Olympe de Gouges

Olympe de Gouges was a butcher’s daughter from Montauban who came to Paris as a young widow, wrote plays against slavery, and in 1791 answered the Declaration of the Rights of Man with the Declaration of the Rights of Woman, article by article: woman is born free and equal to man in rights, and since she has the right to mount the scaffold she must have the right to mount the rostrum. She attacked Robespierre in print and was guillotined in November 1793, denounced afterward for having forgotten the virtues of her sex. The lists read her beside Wollstonecraft as the Revolution’s own feminist.