle, but also of feminism itself which does not question the heterosexual dogma.

A theorist of materialist feminism, she stigmatised the myth of "the woman," called heterosexuality a political regime, and outlined the basis for a social contract which lesbians refuse.

[13] Les Guérillères, published in 1969, five years after Wittig's first novel, revolves around the elles, women warriors who have created their own sovereign state by overthrowing the patriarchal world.

"Elles are not 'the women' – a mistranslation that often surfaces in David Le Vay's English rendition – but rather the universal 'they,' a linguistic assault on the masculine collective pronoun ils.

"[14] The novel initially describes the world that the elles have created and ends with members recounting the days of war that led to the sovereign state.