Olympe de Gouges

Marie Gouze was a butcher's daughter from Montauban, widowed at eighteen, who refused to remarry, moved to Paris, changed her name and wrote for the theatre. Her play about slavery in the colonies was so unwelcome that the Comédie-Française shelved it and the colonial lobby had her threatened. She wrote pamphlets on divorce, on maternity hospitals, on the rights of children born outside marriage, and on a graduated tax, printing many at her own expense and posting them on walls.

In 1791 she answered the Declaration of the Rights of Man with the Declaration of the Rights of Woman, article by article, and observed in it that since a woman may be sent to the scaffold she must equally have the right to speak from the tribune. She opposed the execution of the king, offered to defend him, and attacked Robespierre in print. In November 1793 she was tried without a lawyer and guillotined; the bodies of the condemned went into a common pit, and hers has never been located. Two days later the Convention was told that she had forgotten the virtues suited to her sex.