Olympe de Gouges: The Woman Who Wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman

Marie Gouze was born in Montauban in 1748 and married off at 17 to a man she did not love. When he died soon after, she took the name Olympe de Gouges and moved to Paris with her son.

She had little formal schooling, yet she built a prolific career as a playwright and pamphleteer. Her play on slavery made her powerful enemies, and critics attacked her for daring to write at all. One suggested giving such women razors as a present.

She answered that she was determined to succeed in spite of them, and she kept writing on divorce, children’s rights and social security.

The Revolution declared the rights of man in 1789, and left women out. In 1791 Olympe de Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, article by article, to show what equality would really mean.

Its most famous line argues that if a woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she must also have the right to speak from the tribune. She followed it with a social contract proposing marriage between equals.

She was not guillotined for her feminism alone. Her attacks on Robespierre condemned her, but the official press said she had crossed the boundaries of female virtue.

On 19 July 1793 she had a poster, Les Trois Urnes, put up across Paris, calling for a vote on the form of government. She was arrested the next day and denied a lawyer, on the grounds that she could defend herself.

From prison she still managed to publish two texts condemning the Terror. According to the City of Paris, three months later she was held at the Conciergerie, the antechamber of the guillotine, where Marie-Antoinette had come shortly before her.

She was guillotined on 3 November 1793, aged 45. The night before, she wrote to her son that she died a victim of her love for her country.