[1][2][3] Born on 28 November 1937 in the Vendée department, Nicole-Claude Mathieu, the daughter of an engineer, was brought up by her paternal grandmother in eastern France during the years of the Second World War.
After a year as a research assistant at the Centre d'études sociologiques, in 1971 she joined the Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale where in 1977 she helped Christine Delphy and others to launch the journal Questions féministes.
In addition she translated articles from English and coordinated the special diplomas from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences granted in some cases to those who had not passed the baccalaureate.
It was thanks to the Canadian Université de Laval that in June 1996 she received an honorary Docteure en sciences sociales honoris causa.
[1] Mathieu is remembered as a pioneer of materialist feminism, inspired by Marxist confrontation with French communism in the 1970s.